Economy is shaky. Gas? Up. Inflation? Up. Markets? Tanking. So what do we get from Trump? Iran bombastery

Economic numbers are turning negative. Gas is going up, so is inflation. The stock market is tanking. You’d think we’d get some messaging about this from the admistration, but what do we get from Trump?  Contradictory and confusing statements about Iran.

Is the administration paying attention to the homefront? Doesn’t sound like it. When told about gas prices going up, Trump just said, “if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.”

Wonder if Trump knows that domestic crude oil just crossed the $90/barrel threshold, which represents a $30/barrel jump just since the war started. This is more than going up “a little bit” and will soon start causing pain at the pump.

We’ll see if Trump remains dismissive about the price increase. Until then, we see a government in some disarray about just what’s going on in Iran.

First off, from D.C. there seems to be a cacophony of words concerning the definition of what’s happening. Just what are we supposed to call this bombardment of Iran. Is it a war? If not, what the heck is it?

Trump and his Secretary of War Hegseth have called it a war, but congressional Republicans, too wussy to assert their constitutional obligation to declare war, call it something else. House GOP leader Mike Johnson insists that “we’re not at war right now … we’re four days into a very specific, clear mission and operation.”

This is political doublespeak, aka “malarkey,” at its most disingenuous. What’s so hard about saying we’re at war? 

You’d think with all the “bang, bang, shoot, shoot” going on in Iran and among its neighbors, the simple conclusion is that we’re at war. It was easy enough to figure out that a war was going on when I was a Marine at a hellhole called the DMZ in Vietnam. You know, we fired at them, then they fired back … basically a grunt-level version of the missile and drone exchanges in the ever-expanding war that Trump started in Iran.

It indeed seems simple enough, but the semantic quibbling going on in D.C. is taking attention away from some tough messages being broadcast by the financial and energy markets. Same goes for some unnerving news coming from statistics about the economy itself.

• The stock markets are down “bigly,” as Trump might put it, dropping like a rock since Trump initiated this war. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost nearly 2,000 points since the warfare began last weekend.

• Oil has reached $90/barrel in the past week, up nearly $30/barrel.

• Wholesale gasoline is up by 70 cents/gallon 

• Wholesale prices overall were up at a 6% annual rate in January, far exceeding the 2% target for inflation

• The U.S. shed 92,000 jobs in February

• There is one positive side-effect for agriculturally-oriented states like South Dakota — soybean and corn futures have been strong. That’s nice for our state, but in the bigger picture it’s a negative: Investors move their money into hard assets during times of economic decline and uncertainty. 

Meanwhile, the tough market and economic numbers have escaped the attention of our leaders, who seem to be grasping for a way out of the mess that is going on in the middle east.

I say “seem to be grasping” because they must lately have hit a level of irrationalism, if not desperation altogether, when they seriously thought that they could foment some sort of rebellion in Iran’s northern regions by arming Kurdish nationalists, who for generations have been seeking territory to create their own country. The idea is a non-starter at worst and “highly doubtful” at best according to this assessment in The Council on Foreign Relations, which lays out a good historical and practical case against the possibility that Kurds will do our dirty work for us in Iran.

It’s time for administration and congressional leadership to focus on the homefront. They must address some shaky economic issues that have been lingering for a while. The energy markets alone are signalling a very tough future for economic growth now that gas prices are sure to go even higher until some stability returns.

You have to hope that somewhere in the midst of the craziness, someone in D.C. is minding the store and keeping an eye on repercussions and unintended consequences that are sure to materialize. The markets are telling us that those eventualities will soon inflict some serious economic pain on the United States if this venture into regime change, if not outright imperialism, goes on much longer.

John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.

Photo: President Trump reviewing Iran operations, public domain, wikimedia commons

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