It may not be as “kinetic” as Hegseth would likely prefer, but there has been no conclusion to it, which is evidenced by the fact that although the Strait of Hormuz is said to be “open,” the number of ships making its way through that waterway is down some 90% compared with a year earlier.

Which explains, in part, why the price of a gallon of regular unleaded is at a national average, according to AAA as of August 30, of $4.07, which is up from the year-ago price of $3.19. That’s a 28% increase.

Now you can be sure that whenever Donald Trump declares “VICTORY!! Plenty of people are saying it!” there will be all manner of rhetoric about gas prices falling back to “Levels like you’ve never seen.”

Even if gas prices do fall, here’s something to keep in mind: The Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University has developed the “Iran War Energy Cost Tracker.”

At the time of this writing the additional amount that US consumers have paid for fuel — gasoline and diesel — is $94.2 billion.

That’s $94.2 billion (and rising) that you won’t get back.

Or let me put this in a Trump-like manner:

THAT’S $94.2 BILLION (AND RISING) THAT YOU WON’T GET BACK.

A word about diesel.

While the number of passenger vehicles using diesel in the US has decreased greatly, diesel is the dominant fuel for many applications, including the semitrucks that ship everything from coast to coast. So transportation costs rise. So those who receive the shipped products pay more. So the consumers of those products (i.e., you and me) pay more, too.

But another application that uses diesel is for farm equipment. The price of a gallon of diesel today is $5.60. It was $3.70 a year ago.

That’s a 51% increase.

Unless you are a farmer, you aren’t seeing it. For now. Because farmers have extremely thin margins, and they are going to have to make up for that by raising their prices.

Farmers are subject to a double-whammy because the Strait of Hormuz, in addition to being the passage for about 20% of global petroleum, is the passage for about 30% of the world’s fertilizer.

A farmer buying anhydrous ammonia pre-war paid some $828 per ton, which is now $943.

Urea? $611 to $644.

Monoammonium phosphate? $800 to $959.

The point is, US agriculture is taking a big hit as the Trump Administration claims the Strait is open.

You’re going to pay more at the grocery store now. You are going to pay more at the grocery store going forward.

Those input cost rises will simply cause that to happen.

Or let’s say you want to get away from it all and take a trip.

The price of jet fuel has doubled since the start of the war in Iran.

On The Hill program on NewsNation August 30, Chris Sununu, president and CEO of Airlines for America, the trade association and lobbying organization for the major US airlines, acknowledged the rise in fuel prices but noted the airlines have only increased the average price of a ticket by 19%.

Sununu said the airlines “are eating” the additional costs.

What does that mean? Simply that they are decreasing their profits. How long is that tolerable for investors? And at what point does this lead to trimming services, whether cutting places they fly to (smaller markets, including those in agricultural areas) or cutting the distribution of tiny bags of pretzels. (While this may seem like a nonsensical concern, realize that you’re paying more and getting less.)

Donald Trump, perhaps trying to divert attention from things like this, had decided to start a trade war with Canada.

Which is remarkably stupid.

Going back to the aforementioned fertilizers used by farmers: More than 80% of the potash used by US farmers comes from Canada. Yes, not a Strait of Hormuz issue, but one that is caused for inexplicable reasons. (Trump likes to claim that other countries, including Canada, “Are ripping us off.” Yet he never provides specifics as to how this is happening.)

Petroleum products? The US imports as much as 4.4 million barrels of oil — some 60% of all crude imports — per day from Canada. This is because even though the US has plenty of reserves, it turns out that many oil refineries — which turn oil into things including gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel — are engineered to process the kind of oil that comes from Canada, not the light crude that comes out of the ground in places like Texas. If you can’t refine it, you can’t use it.

In 2025 the US imported over $40 billion worth of agricultural products, from grains and seeds to beef to fruit to potatoes, from Canada. Yes, a trade war will lead to higher prices for US consumers.

(Here’s something interesting about overall US ag imports, from the Economic Research Service of the US Deptartment of Agriculture, posted on June 30, 2026: “Much of the US agricultural import growth has come from high-valued imported goods — such as fruits and vegetables, alcoholic beverages, and processed food products. Those goods often include products that can’t be easily or economically produced in the United States (such as tropical products or off-season produce), as well as labor-intensive products that can be comparatively more cost effective to produce in other countries.”

If we run a trade deficit with a particular country on ag, it isn’t because they are “ripping us off” but because that’s the way economics work in a modern society.

How is the president working to make things better for the American people?

By claiming the body of water known as “Lake Ontario” is now “Lake America”?

This is incredibly childish — at most. Can you imagine any serious world leader resorting to this?

If the US is going to continue to be globally competitive with China it will need to work with allies including Canada, not alienate them with tariffs and trash talk.

But do we work with our allies? Of course we don’t. Because we’re number-one.

For now.

Xi Jinping is chuckling somewhere.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, writing primarily for the right column.

The reason?

“This deal will reduce prices for Americans while giving space for our Great American Beef Herd to grow again,” he wrote.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the average price of a pound of ground beef in January 2025 — Biden’s last month in office — was $5.545.

The average price of the same in July 2026, well into Trump’s second term? $6.885 per pound.

That’s a 24% increase.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t Trump going to lower the cost of “the groceries”?

That’s certainly not lowering it.

To be fair, this is not all Trump’s fault.

One of the things he hasn’t managed to keep south of the US border is Cochliomyia hominivorax, a.k.a., the “screw worm,” which is killing cattle. (This should not be confused with the parasitic tape worm that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said he had had in his brain.)

Fewer cattle means higher prices for beef.

But there is something that cannot be overlooked in Trump’s statement: He is lifting tariffs to reduce prices.

While they never like to say this out loud, the tariff regime that Trump has applied in either a willy-nilly or vindictive manner is costing the American public money.

This is not just beef. It is all of those goods that are imported into the US from other countries because the American public wants to buy them.

As of August 22, 2026, the Trump Administration has put on 50% tariffs on $20-billion worth of goods coming from our largest trading partner and our former best ally (until Trump trashed the relationship), Canada.

Even goods — from automobiles to hockey sticks — that had been covered by the USMCA trade agreement signed by Donald Trump are now subject to the 50% tariffs.

This led Canadian prime minster Mark Carney to say that when it comes to trade deals, the US “signature was written in pencil.”

Erased at will.

Carney, who has a doctorate in economics from Oxford, knows more than a little about finance and trade, given that he was the governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008-2013, meaning he helped get Canada through the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, meaning he was the first non-Brit to lead that bank since its establishment (1694) and that he had to guide the UK economy through Brexit and COVID.

Odds are a man with that background doesn’t make statements about economic issues affecting his country on a whim.

Trump has a BA in Economics from the Wharton School; his pre-political career was being a reality TV show character and real estate developer.

Evidence shows that a man with his background says things one day and something else the next.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer — whose background is as an attorney — said on August 22, “Two countries have retaliated against the United States: the People’s Republic of China and Canada.” This retaliation in the context of China is the country essentially saying, “We are an economic powerhouse, too, so you’re not going to push us around.” The retaliation in the context of Canada is predicated on principle: If you establish a trade agreement, then you live by its rules. When Trump signed the USMCA in 2020 he called it “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law,” and now says “We do better as a country if we don’t have an agreement.”

