US President Trump says that they've been taking more oil out of the Strait of Hormuz than before the war

Remarks of this kind from a head of state about Gulf transit volumes sit in the familiar category of wartime supply signalling: assertions that flows through a chokepoint have held up are intended to cap the geopolitical risk premium embedded in the crude complex, and past episodes of this kind have tended to compress the front of the WTI and Brent curves while leaving the underlying freight, insurance and tanker-rate signals to tell the real story. The distinction that matters is between rhetoric and observable flows: statements about transit volumes are not independently verified at the time of publication, and crude pricing in comparable Hormuz episodes has historically tracked ship-tracking data and war-risk premia rather than official commentary. The actor's prior form is relevant, since this president has a documented pattern of talking down oil prices around periods of elevated tension, and markets have typically faded such comments once physical data confirmed or contradicted them. What tends to resolve the signal is the sequence of tanker traffic counts, insurance rates for Gulf transits, and any change in actual export loadings from the region, rather than further remarks. Absent corroboration of a genuine increase in flows, the read is directional at best.