Iran ‘skirmish’ has no effect on strong US economy, White House advisor claims

President Donald Trump’s policies have made the U.S. immune to the chaos in the oil markets and the impact on the global economy resulting from the Iran war, White House advisor Keven Hassett claimed Friday.

“All the cumulative policies” Trump has promoted, including tax cuts and deregulation, “can’t be upended by a temporary Middle East skirmish,” Hassett said on Fox News. “This is really an economy that can’t be slowed down” added Hassett, director of the National Economic Council.

Hasset spoke as air raid sirens once again sounded in Israel and across the Gulf States to guard against another round of drone and missile strikes from Iran but before reports from the region said that a U.S. warplane had been shot down over Iran and the fate of the crew was unknown.

Later reports from several outlets said that one of the members of the two-member crew had been rescued by U.S. forces and a search was continuing for the second.

Hassett’s rosy analysis was prompted by the monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that U.S. employers added 178,000 jobs in March, blowing past estimates that about 60,000 jobs would be added to payrolls.

In a post on X, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said, “The March jobs report blew out expectations with strong construction job growth and a surge in manufacturing job creation as trillions of dollars in investments begin to materialize.”

However, the March jobs report was based on BLS data collected by mid-March, which was before the Feb. 28 start of the Iran war, and did not gauge the impact of $4 gasoline, $104 crude or wild swings in the stock market indexes. The markets were closed Friday, and so the impact of the BLS report on the markets would have to wait for them to re-open Monday.

The jobs report also showed that the national unemployment rate ticked down from 4.4% in February to 4.3% in March, while the jobless rate for all veterans came down from 4.1% in February to 3.9% in March.

The closely-watched unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans also came down from 4.8% in February to 4.5% in March.

Health care added 76,000 jobs in March, construction added 26,000 and manufacturing added 15,000, while federal government employment continued to decline in March, losing 18,000 jobs, the BLS said. Since October 2024, the number of jobs in federal government has declined by 355,000, or 11.8%.