During a Friday appearance on Fox News, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum blamed Democrats for high gas prices across the country, saying voters should “thank [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom for that.”

Fox News’ Aishah Hasnie and Burgum began the segment with a discussion on the potential deal between the U.S. and Iran to end the months-long conflict in the area, in which Burgum said President Donald Trump has “all the leverage.”

Hasnie went on to ask Burgum to respond to a Thursday report from The Washington Post that warned gas prices may soon rise even further “as the commercial and government inventories that have mitigated price rises so far are rapidly depleting.”

Burgum was quick to point the finger at “pundits” who have been “completely wrong on this from the beginning.”

Read the remainder of their exchange, where Burgum moves to place the blame on Democrats, below:

HASNIE: Let me ask you this, Secretary. If for some reason this deal does not go through this weekend, and it doesn’t go through next week, and for whatever reason, Iran backs out, we know that the White House is doing everything it can currently to bring these gas prices down. We’re tapping the strategic petroleum reserve. Is there a backup plan? Is there something that you guys have up your sleeve to get through the summer months?

BURGUM: I have to smile everytime I see on the screen the national average for gasoline, because it’s about like if a weather reporter said, “Here’s the temperature in America tomorrow. It’s gonna be 46 degrees.” I mean, it’s not a criticism of Fox, but the price of gasoline varies across our whole country, largely right now by state policy and state taxes, not by the underlying fundamentals.

The underlying fundamentals, like you opened with, we’re producing and exporting more oil than we ever have, producing more natural gas than we ever have. We are an abundant nation but the states that went down, about half the states that went down this path where they overrotated towards “we’re going to have energy transition, we’re going to move from affordable, reliable secure American energy and we’re going to rely on intermittent, highly subsidized, weather-dependent sources of energy,” they’ve got substantially higher energy prices than the states that don’t.

And so, I think that we’re going to see prices continue to drop across the country but they’re going to drop unevenly because some states — I mean, for example, California. California was importing, two months ago, 60% of their oil from foreign countries. California was dependent on oil coming from the Strait of Hormuz. No other state, other than Hawaii, had that condition. That was self-inflicted, and with California shutting down refineries — They used to have 40 refineries. They’re heading towards having six. Texas has 38 refineries. Who’s got the most number of internal combustion machines? California. They are going to have high gas prices. You can thank Gavin Newsom for that and their state legislature for the policies they put in. That has nothing to do with the Strait of Hormuz.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

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