Let’s rewind the clock a few weeks and revisit Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, because one particular passage strikes me in hindsight as delectably delicious:
“Gasoline, which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states under my predecessor, is now below $2.30 a gallon in most states. And in some places, $1.99 a gallon. And when I visited the great state of Iowa just a few weeks ago, I even saw $1.85 a gallon for gasoline.”
If we ignore the pathological liar’s most blatant lie – that he “saw” an Iowa station pump a gallon for a buck 85 – we can rightly conclude that this guy was nervous about the issue of affordability. He has long boasted that his 2024 win was greased in part by voters’ concerns about inflation, and indeed he has long used gas prices as a metric for the health (or ill health) of the American economy.
Yet here he is today – having blundered into a Middle East war via his toxic trifecta of impulsiveness, incompetence, and ignorance – presiding over a national pandemic of pain at the pump, with prices spiking an average of 74 cents a gallon in the last two weeks (roughly 27 percent). That translates to $3.72 for unleaded. And it’s clear he has no clue what to do about it.
Trump is so far over his head, he’d drown in a kiddie pool.
It has long been axiomatic in American politics that the incumbent party takes a hit when gas prices go north. If that’s still true, swing-voting independents and non-MAGA Republicans might take their revenge on Trump and his congressional lickspittles in the November midterm elections.
Heck, even the most MAGA-fied motorists should be in high dudgeon about the war tax being levied on their wallets. It should be easy to connect dot A (the warlord’s impetuous actions) to dot B (the economic consequences), but I have no faith the cultists will ever wake up.
The good news is that we may not need them.
Trump’s new war is reportedly the most unpopular foreign adventure in the history of polling, thanks to a massive thumbs-down verdict from independents – with a key assist from many non-MAGA Republicans. The cost to consumers is already emblazoned on every gas sign at every highway exit and suburban street corner, where there’s no choice but to pay up.
Thanks to Trump, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where 20 percent of the world’s oil is transported, has triggered “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” That’s according to the International Energy Agency, which represents 32 member nations and reports basic facts without kissing Trump’s rump.
No wonder he has been desperately pleading for help to reopen the Strait, begging all the nations he has been relentlessly dissing. Naturally, they’ve told him to buzz off.
The clock is ticking, because if this war becomes open-ended, spiking oil prices will inflate prices across a broad range of consumer goods. Oil is the key ingredient in the industrial processes that churn out the stuff we buy, like food and medicine.
But for now it’s all about the gas, the warflation at the pump, and what’s truly priceless are the rationalizations being offered by Trump’s hapless toadies on Capitol Hill. House Speaker Mike Johnson says the 27 percent price hike is just a “blip.” Florida congressman Aaron Bean says the price hike is like “street repair. There comes a day when they release the cones and whatnot, and it’s smooth and easy and widened and safer, and that’s what’s happening.” Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker said, “The public understands the necessity of what we’re doing,” a claim that flunks reality.
Nobody, least of all Trump, knows what will happen to warflation in the months ahead. But unless Trump can find a way to rig the midterm congressional elections in his favor, it’s safe to predict that voters outside the MAGA cult will give him a beatdown and drive the Republicans from power in one or both chambers.
We’ve been whacked at the gas pump, but, more importantly, our consciences have been stirred. At the Oscars, the best acceptance speech was delivered by a documentary filmmaker, David Borenstein. While referencing his winning entry about Russian tyranny, he said this:
“What we saw when working with this footage – it’s that you lose (your country) through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we could produce it and consume it, we all face a moral choice.”
Our choice, by now, should be obvious.
Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]