Which brings us back to the ground beef.

The American people are paying a whole lot more not only for burgers, but for coffee, cars and cantaloupes. Fuel import costs are up 20%.

So if tariffs are the cause of some of the price increases that Americans are facing when they go to the grocery store or Walmart or wherever, and if tariff suspension is a tactic being used by the Trump Administration to reduce the prices of a particular product, wouldn’t tariff relief make sense across the board?

We have an Administration driven by petulance. And we are all paying for it.

What is the national advantage we are getting from ill-conceived trade policies (to say nothing of the ill-conceived war against Iran)?

Where is the resurgence in manufacturing that Trump claimed would occur—a resurgence that has not only not happened but has led to a situation where over 75,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since he took office?

Where’s the beef?

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, writing primarily for the right column.

That’s Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) talking to Ed O’Keefe on CBS News’ Face the Nation August 16.

“He,” of course, is President Donald Trump.

Bacon was reacting to a piece of tape recorded on August 14.

Trump said: “For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have – a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world.

“We don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So, remember that when you have to pay a little bit more. You’re at $4. It’s OK.”

Now let’s look at Trump’s comments. A “tiny bit more” for your gasoline?

Isn’t that a “tiny bit more” than condescending?

Since he started the war Americans have paid, on average, 30% more for gasoline.

That’s money that’s gone.

He already told us after Operation Midnight Hammer that Iran couldn’t have a nuclear weapon.

He’s repeated that there is “nuclear dust” remaining.

Was he lying then?

“So, remember that when you have to pay. . .more.”

And who says its “OK”? The man who claimed that there would be so much energy generated in the US that we’d have nothing to worry about — clearly not understanding how the oil industry works. Private corporations acquire the oil and sell it where there is the best market for them to do so.

While Trump seems to have no problem making socialist moves by inserting government into private enterprise — Intel and U.S. Steel, for example — so far, he hasn’t done the same to the oil companies.

When approximately 20% of the oil is not getting to the market because of the war — which he has claimed nearly 40 times was coming to a close — the market acts accordingly.

But here’s something that he said immediately after “It’s OK”: “I mean, it’s – I’m not – I’m not – I will never apologize. I did the right thing.”

“I will never apologize.”

There you have it. He doesn’t think he has done anything wrong here, nor, apparently, anywhere else.

He doesn’t care about the American people if it means that he has to accept fault for something.

But, of course, there are his enablers like Don Bacon: “I think a better way for him to frame it, we had 9% inflation under Joe Biden. Of course, it went down towards the end of his presidency. But the Americans have never recovered from that.”

Biden!

What never gets said by the Republicans who are busy looking in the rearview mirror is something that should be large in that mirror: COVID.

Yes, the pandemic, which wreaked havoc on the US during Trump’s last year of the presidency, led to. . .yes, inflation when Biden took the position.

Arguably, had Trump been more responsive to dealing with the virus and not making absurd claims about it suddenly disappearing, the supply chain wouldn’t have been as broken and inflation wouldn’t have been as high.

Inflation was caused during that period in part as a result of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that President Biden signed in March 2021. . .as well the $3.1 trillion that Trump spent for pandemic relief during 2020. Somehow that part never gets attention.

Will Republicans ever acknowledge the fact that Trump isn’t the business genius they seem to believe he is? And will the American people realize that he only has their back when it works to his advantage?

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, where he writes primarily for the right column.

The objective of the game is to not have the lowest card in your hand when the round ends. The gameplay involves shifting a low card that may be in your hand to someone else’s hand. Thus the “screwing” part. Your problem becomes theirs.

This, in effect, is largely what Trump’s tariffs are all about.

That is, he saw the situation if we were running a trade deficit with a country that it was intolerable, by applying a tariff, so he thought, they would pay the US. The US would have a “higher card.”

And if they were screwed, so what?

Now in certain instances, there are countries with trade policies that put the US at a competitive disadvantage. And in those cases, the Trump administration should take steps to mitigate those circumstances.

The Trump administration should also understand who pays the tariffs. When all else is stripped away, it is the importer of the goods and the consumer of the goods who pays. Perhaps there is a decrease in the amount of goods purchased, which would have an effect on the other country’s economy, but the consequences on the domestic consumer cannot be overlooked — well, it can be, as demonstrated by the administration.

One policy used to impose tariffs was the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. That act, signed by Jimmy Carter, was established to be used if the US faces an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to its security or economy.

Did you find something out of the ordinary and threatening to the economy when you went shopping prior to April 2, 2025, so-called “Liberation Day”?

Probably not.

And apparently the Supreme Court determined there were no such compelling threats because last February it essentially told the Trump administration that it owed the companies that paid the tariffs the amounts they paid.

So this element of “Screw Your Neighbor” was taken off the table. (Consequently, the administration applied other tariffs under the Trade Act of 1974. It was not going to be screwed by the Supreme Court.)

Earlier this week the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its calculations on the state of the national deficit.

Now when you read this statement from the CBO’s monthly budget review, remember that Trump was positioned as being the consummate businessman: “The federal budget deficit totaled $1.8 trillion in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026 … That amount is $169 billion more than the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year.”

That’s right: A bigger deficit.

In February the CBO published The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036.

But now it finds: “Based on information available through the end of July, CBO estimates that the fiscal year 2026 deficit will be $2.1 trillion -- $200 billion more than the $1.9 trillion deficit projection that CBO published on February 11, 2026.”

Yes, an even bigger deficit.

Aren’t Republicans supposed to decrease the deficit, not make it go up?

The CBO had to do recalculations because it now thinks “all tariffs and customs duties collected in 2026 will be about $250 billion (or 60%) below earlier projections.”

It could be worse. And it isn’t thanks to you: “CBO now anticipates that income and payroll tax collections will be about $75 billion (or 2 percent) more than in February.”

There is also this: “Collections of individual income and payroll taxes rose; collections of corporate income taxes declined.”

That’s right: You pay more. Corporations pay less.

Why?, you wonder.

Can you say “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”?

It is argued that if taxes are cut on corporations there will be greater investment in things like bricks and mortar and machinery and systems. This will then result in more jobs with higher wages.

Sounds great in theory, but you’ve probably heard of late several corporations that are buying back stock. This buyback reduces the number of outstanding shares of stock, thereby decreasing the number of outstanding shares and increasing the value of the shares held.

But when a corporation buys back stock, it spends money that can’t be spent on CapEx, those things meant to enhance productivity.

As the CBO puts it: “Receipts from corporate income taxes decreased by $89 billion (or 23%). The 2025 reconciliation act allows corporations to take larger deductions for certain investments, thereby reducing some payments and offsetting the increases in those receipts that otherwise would have been expected, given the rise in corporate income.”

Swell.

So where are we as a nation?

Deeper in debt and as we’ve been screwing our neighbors, not particularly well perceived.

