Trump’s Iran Speech Shed Little Light On War. What Investors Still Want to Hear.
By Emily Russell and Anita Hamilton
Updated April 01, 2026, 10:30 pm EDT / Original April 01, 2026, 12:40 pm EDT
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President Trump spoke from the White House in a prime-time address to the nation.
Key Points
About This Summary
- President Donald Trump addressed the nation at 9 p.m. Eastern time.
- Trump said the military’s “core strategic operations are nearing completion,” but didn’t provide clarity on the war’s timeline.
- Prior to the address, Trump had given mixed messages regarding the Strait of Hormuz.
President Donald Trump updated Americans on the progress of the Iran war in an address to the nation on Wednesday night.
It has been just one month since the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran. Trump said they have delivered “swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield.” Iran’s navy and air force is destroyed and its old leaders have been killed, he said.
“These core strategic operations are nearing completion,” Trump said. “We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.” He didn’t provide further clarity on the war’s timeline.
Trump acknowledged that many Americans are concerned about rising gas prices, but said these are short-term increases. “Gas prices will rapidly come back down and stock prices will rapidly go back up,” he said. The average gasoline price nationwide was $4.064 per gallon on Wednesday, according to the American Automobile Association.
The U.S. “has never been better prepared economically” to confront these headwinds, Trump said. The U.S. is in “great shape” for the future and has seen new stock market highs over the past year, he added.
He also encouraged European countries that must import oil and gas to buy from the U.S. and urged them to go and “take oil” from the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil shipping waterway that Iran has functionally closed during the war. Reopening the strait has been of primary concern for investors and consumers since the war began, because its closure has led to global energy price spikes.
Trump said that “the strait will open up naturally” after the war. He didn’t provide details as to how that would happen.
Earlier this week, Iran’s parliament approved a plan to collect tolls on vessels traveling through the waterway, The Wall Street Journal
reported, citing Iranian state media. Those tolls could keep oil prices elevated even after the war ends.
International and domestic oil prices rose in the aftermath of the speech, signaling that oil markets were not assuaged by the president’s remarks. Brent crude
BRN00+7.44% hit $106 a barrel and WTIWBS00+7.06% surpassed $104 a barrel.
“There is only one thing that investors care about: Is the strait reopened or not? Everything else is secondary,” Beacon Policy Advisors managing partner Stephen Myrow told Barron’s prior to Trump’s address on Wednesday.
The president has given mixed messages on the strait’s reopening as a condition for ending the war. On Wednesday morning, Trump said that the U.S. is “blasting Iran into oblivion” until the strait is open. That’s in contrast with a Tuesday post on Truth Social, in which Trump wrote that countries that fuel because of the waterway’s effective closure should take matters into their own hands.
Trump has been pressuring European countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to commit to helping reopen the Strait of Hormuz by threatening to leave the security alliance if they don’t. He told Reuters in an interview posted earlier Wednesday that he planned to discuss the nation’s relationship with its European allies, who have so far resisted his requests to help in the war effort.
The president didn’t mention NATO in the address as expected.
Investors pulled out of U.S. equities after his speech ended around 9:20 p.m. Dow
DJIA+0.48% and S&P 500SPX+0.72% futures dropped sharply, marking a reversal from the indexes’ gains earlier in the day. As of late Wednesday afternoon, the Dow and the S&P 500 had risen 3% and 4%, respectively, over the past two days.
“Generally as investors look to Washington, they see the rhetoric looking more positive than it was a week or two ago,” Stifel’s chief Washington policy strategist Brian Gardner told Barron’s before the address. The administration had been publicly signaling the war was on track to finish within the next two weeks.
But with no additional clarity on NATO, details around reopening the strait, or a timeline for ending the war, investors who were searching for relief in the president’s words might be left more worried than before.
Write to Anita Hamilton at anita.hamilton@barrons.com and Emily Russell at emily.russell@barrons.com.
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