President Donald Trump's war in Iran looks no closer to ending, all while he declares victory.
But even if somehow the war were to wrap up, Trump is facing a massive crisis when it comes to the price of gas. He largely won a second term in the White House on the promise to lower energy prices, which spiked after the Covid-19 pandemic and the global supply shocks amid the war in Ukraine.
The Trump team seems to understand this. Vice President JD Vance admitted in Michigan this week that there would be a "rough road ahead," with gas prices, but insisted, "This is a temporary blip."
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, whom Trump passed over to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, said on CNBC that the pain consumers could feel thanks to the increased prices that come from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz was "the last of our concerns right now."
I don't know about you, but this all feels very 2022 — maybe with a touch of 1992.
As the economy recovered from Covid-19, Jerome Powell famously said at the time that inflation would be "transitory" and Joe Biden had called it "temporary" in 2021, which came off as glib and disconnected from the pain Americans felt at the grocery store.
When Vladimir Putin launched an assault on Ukraine, the price of gas spiked. The last Democratic president who served only one term, the late Jimmy Carter, also had an oil shock and crisis in Iran that bedevilled him, albeit not one of his own making.
That might be why Democrats faced with the war in Iran are ripping a page from Bill Clinton, one of the most astute political operators they've had in the modern-era White House, and using a line his chief adviser James Carville famously uttered in 1992: "It's the economy, stupid."
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