Consider: Gallup reported in April that based on its polling of people in more than 130 countries in 2025 — so this is pre-Iran War, which has had a debilitating effect on the global economy: “China surpassed the United States in global approval ratings in 2025, with a median of 36% approving of China’s leadership, compared with 31% for the US. China’s five-percentage-point advantage over the US is the widest Gallup has recorded in China’s favor in nearly 20 years.”

What’s more (or less): “disapproval of US leadership rose to a record-high 48%, while China’s disapproval rating remained flat at 37%.”

Screw Your Neighbor, indeed.

And keep something in mind: The deficit is not just something that goes away. It has to be paid back.

Guess who won’t be in office when the deficit starts being reduced?

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings where he writes primarily for the right column.

Rather, he is an if-Trump-has-anything-to-do-with-it-it-is-a-Big-Gulp-cup-and-it-is-overflowing-with-goodness kind of guy.

On Fox News Sunday August 9, Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, Trump’s inside economics advisor, told host Shannon Bream, “Wage growth is through the roof, especially for blue collar workers.”

Sure, he admitted earlier in the program that not all is going well.

But certainly not because of anything the Trump administration has or hasn’t done: “The prices went up so much under Joe Biden we totally understand why people are still frustrated when they go to the grocery store.”

Yes, the specter of Joe Biden still haunts the country.

Still, that roof-busting wage increase claim is intriguing.

So, I checked the data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which charts wage growth.

Presumably the “blue collar” jobs are found under the “manufacturing” category.

The bank has figures that are updated month by month.

Let’s go back to the Biden years, starting with February 2021, as that would be the first that one could conceivably argue he began to “own” the economy. (Unless Trump is proclaiming how great the economy is, he blames Biden for the state of affairs, even though he’s “owned” the economy since February 2025.)

Here are the Manufacturing wage growth figures for the Biden Era, starting in February 2021 and ending in January 2025. (You can just glance over them: There will be no test.)

3.0, 2.9, 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.4, 3.7, 3.8, 4.1, 4.3, 4.7, 5.1, 5.4, 5.8, 5.9, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.6, 6.6, 6.6, 6.9, 6.8, 6.7, 6.7, 6.1, 6.0, 6.0, 5.9, 5.8, 5.5, 5.4, 5.3, 5.2, 5.0, 5.1, 4.9, 5.0, 5.0, 4.9, 4.8, 4.7, 4.5, 4.7, 4.7,

Now we’ll look at the Trump Economy numbers, running from February 2025 to June 2026: 4.5, 4.4, 4.1, 4.1, 4.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.2, 4.4, 4.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.2, 4.2, 4.2, 4.2

It doesn’t take a mathematician to see there is nothing on that second run of numbers that is greater than 4.5. There were 27 months during the Biden years when the number for manufacturing workers was 5.0 or above.

Then that claim about all of those factories that are being built, factories that will, in Hassett’s estimation, unleash even more of the power of the Trump Economy.

According to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a pro-manufacturing trade organization, in May 2026 there was $174.8 billion being spent on manufacturing construction.

Not too shabby, right?

Well, also according to NAM, in June 2024, yes, during the Biden administration, $240.1 billion was being spent on manufacturing construction.

Oh, what’s $65.3 billion when you’re advising the President about economic policies?

And then let’s look at what NAM members cite as their “Biggest challenges” during Q2 2026:

• 83.1% -- Increased raw materials costs. (Hmm. . .might the tariffs have something to do with that?)

• 71.8% -- Trade uncertainties -- e.g., actual or proposed tariffs, trade negotiation uncertainty. (When changes are just a Truth Social post away, how can anyone be confident of anything?)

• 70% -- Rising healthcare/insurance costs. (Notice how the administration has

done little in the way to address issues while being more concerned about

things like the state of décor in the Oval Office?)

One more data point about the state of manufacturing, which is not all that Hassert purports it is.

There is the Manufacturers’ Outlook Index, NAM’s chart of the relative level of optimism of its members.

• Q2 2021, the first full quarter of Biden: 60.48.

• Q2 2025, the first full quarter of Trump: 36.75.

A higher number is better.

“Oh,” you think, “that’s just all the past. How are things looking now?”

• Q2 2026: 49.85

“Ha! You see? A few quarters and Trump is bringing it back.”

But to be comparable in terms of time spent in office:

• Q2 2022: 55.31

Down from that high point earlier, but Biden’s number is 11% higher than Trump’s.

Do you think Hassert knows? Do you think he’d tell Trump if he does?

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, where he writes primarily for the right column.

El-Sayed won.

So what’s he have in mind? I looked at his campaign page to find out.

The first item on El-Sayed’s list of priorities is something that is one of those things that’s nice to have, but something way down the list because it is something that (1) doesn’t have an immediate impact on people who aren’t running for office and (2) not likely to happen:

“Money Out of Politics”

The explanation: “To get corporate and special interest money out of politics, I support legislation to overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision”

Good luck with that.

“In addition, I support banning outside spending thorough corporate 501(c)4s, SuperPACs, and 527 groups.”

Isn’t this an example of the old saw: “The horse has left the barn”? That is, the people behind those various mechanisms are going to use those mechanisms to assure that they won’t be banned, and as laudable as that mission may be, odds are it would take a whole lot of time, energy and effort that could be spent on objectives that address people’s needs.

The next item on El-Sayed’s list is:

“Money in Your Pocket”

And here, guess what politician he sounds like in large part?

No, not Bernie. Not AOC. Rather, Trump.

“Trade deals, like NAFTA, have been a disaster for American manufacturing and have rotted out our towns and destroyed communities. I believe in bringing dignified, well-paying jobs to Michigan. That means investing in the research, development, and growth of the technologies of the future while using tools like tariffs in a steady, thoughtful, and targeted way to protect them as they grow.”

Yes, Trump has referred to NAFTA — and now the USMCA (one would think El-Sayed would be a little more up to date in his references) — as a “disaster.”

And whose favorite word is “tariffs”?

While this might be construed as cherry-picking to make El-Sayed seem like something he isn’t, know that under his “Money Out of Politics” agenda there’s this:

“Abolishing the Filibuster

“The filibuster has been used by senators to shield one another from having to take hard votes. I believe that it is antidemocratic and should be abolished.”

Who else is in favor of getting rid of the filibuster? Yes, President Trump.

Getting back to “Money in Your Pocket,” El-Sayed claims, “Trump’s incoherent, self-serving version of tariffs have only made the problem” — as in the loss of manufacturing jobs — “worse.”

Sort of a fair point, but the loss of manufacturing jobs have a whole lot to do with global competitiveness, not just tariffs.

“I support targeted, smart tariffs that would help protect Michigan manufacturing and incubate the industries of the future with unions at the forefront.”

One might argue that the likes of Lutnick, Bessent and, yes, Trump, imagine their tariffs are “smart,” so that has to be taken into account.

And El-Sayed is quite pro-union in his priorities. He was endorsed by the UAW, whose president, Shawn Fain, was all in on the Trump tariffs of 25% on imported vehicles.

Presumably, if you want to create “industries of the future” you don’t do it by protecting jobs because with protection comes no need to advance.

