I was scrolling through photos the other day, looking for a shot from a 2021 fishing trip to Pennsylvania. In the process, I came across one I took on my way there, at a gas station in West Virginia. It showed a sticker of then-President Joe Biden pointing at the price on a gas pump with the words “I did that!” The price of gas was $2.89. The horror!
According to GasBuddy, a company that monitors U.S. gas prices, average prices at 439 stations in Memphis rose 42.0 cents per gallon last week, averaging $3.04 as of Monday. That’s 53.5 cents per gallon higher than a month ago and 32.6 cents per gallon higher than a year ago. The national average price of diesel increased 85.9 cents last week and stands at $4.60 per gallon, meaning the cost of delivering goods by semi-truck just went up 20 percent. And projections are that it’s going to get worse.
“In just a week, consumers have seen gasoline prices surge at one of the fastest rates in years, after oil prices spiked following U.S. strikes on Iran and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy. “With additional attacks across the Middle East over the weekend pushing oil above $100 per barrel for the first time in years, fuel markets are now rapidly recalibrating to the risk of prolonged disruption to global supply flows. As a result, gasoline prices in many states could climb another 20 to 50 cents per gallon this week.”
President Trump once boasted that he could “shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue” and not lose a vote among his core supporters. More recently, evidence suggests that he could also molest teenage girls in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote among that group. But pushing gas prices to over $5 a gallon may be a step too far. We shall see.
Trump is on a tear, and where it ends, nobody knows, including him, it appears. After being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize in February, Trump told Norway’s Prime Minister that he no longer felt bound “to think purely of peace.” It’s one of the few times where Trump has proven to be a man of his word. In fact, in little more than a year in office — after campaigning that he would be the “president of peace” — Trump has authorized U.S. attacks on eight countries, including Venezuela, Yemen, and Ecuador(!), with Cuba up next. But of course, it’s Trump’s massive joint assault with Israel on Iran that’s causing the world’s economy — and fuel prices — to go wobbly.
In a remarkable interview with Time magazine last week, Trump talked about the decision to attack Iran on February 27th. It happened at Mar-a-Lago. On one side of the club, members and guests danced and partied. On the other, Trump and various administration leaders sat in a makeshift command center and made the call to launch what they called a “decapitation strike.”
American long-range missiles and drones and Israeli jets struck hundreds of military installations, and also killed 86-year-old Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a number of senior officials. Trump took personal credit for the success of the decapitation: “I’ve killed all their leaders,” Trump told Time. “That room is gone.”
Also “gone” was a girls’ school that suffered a direct hit, killing 175 people, mainly students. In addition, several other civilian areas, especially in Tehran, took heavy shelling, with multiple casualties. No comment from Trump as to his personal responsibility for those deaths.
Trump’s latest act of aggression hasn’t impacted most Americans yet. Troops aren’t dying — with six exceptions, as I write this — and Americans aren’t really being impacted, except in their pocketbooks. But Iran has been expecting and planning for something like this for decades. There’s little doubt that terror cells exist in this country, and that ripe targets for them — nuclear plants, skyscrapers, power grids, schools — are ample. When asked if Americans should be worried about potential Iranian retaliation on U.S. soil., Trump replied, “I guess,” which nicely sums up his foreign policy. The reckless fools who are blowing up people all over the globe in our name are the same reckless fools charged with protecting us at home. Rising gas prices should be the least of our worries.