President Trump is fleecing working families at the pump to pay for his Iran war.
The pump outside the Co-op in Friendship reads $4.15 this morning. Not the national average the White House briefs on — that’s a nickel lower and a month behind — but the number on the sign, the one that matters when you’re filling the tank. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index ticked up four points to 49.8 this month, and Kush Desai at the press office called it proof the economy is resilient. A four-point bounce in a survey that still reads below fifty. That’s not resilience. That’s the difference between being punched four times and five.
Seventy-six percent of voters in the May Times/Siena poll rated economic conditions as fair or poor. Nearly two-thirds said entering the Middle East conflict was the wrong decision. More than half judge the war not worth its costs. Those numbers are not a sentiment bounce — they are a verdict. The people buying diesel for the baler and gasoline for the truck are not buying the White House framing. They’re buying four-fifteen fuel at four-fifteen and watching the rest of the grocery bill do what a four-percent inflation rate does, which is eat the cash that pays for the parts and the tires and the propane.
The median sales price of a house sits at four hundred three thousand dollars. That’s the number that keeps the younger men and women in this county from building on the lots their grandparents left them. The prime-age employment-population ratio sits at 80.8 percent — a healthy number on the macro screen until you recognize that a working hour buys less in groceries and fuel than it bought two years ago. The work is there. The money is not.
Earlier this week MSI reported that inflation hit 4.2 percent in May, a three-year high. That is not an accident arriving from nowhere. Inflation is the ledger where wars show up after the press briefings are over. The tariffs the administration imposed last year — on steel, on aluminum, on a long list of goods meant to signal strength — function as a tax on everything built from those materials, which is nearly everything. The Iran conflict piles on the oil shock. Together they amount to a systematic transfer of purchasing power out of working households and into the balance sheets of the sectors the White House calls its “pro-growth agenda.”
The oil majors. The defense contractors. The consolidated agribusinesses that sell us the diesel to run the tractors and the nitrogen to feed the corn.
The administration’s story is that gas prices are easing. They are, slightly — from the $4.50 panic-peak in May, when Iranian mines briefly closed the Strait of Hormuz and the oil market did what oil markets do when a fifth of the world’s seaborne crude suddenly cannot move. The price has drifted back toward $4.10 as tankers resume some Gulf traffic. But easing does not mean good. It means we’re only paying a war premium of roughly eighty-five cents a gallon instead of a dollar-twenty.
That eighty-five cents is a tax. Not one Congress voted on, not one the President put in the budget, but a tax nonetheless, levied at the nozzle by a military operation the administration chose and the oil companies are only too happy to price in. The rhetoric of national security and the arithmetic of household survival are two separate ledgers, and the White House expects the people holding the empty ledgers to applaud the national-security column.
When the President told reporters that $4.16 a gallon is “not very high,” he was not spinning. He was lying — the specific kind of lie Hannah Arendt catalogued seventy years ago, the one so large it’s meant to destroy your confidence that anything can be called true. The median household in this county makes about fifty-nine thousand dollars a year. A dollar more per gallon of gas costs that household somewhere between sixty and a hundred dollars a month, depending on how far they drive — and in Adams County, we drive. The school bus runs on diesel. The grain truck runs on diesel. I drive thirty miles round-trip to the parts warehouse in Wisconsin Rapids. Every dollar at the pump is a dollar that doesn’t go to the dentist, doesn’t go into savings for the truck that’ll need replacing next year, doesn’t go to whatever small businesses are left on Main Street.
The nationalist shell game operates by pointing at the horizon while the wallet empties on the counter. Wendell Berry caught this mechanic years ago when he warned that the industrial economy extracts value from a community, leaving the membership to account for the loss. In The Unsettling of America he wrote that an economy which treats land as a commodity will end by treating its people the same way. The administration extracts the margin from the rural household to pay for a geopolitical confrontation, then calls a four-point sentiment bounce a pro-growth agenda. The diesel that runs the tractor and the gasoline that gets the crew to the jobsite don’t care about the press release. They cost what they cost because of a war and a supply chain the administration cannot control and doesn’t want to control, because controlling it would mean abandoning the escalation that caused the spike in the first place.
Daniel Yergin’s The Prize tells you the whole grim arc in nine hundred pages. Every major American military engagement in the Middle East since the first Gulf War has been, at bottom, about the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. This one is different only in that the administration is refusing to name the cost. The war in Iran is being paid for in part by a hidden gasoline surcharge on every working family in the country, and the President is telling those families the price is not very high.
A Times/Siena poll in late May found that two-thirds of Americans — including 73 percent of independents — say entering the Middle East conflict was the wrong decision. Those numbers are not a statistical blip. They are a verdict. The pump does not publish a press release.
The Co-op pump doesn’t have a communications staff. It has a number, and the number is the number. Next week I’ll drive to the warehouse and fill the tank, and the war will be on the receipt, whether the administration admits it or not. In Friendship, we’ll keep filling the tank, keep reading the receipt, and keep remembering who set the price.