And finally,

“Medicare for All”

El-Sayed writes: “I will fight to expand Medicare to cover all necessary healthcare, including vision, dental, and hearing, and extend it to every single American from cradle to grave without premiums, copays, or deductibles.”

Sounds swell. But what he doesn’t have in the explanation of that priority is where the money is going to come from in order to pay for that. And Medicare as it exists today — the “original” Medicare, not the Medicare Advantage plan that is administered by private insurance (El-Sayed: “I categorically oppose the privatization of Medicare”), doesn’t cover vision, dental and hearing, so he’s talking about adding more costs to the program.

And while on the subject of costs of federal programs, let’s not forget that Social Security, which is funded by payroll taxes, will have a shortfall by the early 2030s without action.

And in another channeling of the man behind TrumpRx, El-Sayed proclaims:

“It is absurd that we pay more for prescription drugs than any other country on Earth.”

OK. But let’s look at why that might be the case — the paying more, not the absurdity.

In February 2024, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), which had contracted with RAND Health, released a study, “Comparing New Prescription Drug Availability and Launch Timing in the United States and Other OECD Countries.” This means the study occurred during the Biden Administration.

One of the findings: “Over half of new drugs are launched first in the US before being launched in other countries, with an average lag of about one year between launch in the US and launch in another country.”

Presumably that has a little something to do with the higher prices in the US. And for a parent whose child depends on a breakthrough drug, that year makes a lot of difference.

El-Sayed will face off in November with Republican Mike Rogers.

Rogers, who ran TV ads for weeks during the campaign, even though he was running unopposed, emphasized that he is a proponent of bringing shop classes back into secondary schools because the jobs that will result for those who have taken shop can’t be taken away by the Chinese or eliminated by AI. The skilled trades are not necessarily the consequence of taking shop. (That is a self-observational assessment.) Somehow this position doesn’t seem senatorial. More like someone running for school board.

Rogers doesn’t beat around the bush in how he positions himself: “I’ll stand with President Trump to deliver on the mandate given to him by the American people.”

And what mandate is that?

The Michigan electorate has a mess on its hands come November.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings where he writes primarily for the right column.

-30-

Schoolchildren will soon be back at their desks, and while they probably don’t pay too much attention to things of a political nature, they should keep that in mind: Instead of claiming that the dog ate their homework, they can blame it on Biden.

Funny thing: if you think back to the Biden approach to supporting Ukraine it was often criticized for slow-walking aid to a democracy that had been attacked by a historic enemy of the US. While there were advanced missile systems sent to Ukraine, the number used during the war in Iran dwarfs it.

That is, according a piece published by the Center for Strategic & International Studies on July 31, in 2024 (Biden) the US used 39 SM-3 missiles and 80 SM-6 missiles. That sums to 119.

In the Iran war (so far), the US has launched 130 SM-3s, 190 SM-6s, and 200 THAAD missiles. That sums to 520.

Sure, blame Biden.

==

On CBS’s Face the Nation August 2, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a former US Navy combat pilot who flew 39 missions during the Gulf War, so he probably knows a little more about things like this, was asked by Margaret Brennan about a report in The Washington Post that states General Alexus G. Grynkewich, a four‑star Air Force officer who is Commander of US European Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), “warned the Pentagon that he (Trump) lacks resources to protect Israel from incoming ballistic missiles, and if he’s without another Navy destroyer, he will be forced to choose between defense of the homeland versus that of Israel.”

Kelly responded, “This isn’t rocket science.” (Kelly was also a US astronaut.) “It’s not hard to figure out. I mean we — we struck over 14,000 targets with multiple munitions.” And with what has to be characterized as “understatement” continued, “That puts a lot of stress on magazine depth.”

Biden probably had something to do with there being so many targets.

==

And then there was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, on CNN’s State of the Union on August 2.

For some reason members of Congress, who ought to be doing things like helping bring down prices for the American people right now, are elevating conspiracy theories regarding Anthony Fauci and the US response to COVID-19 some years back.

So let’s look at the timing of the situation.

On March 13, 2020, Donald Trump declared COVID-19 a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act.

Donald Trump was in office until January 20, 2021.

There are 313 days between the declaration and when Joe Biden took office.

Three-hundred and thirteen days that Anthony Fauci worked for Donald Trump. Three-hundred and thirteen days during which Donald Trump could have done something about this alleged scourge on society.

If Fauci was so evil, corrupt and an all-around attention-seeking stupid son of a bitch, then why didn’t Donald Trump fire him?

Why did Trump allow Fauci to do all manner of unspeakable things to the American public — you know, with those vaccines that were developed under “Operation Warp Speed,” which Donald Trump officially announced on May 15, 2020, and which led to the first doses administered in the US on December 14, 2020, and which Donald Trump gladly took credit for (“one of the greatest achievements of mankind”) — and not simply fire Fauci?

After all, during the first Trump administration he gave the boot to lots of people including US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Compared to those two, Fauci’s firing would have been a walk in the park.

But guess who is to blame for the alleged badness of Fauci?

Kennedy: “Anthony Fauci was mismanaging the COVID pandemic and was doing it under the Biden administration. President Trump wanted to end the lockdowns.”

The lockdowns began in March 2020. There was an expiration in most states in May 2020. There was a resurgence in November 2020, which resulted in states taking action again. By June 15, 2021, California and New York completely lifted their remaining social distancing rules.

Again: much of this happened during the Trump Administration yet here is the man currently running the agency in charge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claiming; “Anthony Fauci was mismanaging the COVID pandemic and was doing it under the Biden administration.”

==

When in doubt, blame it on Biden.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings.

Trump on Thursday signaled his intention to withdraw Blanche’s nomination after empowered-by-lame-duckiness Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) said they would not vote to move Blanche’s nomination out of the Judiciary Committee to the full Senate without written assurance the White House would pull its unique sweetheart deal for a $1.776 billion retribution slush fund that would likely go to more than 1,500 January 6^th rioters and would give Trump, his family and businesses immunity from future Internal Revenue Service audits.

Cornyn, who was successfully primaried by Trump-backed Texas Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton, said; “POTUS is mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Sen. Tillis.” The North Carolina senator chose not to run for re-election this year.

Beside contempt, or retribution however, Trump’s withdrawal of Blanche’s nomination also reflects the president’s confidence the Republican Party will hold or even improve upon its 52-48 Senate majority. If Trump can’t get the Senate to pass his SAVE America Act, he seems to be counting on other methods, including maybe Immigration and Customs Enforcement “guarding” certain urban polling areas in November.

That will have to include Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and of course, Austin. In the latest poll of the Texas Senate race for Cornyn’s current seat by Texas Public Opinion Research, Democrat James Talarico leads MAGA champ Paxton 45 to 40 points, The New York Times reports.

Even if Trump is wrong about the Republican Party holding on to its Senate majority, by refusing to name another permanent AG candidate, he can keep Blanche in that role potentially to the end of his term in January 2029 and hold on to his IRS audit immunity forever.

Lassa is founding editor of The Hustings.

