House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was asked during a Wednesday presser to react to an eyebrow-raising quote from President Donald Trump the day before, in which the president said Americans’ financial concerns are not a factor in his negotiations with Iran.

“Yesterday, the president was asked about whether Americans’ financial concerns were motivating him to make a deal with Iran. His response was, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situations.” Do you think that’s the right message? Do you believe the president should be considering the financial toll?” asked a reporter.

“I don’t know the context in which he made that comment, but I can tell you the president thinks about Americans’ financial situations. I talk to him on average twice a day, sometimes three or four times a day, and we talk about it constantly. He’s laser-focused on trying to resolve the conflict in Iran,” Johnson replied, adding:

Because if we get the Strait of Hormuz reopened, that will alleviate a lot of pressure with gas prices and other things in the economy.

Now, we’ve done everything—the Republican Party, under President Trump’s leadership, have done everything that we possibly can to reverse the maddening inflation of the Biden years that was at 40-year highs and all the gross misspending over the last several years—to get the economy back humming again.

And we did that in the big, beautiful bill, the Working Families Tax Code, infused with pro-growth policies. We put in incentives for job creators and entrepreneurs and risk-takers, small business owners to expand and add more jobs, to increase wages. Those things are beginning to happen. We put into place the lowest taxes, the biggest tax cut in American history, to help out hard-working American families. The average American household has over $10,000 more in their pocket because of the policies that we passed.

While leaving the White House on Tuesday afternoon, Trump told reporters, “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me.”

The quote quickly grabbed headlines across the media and ran as the lead story on the Drudge Report on Tuesday evening, in bright red.

Watch the clip above via C-SPAN.

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