Donald Trump is really upset and desperate and mad that everything seems to be falling apart right now, mere weeks before the midterm elections that should be the beginning of determining whether he spends the rest of his life as a free man, or whether he is gonna need to see if Natalie can smuggle Those Diapers He Likes into The Hague.
One thing falling apart: Gas prices. The headlines are horrific:
“Oil Executives Say the Great Fuel Crisis Is Here.” That’s Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
“Gas prices are about to take a big jump, analysts say, with the worst still to come.” That’s Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post.
“Rising Fuel Prices Set Off Anger and Protests Around the World.” That’s the New York Times, which is thank God not owned by one of Trump’s oligarchs.
But wait, y’all, the prices are already high, and they’re going up even more?
Not if you believe what Dear Leader says, and if you don’t believe what Dear Leader says, then you are guilty of treason against the Great Trump, Buster of Hoaxes!
Trump told a crowd of absolute morons in North Carolina on Wednesday night that, first of all, stop your complaining, because these high gas prices are a small price to pay for how awesome it is to be in this forever war with Iran he started for not even God knows why. (And lost on the first day, and continues to lose every subsequent day.)
“It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done. Remember that. It’s a little more. Frankly, even if it was a lot more[.]”
Yeah, so stop your bitchin’.
Besides, relax! Dear Leader and Secretary Shitfaced have got this:
“But that’s going to come tumbling down,” he added, referring to gas prices. “That’s going to be like rocket ships in reverse.”
That’s right. Donald Trump is gonna reverse cowgirl/reverse rocket ship those gas prices into submission. Or he’s going to keep blaming it on Ukraine, because that’s his new line, blaming Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s drone attacks on Russia for the diesel fuel shortage. (Bulllllll fucking shit, asshole.) And if he doesn’t, and if those gas prices keep climbing, he’s going to have Marco Rubio brand you a left-wing terrorist for saying so.
Why are you a terrorist so much? Oh look at you over there, dramatically whining that it costs $500 to fill up your F-350’s tank. What are you, some kind of Hasan Piker in his underpants who hates America with rock hard abs?
This week, thanks to Trump’s stupid fucking unwinnable war, average gas prices are up to $4.44 per gallon, and diesel just hit an all-time record of $6.40.
That $4.44 average isn’t the highest ever (that was June 2022) but give it a minute, because literally zero of the analysts are saying that Trump is about to rocket-ship-reverse the trends, and oil executives themselves are sounding the alarm in the Wall Street Journal. They say the crisis is right now.
You see, there was another pipeline in Saudi Arabia, the East-West Pipeline, that was easing some of the burden of the Strait of Hormuz being closed. But then it took hits last week in the war. That pipeline comes out on the Red Sea side. Glance at a map of the region and you’ll see how it might fuck everyone mightily for the Red Sea side and the Strait of Hormuz side to be closed/severely hampered.
“All these mechanisms helped to mitigate the price and supply risk,” said the leader of Chevron, Mike Wirth, last Friday, at an energy industry confab. “Those have largely now played out, and we don’t have nearly the buffers in the system that we did when it began.” (The buffers he’s talking about, including the Saudi pipeline, are well explained here.) He added, “I wish I could tell you that I saw some reason why things would ease, but it’s difficult right now to see that happen.”
For more from those analysts, we go to the Washington Post:
[A]nalysts who reviewed images of the pipeline damage anticipate a significantly longer disruption, likely resulting in high prices for consumers well beyond the midterm elections. And maritime tracking organizations say that far less oil is getting through the Strait of Hormuz than the Trump administration claims.
Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a liar like all the rest, says that pipeline will be back up in a couple days. Andrew Lipow, an analyst and expert WaPo spoke to, says ummmmmm no, more like a month or two:
“They will need to replace piping, valves, all the electrical stuff,” he said. “It is not like you can just go to Costco and pick that stuff up off-the-shelf.”
Add it all up and what do you get?
Chief energy adviser for Gulf Oil, tell us:
Huh, any big Senate or congressional races up that-a-way?
The price for a gallon of regular spiked 25 cents between Wednesday and Thursday in Iowa, according to AAA. In Wisconsin, it was up 23 cents. In Michigan, it was up 22 cents.
Top petroleum industry understander, tell us:
Big investments understander from big bank SoFi, tell us:
Of course, WaPo notes that such an export ban on diesel “could create chaos in global markets and not necessarily lower prices in the U.S., as domestic refineries are already running at capacity.”
Oh.
There is much more interestingness in that article — lots of details about Yemen and Houthis and what-have-you — but the shortest version is that this is all because of Trump’s goddamned lost war, and just remember, it can and probably will get worse! Yes, worse than the $10-per-gallon diesel in California right now.
And of course, this isn’t just hitting us. The entire world is having to deal with the ramifications of Captain Dumbfuck’s war that a fifth grader with a social studies textbook could have told him was a bad idea. Protests are breaking out around the world in response to fuel shortages, and there’s rationing, blackouts and more. Fishermen in the Philippines who can’t fish because Donald Trump is a dementia-shitting dumbass. Chaos in Guatemala, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Syria, Indonesia. Garment factories shutting their doors in Bangladesh. The power going out five times a day even for those that are staying open.
But wait, didn’t Dear Leader just promise he was going to reverse cowgirl the gas prices and take them furniture shopping, because he’s a celebrity and they let him do it? Yes, he did.
But he’s full of shit and can’t even tell the difference between reality and the AI slop Natalie prints out for him, so this is going to get worse. Wait until it gets cold and people have to start paying their utility bills to keep the heat on. Wait until Kevin Warsh has to jack up interest rates some more.
Wait until … wait until none of this ever ends. It just keeps getting worse and worse, long after the Democrats retake Congress, inshallah. A lot of this shit has simply been set in motion, and we’re just going to have to live with Trump’s destruction. (Though if it gets bad enough, it’ll sure be helpful to have Congress comfortably in the Democrats’ hands, to impeach and defund every single one of these bastards, and that’ll just be the beginning of the accountability.)
Fox News is freaking out, we should note.
Relatedly, did y’all hear about the drama queen screaming match House Republican leadership recently had with the heads of its five ideological groups? Did you know there were five kinds of white fascist Nazi bigot? Haha! Us neither, but they call the caucuses the “five families,” oh boy. Anyway, there was hootin’ and there was hollerin’ about “THIS IS FUCKING WAR!” and “You disrespectful fool!” (that was Clay WHAR BOXES Higgins) and everybody was screamy fighty big man grrr argh!
Know what that screaming match civil war fisticuffs Caucasian yip-yap orgy among House Republicans was all about?
Suspending or not suspending the gas tax.
Enjoy the bed you’ve made for yourselves, motherfuckers!
The rest of us will be busy voting.
[WREG / Washington Post]
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The fact that this is, in a way, *good* news is depressing as fuck. It's good news because absolute fucking morons, drooling zombie idiots, unworthy of citizenship, are incapable of understanding *anything* except what's right in front of their stupid fucking faces. The ONLY thing that will make them turn on Trump and the Republican Party in the midterms is what's hitting them in the pocketbook right. now. Not human rights. Not our standing among our allies and in the world. Not the decorum and dignity of the office. Not the environmental catastrophe we're ALREADY IN. Nope! Just the prices of gas and groceries.
Whew! {pant, pant}. Sorry, frustrated rant over.
This is what you get when you put a man who bankrupted casinos in charge.
Such a great businessman.