Because of the change in tax policy for EVs, GM had to write down some $7 billion from its books. Things were worse at Ford, which had a write-off of $19.5 billion. (Stellantis reported a write-down of $26 billion, but as it is truly a global company, the amount related specifically to the US is not called out, though it is thought to be the largest percentage of that figure.)

Trump had several boasts in Milford, including the bizarre, “I’ve done more for you” — as in the workers who were in the audience — “than your parents, OK?”

And what exactly might that be?

Never mind. He probably doesn’t know, either.*

He, naturally, claimed there were jobs created in auto because of his tariffs.

Per usual, that wasn’t true. In late 2024 there were some 166,000 auto jobs in Michigan, a number that is now down to 156,000.

MAGA!

He said that Ford is investing $3 billion in its BlueOval Battery Park in Marshall, Michigan, and creating 1,700 new jobs. Which is partially correct.

Before the Trump tax credit elimination Ford was going to invest $3.5 billion in the plant and create 2,500 jobs.

Post-tax credit elimination Ford has reduced its investment to $2.5 billion (not $3 billion) and yes, there is an expected creation of 1,700 jobs — or 800 fewer than Ford originally planned.

Another aspect of the tariffs: the Detroit Three is getting a refund of $2.3 billion because the Supreme Court ruled certain reciprocal trade duties were unconstitutional.

And while he is correct that 2025 was the strongest sales year in the US since 2019, arguably his heel-dragging on the creation of the COVID vaccine helped lead to a considerable collapse of auto sales in 2022 (a situation aggravated by a chip shortage).

But it goes like this for US sales:

· 2019: 17.0 million sold

· 2022: 13.8 million sold

· 2025: 16.2 million sold

Cox Automotive and Mobility Global, two highly respected automotive analyst firms predict:

· 2026: 15.8 million sold

Seems like the wrong direction, doesn’t it?

And there is something else to consider.

In 2019 the average transaction price for a vehicle in the US, according to the authority Kelley Blue Book, was $37,876.

Today it says the average price is $49,758.

Which goes to another one of his claims in Milford: “We’ve brought down prices.”

Not only is that not true when it comes to vehicles, but according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) in the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn area (and know that GM HQ is in Detroit and the GM Technical Center is in Warren; Stellantis operates plants in Detroit and Warren; Ford HQ is in Dearborn, as are its research campus and its legendary Rouge Plant): “The Detroit-Warren-Dearborn area all-items CPI-U increased 4.0 percent for the 12 months ending in June.”

Two elements of that are food, which was up 6.4% during that period, and energy, up 20.4%.

You may recall that last July Trump fired Erika McEntafer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because he didn’t like the figures in the jobs report. The person in charge of the CPI-U for the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn area ought to update his or her resume.

==

*It is amazing how Trump can make claims like that which are thoroughly abnormal yet none of his supporters even scratch their heads in wonderment. “Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump.” Yes, a man who demeans anyone and everyone that somehow creeps into his imagination — including the women and men who are parents, people who teach their children not to demean other people or to use vulgar language: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in one. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!” — Donald Trump, Truth Social, April 5, 2026. Some people — likely parents — will recognize that date as Easter Sunday.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings. He lives in Southeastern Michigan.

On ABC’s This Week Martha Raddatz noted that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth said after Operation Midnight Hammer that the Iranian nuclear facilities had been obliterated.

Turner, creditably, acknowledged, “actually, they said it.”

That factual observation would have put them and him in a box.

If the nuclear material was now, in Trump’s term, “nuclear dust,” saying that almost as though it is as lethal as the sprinkles distributed by Tinker Bell (this, of course, was in the context of his claiming that the US has won the war which, months later, still seems to be, well, a war), then there would have been no reason for Operation Epic Fury, no reason to have lost brave service people, no reason to spend billions of dollars, no reason to make the homeland less safe by squandering munitions that seem to have done little beyond providing Hegseth with good optics for the press conferences he used to hold (the last one was March 31: seems like there must be some pent-up podium thumping in the high-T Hegseth).

Turner couldn’t leave it at that and hope that Raddatz asked him about something else — maybe LeBron James signing with the 76ers because James began his professional career in Ohio, with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

No, Turner said:

“But actually what they had said was that the actions that they had taken at their nuclear enrichment sites had been obliterated, certainly not their aspirations for nuclear weapons or the nuclear weapons program.”

Now while the pronouns are a bit bollixed up in that statement, the first two “theys” are the Trump administration, then the “theirs” the Iranians.

But here’s the thing about that rational that is unbelievable: “their nuclear enrichment sites had been obliterated, certainly not their aspirations for nuclear weapons.”

In other words, while they can’t make nuclear weapons because Operation Midnight Hammer put an end to that, they want to makenuclear weapons.

And just how is it that dropping bombs and firing cruise missiles will put an end to what some unidentified people want to do?

On June 4 the New York Post reported:

“President Trump on Thursday said the Space Force has ‘very powerful cameras’ trained on Iran’s destroyed nuclear sites, scouting for any attempts Iran may take to break out the enriched uranium still buried deep below.

“’Every inch of that land has cameras on it,’ he said. ‘We have about nine of them, and they’re on, and we cover it. So, if anybody even got near it, we would know what we had to.’”

So physically, the US has the matter under control.

The issue, apparently, at least according to Turner, is the psychological one: those desires to have a nuclear weapon.

On March 13 Trump said in an interview on Fox News Radio that he would know when the war was over “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.”

So will he, or Hegseth or someone else in the administration know when the Iranians no longer have “aspirations for nuclear weapons?”

Does this mean the war will come to an end only when someone in the US thinks that Iranian leaders or scientists or engineers or whomever are no longer thinking about nuclear weapons?

How will they know? Will they feel it in their bones?

Macaulay is The Hustings’ pundit-at-large, writing primarily for the right (conservative) column.

US-based nuclear power companies would like the business, Matthew Bunn, nuclear proliferation expert at Harvard University and former advisor to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology during the Clinton administration, told NPR’s Juana Summers Wednesday evening on All Things Considered.

Bunn’s expert analysis is eye-opening.

Trump has Truth Socialed that the deal is contingent on Saudi Arabia sign the Abraham Accord, the document negotiated by White House son-in-law Jared Kushner toward the end of the Trump 45 administration that normalizes the relationship between Arab states and Israel.

Trump 47’s proposed deal has dropped insistence that to receive the US civilian nuclear program assistance, Saudi Arabia must accept the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol of broad international inspections, Bunn told Summers. The bilateral agreement revealed so far specifies only what the US would provide without details on the broader program, the nuclear proliferation expert said.

While the agreement does not permit Saudi Arabia to reprocess US-supplied nuclear materials for weaponry, there’s nothing in the agreement to prevent the Saudis from enriching uranium or other nuclear fuels that other countries provide. That’s according to Daniel Benhaim, ex-US deputy assistant secretary of state specializing in the Arabian Peninsula for the Biden administration, now with the Middle East Institute, in an interview with NPR’s Michelle Martin on Morning Edition Thursday.

The Trump White House insists that won’t happen.

