Trump Can't End Iran War, So He Changes Subject

One hundred days into the war on Iran, the bill stopped being something economists warned about and became something Americans pay at the pump. Inflation reached 4.2% in May, the highest in three years, and most of the jump was energy: petrol now averages $4.15 a gallon, up 39% from $2.98 the day before the fighting escalated, and the typical household is around $750 poorer over the hundred days. The cause is the Strait of Hormuz, still shut, through which about a fifth of the world's oil normally moves. The strangest part is that the same disruption has made the United States the world's biggest oil exporter — a bonanza for Texas that does nothing for the family filling up in Ohio.

What makes the picture confusing is that the rest of the economy refuses to break. Employers added 172,000 jobs in May, more than double what forecasters expected, and unemployment held at 4.3%. So the country is living two realities at once: a strong labour market and the worst inflation in three years, with a war it cannot switch off sitting underneath both. That tension is the real story of the American summer, and it is why the war's politics matter as much as its economics.

Faced with a war he promised would last weeks and which has now run months, the president changed the subject — repeatedly. Donald Trump used the week to repeat his false claim that California's election was rigged, walking out of an NBC interview rather than back it up. His Justice Department opened what officials called the largest denaturalisation drive in American history, moving to strip citizenship from seventeen people, some convicted of serious crimes including child sex offences, others merely accused of immigration fraud — a power that was almost never used before this presidency. He widened the trade war on China, adding more Chinese firms to a Pentagon blacklist as allies were pressed to join in. And in Congress, Section 702 — the surveillance law that supplies more than half of the president's own daily intelligence briefing — drifted toward a June 12 expiry, snagged on a fight over his pick for intelligence chief.

None of these is the war, and that is the point. A president who cannot deliver the one thing the country most wants — cheaper petrol and an end to the fighting — is filling the silence with fights he can pick himself. On Iran he is reduced to insisting a deal is "two or three days" away, the same confidence with which he once promised the war would be over in a month and a half.

The autumn will be decided by which of the two realities wins. If a deal genuinely reopens Hormuz and prices ease while hiring holds, Trump escapes the trap. If the strait stays shut and inflation grinds on, the strong jobs numbers will not save him, and the louder the fights he picks at home, the clearer it will be that the one abroad is the one he cannot win.