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 Vladmimir 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 we’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.”
Two perfect examples come in the form of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), both wildly popular with the Democratic base. Unsurprisingly, Kelly, a former astronaut and Navy captain, has criticized Trump for the military strategy.
“This president got into this without any kind of strategic goal, without a plan, without a timeline and without an exit strategy,” he told The Independent. “We already have, you know, dead Americans and many more injured, and we still haven’t heard a vision from the President. Straits of Hormuz closed down. You know, I’ve gone through there number of times.”
Kelly and Trump have clashed multiple times, most notably after Kelly recorded a video with other Democratic veterans saying U.S. active duty servicemembers can refuse illegal orders. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had unsuccessfully sought to lower Kelly’s retirement rank and pay.
But Kelly also brought up the increase in the cost of living.
“Raises the cost of gasoline, raises the cost of energy,” he said. “When the cost of energy goes up, the cost of manufacturing, everything goes up. Fertilizer comes through the Strait of Hormuz. Price of crops means the price of food is going to go up. So this was not thought out.”
Kelly obviously brought up the deaths of US servicemembers and Iranian schoolchildren from the bombing of a girls’ school.
But the fact he mentioned how the war causes a chain reaction that will cause the cost of living to skyrocket shows just how much they know this will cause pain toward the American people.
The same goes for Raskin. A constitutional scholar in his past life who has served as the Democrats’ literal prosecutor against Donald Trump as the lead impeachment manager during the trial in the Senate after January 6, as a member of the House select committee investigating the riot and now as now the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Raskin has never had an issue criticizing Trump’s lawlessness.
“The founders of our country were adamant that the solemn decision to go to war be made by only the representatives of the people, they knew how the kings plunged their countries into wars of Vandy, conceit, Imperial ambition, avarice, greed, and so on,” Raskin told The Independent.
But he also sought to emphasize how this would raise the cost of living for Americans.
“Anytime a president plunges the country into an illegal war, that becomes an issue immediately in the next election,” he said. “So it’s hard to see how it could not be. Gas prices are up by more than 25 percent already, and this is another radical inflationary pressure, even after Donald Trump’s tariffs, which cost American consumers billions of dollars So, you know, some people.”
Raskin, who has become an icon among Democrats for constantly making the case against Trump, and Kelly, the veteran with foreign policy credentials that helped him win in a state that voted for Trump two out of three times, are astute politicians who have their ear to the ground.
Thus, the fact they know the cost of living could sink Trump shows that they learned a painful lesson from 2022, when Democrats lost the House, and 2024, when they lost the Senate and the White House: Americans will tolerate almost anything except increased costs of living and a decreased standard of living.
And they are betting that American voters will blame Trump.