“The US is not going to reach any agreement with any country in the world that leads to the risk of proliferation,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday (per U.S. News & World Report).

About the time Kushner was negotiating the Abraham Accords, late in the first Trump administration, then-Sen. Rubio (R-FL) co-sponsored legislation requiring Saudi Arabia to confess to the murder of Washington Post columnist Adnan Khashoggi before there could be any nuclear deal with the country.

This is also a good time for a reminder that Kushner’s private equity firm received $2 billion worth of investment from the Saudi government after his father-in-law reluctantly left office.

Now, Harvard’s Bunn concludes that the US-Saudi nuclear deal may make negotiating that deal President Trump says Iran wants so badly more difficult.

“If Saudi Arabia doesn’t agree to the Additional Protocol, it would be difficult to get Iran to agree,” he said.

If Saudi Arabia signs the Abraham Accord and gets its civilian nuclear deal, which would allow the country to sell a larger portion of its oil reserves to foreign markets, an end to the US-Israeli war with Iran will be harder to achieve.

But Israel, which has never acknowledged the nuclear capabilities everybody knows it has, will have an Arab ally with its own potential nuclear capabilities opposite Iran and whatever remains of its nuclear capabilities during an unending war.

Let’s acknowledge that it is a small leap from this column’s connection of dots to all-out conspiracy theory, but the obvious question is this: Is paving the way for a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia the real reason the US is at war with Iran?

Lassa is founding editor of The Hustings.

According to ballotpedia.org: “After the 2000 presidential election and the resulting Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. HAVA legislation created the US Election Assistance Commission. The legislation also directed every state to create “a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the State level that contains the name and registration information of every legally registered voter in the State …”

States make that information available either for a fee or for free.

During his July 16 speech one of Donald Trump’s bombshells was that China had acquired “220 million US voter files,” starting their collection in the 2020 election cycle.

Which is likely the case.

According to the Independent Voter Project, which has as a mission getting more people to sign up to vote so it is probably erring on the positive side, there are 217.8 million registered voters in the US, so quite possibly the Chinese got some duped names.

But the point is, you could get for $0 the “DOB, SSN, DL number, gender, phone number, email address, voting history, voter registration ID number, date of registration” for voters in Indiana, again according to Ballotpedia. (The state that really makes you pay some serious money is Alabama, which charges $37,000. But presumably the Chinese can manage.)

The point is, voter information is out there and only someone incredibly naïve would image that state actors from countries like China and Russia wouldn’t send out requests for these lists.

It is the “gambling in Casablanca” scenario, yet somehow Trump and his minions made this seem almost inconceivable if not incomprehensible.

(Speaking of Russia: on March 10, 2021 “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections,” drafted by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)— State Department, and the National Security Agency (NSA), wrote this: Key Judgment 2: We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US.

How many times did Trump reference Russia in his speech? Once. Putin? Zero.)

Funny thing about Trump’s concern regarding the 2020 election — and it is not that he keeps trying to relitigate something that happened six years ago and which he has been unable to provide bona-fide evidence for any game-changing fraud in this period of time, a period that includes time that he was the President of the United States and can see whatever files he wants. That’s just sad.

No, the funny thing is that the 2020 election was held when he was the President of the United States and as such, were he as concerned about election integrity as he now proclaims to be, there would have been no monkey-business in that election.

There wasn’t. Yet for some reason he keeps thumping the podium claiming there was.

In other words, if the 2020 election was “rigged,” wouldn’t it have been his responsibility to untie the knots before the election occurred?

Back in 2020, perhaps to gin up new viewers and to satisfy existing ones, Fox News and its commentators made claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines had been rigged during the election, switching votes for Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

In March 2021 Dominion filed a $1.6-billion lawsuit against Fox for fraud.

In April 2023, just before the trial was to begin — and the jury was seated, so this is really at the final moment — it was announced that Fox would pay Dominion $787.5 million.

Does anyone think for a minute (outside of Trump and his acolytes) that Fox would pay that kind of money if it thought it would be able to show there was anything wrong with the Dominion equipment?

You’d think that case would have been enough to put the whole thing to rest.

Trump spent about five years (2011 to 2016) claiming that Barrack Obama wasn’t born in the US until he acknowledged that Obama was.

Six years after his defeat by Obama’s vice president, he’s still on the election lie.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, where he writes primarily for the right (conservative) column.

That’s a statement from Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman, to The New York Times for a story about, well, to quote the opening sentence of the story: “As the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts prepares for major renovations, former project manager there have sent Congress internal documents that they say show how the institution bypassed government contracting norms in work carried out under President Trump.”

Norms like, oh, getting more than one bid for the work, something that your car insurance company probably requires you to do if you file a claim for a fender bender. Or something that you should probably do if you are planning a kitchen renovation.

The point of getting more than one bid isn’t necessarily just to get the best price but to have at least a sense of what best practices are and to get a better idea of how well the work will be done.

All of his prowess as a real estate mogul notwithstanding, Trump’s approach to getting renos done is less than satisfactory.

One need only look through the green sludge that is now in the Reflecting Pool to see the blue coating applied by Atlantic Industrial Coatings — a firm that got a no-bid contract worth some $14.6 million (Trump had originally estimated the cost to be about $2 million)—that is still peeling.

What does the Administration do? It has federal prosecutors change a 66-year-old with damaging the surface.

With no evidence, Trump has claimed vandals used box cutters to make a gash in the coating. It is worth noting that the gash in question is said to be 350-feet long. That’s just 10 feet short of the length of an NFL field (300 feet between the goal lines and a pair of end zones 30 feet each).

Sure, that’s likely.

As it has been a while since Secretary of Defense* Pete Hegseth has held a briefing about the war with Iran that apparently isn’t over, this is something from one of his presentations on April 24.

Hegseth said: “President Trump is the only president with the guts and moral clarity to finally do something about it. I see it every day behind closed doors; President Trump’s fortitude is unshakable and his mission is crystal clear.”

Guts and moral clarity but there’s the War Powers Resolution, a legal document passed by Congress “to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgement of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations.”

You know: Follow the document written 11 years after that Declaration of Independence we just celebrated was. In effect, the Constitution is the payoff of the Declaration.

The War Powers Resolution includes this: SEC. 3. The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situation where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and after every such introduction shall consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities or have been removed from such situations.”

Did Trump consult with Congress “in every possible instance” before Operating Epic Fury commenced? Has he done so “regularly” since?

Of course he didn’t/hasn’t. He’s in charge. He’s bold. He gets things done.

Even if they’re not being done particularly well.

So how is the war working out for Americans?

One example. On July 9 AAA released this:“Gas prices are going up again, as the future of the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran remains uncertain. The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline went up 5 cents overnight to $3.84 after steadily dropping since late May.”

It is worth noting the average price of a gallon of gas one year earlier was $3.16 per gallon.

So gas on the 9^th was 21.5% higher than it was a year earlier. Even though gas had been going down since late May, it was still significantly more expensive than it was prior to Operation Epic Fury. Or said another way: Americans have been paying more for gasoline for 4.5 months.

