DORAL, Fla.—President Trump heads into the second week of the Iran war under growing pressure to address surging gasoline prices, stretched-thin munitions stockpiles and sustained opposition to the conflict among voters, including many in his MAGA movement.
Trump and administration officials have so far dismissed concerns about increasing prices at the gas pump, saying those higher costs will ease once the war ends. The average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline climbed nearly 50 cents in the past week, according to AAA.
“We figured oil prices would go up, which they will. They’ll also come down,” Trump told reporters on Saturday. “They’ll come down very fast, and we would have gotten rid of a major cancer on the face of the earth,” he said, referring to the national-security threat from Iran.
On Sunday, he emphasized the point after U.S. oil futures topped $100 a barrel. “Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace,” the president said in a social-media post.
Trump is taking on political risk with his message that high gas prices are temporary. Last year he made a similar case for his program of tariff increases, saying they would make America rich at the cost of short-term pain. “There will be a little disturbance,” he said at the time.
But polls find that voters remain unhappy with the pain of inflation. An NBC News poll released this weekend found that 62% of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation and the cost of living, up from 55% a year ago and well above the 36% who approve of his actions on inflation.
Officials in former President Joe Biden’s administration said initially that price increases during his term would be “transitory,” but inflation topped 9% in June 2022, the highest level in four decades. Voters came to see Biden as ineffective on one of their main concerns, and Trump rode the issue to a second term in the 2024 election.
Republicans have noted that U.S. domestic production has increased under Trump and argued that the end of the Iranian regime would help lower fuel prices in the long run. But lawmakers say that American consumers have a limited tolerance for pain at the pump.
“Three weeks from now, if there isn’t a reasonable confidence that other than Iran that oil can flow, will we be concerned? And the answer is: absolutely,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), in an interview.
Inside the administration, federal agencies have been tasked with providing the White House with options to lower the cost of gasoline. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Energy Secretary Chris Wright have spoken with oil executives about ways to curb energy prices, the White House said last week. So far, Trump has said he is not looking to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the largest emergency stockpile of crude oil in the world.
Beyond gas prices, Trump also faces the challenge of how to quickly refill shrinking military stockpiles. The Trump administration is expected to ask Congress to provide more money to help pay for the costs associated with the war, including the purchase of Patriot, Tomahawk and Thaad antimissile systems, which have been in heavy use since Israel and the U.S. began their strikes.
But such defensive equipment, along with munitions, can’t be manufactured quickly—even though Trump has been trying to browbeat defense contractors into ramping up production.
“Hopefully, we had our eye on the ball on this before we went into this conflict,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.) told reporters last week. “It takes years to build these things—not days, not weeks, but years,” he said, referring to the Thaad antiballistic-missile systems, which are made in Alabama.
Congress itself is also shaping up as a bottleneck, given that it is already bogged down in legislative fights, including over a voter ID law and funding for the Department of Homeland Security, where workers aren’t receiving paychecks because of a dispute over immigration-enforcement tactics. Beyond that, lawmakers already are signaling that they see a supplemental spending bill as an opportunity to attach their own pet priorities—a dynamic that threatens to slow congressional action.
Some Republicans are flashing impatience that the Trump administration, in seeking more money for munitions, is in essence doing an about-face from its posture of last year. Initially, administration budget writers sought to give essentially no funding increase to the Pentagon for fiscal 2026 military spending, using what Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) called an “accounting gimmick” to make nearly flat funding look like an increase.
But as the measure advanced, the Trump administration rushed in to ask for an additional $28 billion for munitions, McConnell said in a floor speech. Yet by that time, White House budget negotiators had already dug in on a smaller amount. A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I urged them to push for sustained, year-over-year increases to the defense top line,” said McConnell, the Senate’s top GOP defense appropriator. “The president’s advisers didn’t initially seem to heed this advice.”
Several polls have found that more than 70% of Republicans support Trump’s actions in Iran, though most surveys have also found the war to be unpopular among Americans overall. But some influential MAGA voices, including former adviser Steve Bannon, have taken a skeptical view of the war, and Trump faces outright opposition from influential podcasters such as Tucker Carlson. The potential for ground troops could amplify that opposition.
Trump’s United Nations ambassador, Mike Waltz, said on NBC on Sunday that “we have troops and assets that are focused on seizing weapons of mass destruction if needed and if so ordered.” Trump said Saturday that the question of deploying U.S. ground troops in Iran wasn’t appropriate, but that it was possible they could be engaged for a “very good reason.”
Rob Smith, an Iraq war veteran and pro-Trump commentator, said considering ground troops “marked a shifting of the goal posts” from how the administration originally presented its case for attacking Iran. “I believe boots on the ground in Iran would be a catastrophe, and it wouldn’t be good for the American people,” he said.
“I would not vote for this. I would advise against it, and I would warn you that the deaths will be on your hands,” said Tim Pool, a generally MAGA-aligned online personality with about 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube. He said he knew that Trump had access to classified information to guide his decisions that is unavailable to others, but he believed the president would pay a political price for the war.
Among his audience, he said, “There are people who say, ‘It is Bush all over again. I should never have voted for this man.’ I don’t know how many people it is, but it isn’t insignificant.”
Write to Ken Thomas at ken.thomas@wsj.com and Siobhan Hughes at Siobhan.hughes@wsj.com