Remember when Trump said in April “The gas will go down as soon as the war’s over. It’ll drop like a rock”? Yes, there was a decline but not a precipitous one. The war isn’t over. And now gas prices are rising.

The US inflation rate had been 2.4% before the war commenced. It is now 4.2%, a three-year high. Simply put: Pretty much everything costs more.

Those who got a 30-year mortgage pre-war paid an average 5.98%. Today someone who wants to buy a house will pay 6.44 to 6.49% for a 30-year mortgage.

Yes that “bold leadership,” that unshakeable fortitude, may have been something that people liked about Donald Trump but are now beginning to see how it is leading to shoddy performance across the board that is costing America plenty.

===

*They like to call it the “Department of War,” presumably because it has more than a whiff of testosterone. But legally it is still the Department of Defense because it takes an act of Congress to change the name. But why let something like that get in the way?

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings.

On Wednesday, July 1, during a game between the USA and Bosnia and Herzegovina, USA striker Folarin Balogun, who happens to be a US citizen through the 14^th Amendment, something which Trump is opposed to, received a red card for a foul. A red card means the player is ejected from the game and is suspended for at least the next game.

That suspension was troublesome for the US team as Balogun is the premier player for the squad. He had scored three goals in the World Cup tournament games he participated in, which may not sound like much, but that is a big number in the sport.

So without Balogun, things seemed dire for the US team, which was to go up against Belgium.

Ever the diplomat, Trump got on the phone with FIFA President Gianni Infantino . . . the man who happened to give Trump the FIFA Peace Prize.

Who cares if there are rules?

Balogun was reinstated.

Belgium won the game by a commanding 4 to 1.

Balogun didn’t score that single US goal.

One week later, our very own presidential diplomat was back at it, but this time more in what is ostensibly his wheelhouse.

While attending the NATO summit in Turkey, he said this about the Iranian people that the US is negotiating with to end the war in Iran: “I don’t want to deal with them anymore — they’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people.”

He went on to say:

· “it’s just a waste of time dealing with them”

· “They’re liars”

· “There’s something wrong with them”

· “They’re cuckoo”

When Infantino presented Trump with the “FIFA Peace Prize” at what was still then the Kennedy Center, renamed a couple weeks later before that switch was found to be breaking the rules, he said: “This is what we want from a leader. A leader that cares about the people. We want to live in a safe world, in a safe environment. We want to unite — that’s what we do here today, that’s what we’ll do at the World Cup, Mr. President.”

Yes, a leader who cares by insulting people that the country needs to come to an agreement with, unless, of course, he goes back to his “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” mode.

While he claims he is making it a “safe world” by going to war with Iran to keep it from developing a nuclear weapon, providing no evidence that that was, to use one of his metaphors, in the cards, odds are he is making the world less safe by treating the Iranians the way he is.

Let’s never forget that the 9/11 hijackers used only box cutters and pocket knives, not nuclear weapons, to cause the deaths and create the devastation in New York and Washington.

And let us also not forget that for the first and only time in the history of the NATO alliance Article 5 was invoked on behalf of the US. That part of the organization’s treaty says an attack on one NATO member is considered an attack on all. These are rules people abide by.

So Trump goes to the NATO summit and says:

“Greenland is very important for the US, but it’s not important for Denmark,” again threatening the sovereign territory of a US ally.

It would be better for all of us if this “FIFA Peace Prize” winner stuck to soccer.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, where he writes primarily for the right (conservative) column.

Really? And why that might be this case?

Then 14 more sentences in:“And tonight our country is stronger, freer, richer, safer and prouder than ever before.”

Undoubtedly his speechwriters crafted those lines for an audience of one, not for an audience of the ages. This speech, which marks an important moment in all of history, won’t be included in one of those compilations of Great American Speeches along with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” — you know, speeches that are aspirational.

Trump’s speech writers must have been a bit flummoxed when he quickly went off script, making a meteorological observation. He went from talking about the signers of the Declaration of Independence to: “And this is an evening for the ages. I believe this is something very special.”

OK.

But then: “This is bigger than if we didn’t’ have the lightning blaring. We had lightning blaring. But this is bigger, little more inconvenient. But it’s bigger, I think, in its own way it’s more beautiful.”

Perhaps he was channeling Maya Angelou or Amanda Gorman with his “lightning blaring,” doing a poetic turn of phrase. Not flashing or crackling. Blaring.

Well, probably neither of those poets. Maybe something from Lee Greenwood.

But what is “This” “bigger than,” “more beautiful” than?

Never mind.

He moved on to showing famous flags, perhaps trying to appeal to the Sheldon Cooper contingent. Trump talked about the British surrender at Yorktown and then said: “Ever since, the entire world has been on notice that Americans will never let anyone take our freedom away. Won’t happen. And all these talks from the communists, they haven’t got a chance. We don’t want communists in our country. Never worked. And it never will work.”

Now, most of the world — not the entire world, but the better part of it — need not be put “on notice that Americans will never let anyone take our freedom away.” Those countries were once considered our allies.

Arguably the only country that might like to take the US down is Russia (we buy too much stuff from China for it to be them), but rather than show resistance to Vladimir Putin, whose stated goal is to reestablish a Great Russian Empire, by providing full support to the Ukrainians who want to preserve their freedom, Trump is apparently pro-Putin by his inactions.

Then before looking at the ideology of “the communists,” it is worth looking at this: “We don’t want communists in our country. Never worked.”

Does he think that there were communists in our country who did take freedom away but not effectively (“Never worked”)? After all, for it to have had the chance of working, it needed to exist. Is he, perhaps, channeling Joe McCarthy?

True conservatives believe in free markets, open trade. You won’t find that in Russia or North Korea. Trump has openly stated that he expects other countries to pay for the ability to sell products in the US. In other words, not an open market.

So what is his economic approach more like? Seems like North Korea.

Communist governments control all the means of communication and production.

Socialist governments own pieces, not all, of the same.

He is likely referring to socialists, not communists. But “communist” sounds more evil, at least to someone of his generation.

But it turns out Trump has things in common with socialists.

Take the means of communication. Notice how the Trump Administration has sued or put under investigation everything from The New York Times to The View. Why? Because they don’t tow his party line. (Really: Whoopi Goldberg is a threat to the nation?)

Yes, trying to control the media is socialist.

U.S. Steel (just the name of the company, nothing to do with the government) had been in decline for some time. But Nippon Steel (just the name of the company, nothing to do with the Japanese government) wanted to buy it.

Nippon Steel offered a 40% premium over the then-existing share price of U.S. Steel. It guaranteed U.S. Steel would operate as a wholly owned subsidiary and as such maintain its corporate identity and even have its headquarters in Pittsburgh. It committed to making a $1.4-billion investment in the facilities of U.S. Steel to make them competitive (which they weren’t).

But then, the Trump Administration became involved. Rather than having Nippon Steel just make guarantees, the US government demanded a “golden share” in the acquired company that gives the president, or one of his designates, control over what Nippon Steel does with the company it purchased.

Sounds like socialism.

You may recall the CHIPS Act passed under the Biden Administration. The objective is to provide support to the US semiconductor industry by awarding grants to US companies engaged in that industry.

Yet last August, Trump decided that rather than providing a grant to Intel, he would demand an equity investment in Intel, which makes the US government the single biggest shareholder in the company.

Yes, a socialist approach.

Now Trump can’t make a speech without a swerve into Festivus.

“After 250 years, unlike so many others in the world, in this country we have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal justice under the law, although I wasn’t treated that well. But we won’t get into that.”

For those of you who have left your rhetoric books behind, that “I won’t get into that” is an example of apophasis. Sort of like the classic “I’m not one to gossip, but. . . .”

That was followed by: “And the right to keep and bear arms. And for the almost six years that I was president, I guarded very, very powerfully your Second Amendment. And they didn’t do a thing to it. And it was not easy. But we guard your Second Amendment.”

Guarded it from whom? And who are “they”? Communists? How often after children and other innocent people are gunned down do we hear more about “thoughts and prayers” than repealing the Second Amendment?

Trump lauds heroic Congressional Medal of Honor winner retired Colonel Parris Davis.

And can’t help but add: “Great man. He looks better than I do.”

Yes, it is always about him.

(A few days earlier, while making remarks at the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, Trump said: “Except for Arthur and Douglas MacArthur . . . they’re the only father and son pair to receive our nation’s highest military award for courage above and beyond the call of duty. Now, as I see my two beautiful sons sitting there, I think I’m going to give one to myself, one to them, and we’ll have a threesome.”

The highest military award is the Medal of Honor.

The comment is described as being a joke.

The Medal of Honor is not something anyone — president or otherwise — jokes about. But there you have it. Trump did not serve in the military. Eric Trump did not serve in the military. Donald Trump, Jr., did not serve in the military.

(Yes, a veritable laff riot.)

Returning to confusion: “We had the American dream. We never had the American dream, however, like we have it right now. The American dream is back.”

Where did it go?

He returns to the power theme — thanks to him: “Our rise to being the world’s strongest and most powerful nation was no accident of history. We rebuilt our military in my first term and we use it a little bit in our actually, I should say third term, but I won’t do that because I don’t want any controversy.”

A few minutes earlier he cited “the most righteous pollical document ever conceived. It’s called the Constitution of the United States.”

If he was as knowledgeable about it as he probably thinks he is, he would know the 22^nd Amendment to the Constitution says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

So even if he wasn’t lying about losing to Joe Biden, the third would be impossible. At least for those who abide by the laws of the United States.

Then there’s this: “You look at Venezuela, you look at Iran. We wiped it out, wiped out their military. Americans crossed the Great Plains, scaled the Rockies.”

So somehow the military activities undertaken in the 21^st century are in some way related to the civilian migration that occurred in the 19^th?

Further on in his flag demonstrations he noted one that flew on a naval vessel back in 1898 after the US Navy sank the Spanish Pacific squadron at the Battle of Manila Bay. That, of course, serves as a segue to: “Much like our recent history by sinking the entire Iranian Navy, 159 ships to the bottom of the sea, all done in just a moment’s time, happened very quickly.”

Once again, he is putting a false narrative to his advantage.

The Battle of Manila Bay was part of the Spanish-American War. That war lasted three months, three weeks, and one day. And realize this was when there were no airplanes and the naval vessels had steam engines that had a top speed of about 20 mph, so getting anywhere took a lot longer than is the case today.

The Iran War, from the start of military action in February to the memorandum of understanding in June lasted four months and seven days — and arguably it is still running.

Seems like William McKinley did a better job than Trump.

Trump said: “Americans won the West. . . . Because America is a nation of winners. And today our country is winning again. And we’re winning like never before.”

What it is that we are supposed to be winning is never clarified in that speech or anywhere else.

That kicks into: “America is back and we want to keep America great. And we will do so by approving the Save America Act. . . . And you won’t have cheating on the elections anymore.”

Interesting how the speech that should be about the greatness and accomplishments of the United States over the past 250 years gets a contemporary political angle inserted.

And isn’t the implication of “And you won’t have cheating on the elections anymore” that there was cheating on the elections and therefore some of those who were elected really weren’t? How does that make America look? Of course, given that even the Cyber Ninjas couldn’t find cheating in the 2020 presidential election doesn’t matter in Trump’s distorted view of the polity.

Time marched on.

But ideas didn’t really go anywhere, as after talking about how “Americans stood against the evil of communism in the Cold War” he advanced to: “America will never be a communist country. Won’t happen. Communism is a loser, and it always will be. The communist system is the opposite of the American system, and the communist system has never worked. . . . We like to stop a threat like that immediately and before it begins. It’s like a cancer. You got to cut it out. You got to cut it out fast.”

Where are all of these communists he’s worried about?

And what sense does this make: “We like to stop a threat like that immediately and before it begins”?

Let’s assume there is a threat. How do you stop something “before it begins”?

Oncologists can’t cut out cancer that isn’t there.

He shows a flag from Checkpoint Charlie, which he describes as a “very famous place on the Berlin Wall where American freedom finally brought communism crashing down to an end.”

Well, one could quibble that Checkpoint Charlie was at the Berlin Wall (about 20 feet away) not on it. But this notion that “American freedom finally brought communism crashing down” doesn’t given credit to Mikhail Gorbachev (Soviet and then Russian leader from 1985-1991), who initiated glasnost and perestroika; the fact that in 1989 Hungary opened its border fences with Austria, which had many East Germans taking advantage of; and the fact that East Germany was bankrupt, so that was a bit of a problem. And let’s not forget Pope John Paul II, who repeatedly talked of reconciliation between the East and the West. (Karol Józef Wojtyła, incidentally, grew up under communism so he spoke from reality, not fantasy.) But why give any credit to anyone else, even if they deserve it?

But that allowed Trump to go on to: “The Stars and Stripes cast the hammer and sickle into oblivion before, and we will do it again if necessary. I don’t think it’s going to be necessary. I think people have learned. They learned what to do and how to handle it.”

The hammer and sickle were put on the national Soviet flag in 1923. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

But presumably Trump is not talking about the non-existent Soviet threat to the Stars and Stripes but the non-existent threat of non-existent communists living in American communities from sea to shining sea. (Be afraid. Be very afraid. Yes, I’ve watched The Americans too, so I am well up on sleeper agents, but I don’t think Trump is referring to them as much as he is colleagues of Zohran Mamdani.)

“We were losing to China and Russia in space. And now we’re leading them by giant steps.”

Well, especially as regards China, those “giant steps” aren’t. Yes, earlier this year the US sent the Artemis II astronauts around to the dark side of the Moon.

In 2019 a Chinese spacecraft landed on the far side of the moon. Then in 2024 China landed a spacecraft on the dark-side surface and had it bring back lunar samples. Clearly, they’re not slouches in this whole space exploration undertaking.

It should be noted that the administration tried to cut the NASA budget by some 24% first for fiscal 2026 and then again for fiscal 2027. Congress pushed back on both and won.

Somehow Trump championing space rings hollow.

So, we get to the peroration.

“We have $19.2 trillion being invested in our country, which is six times more than ever happened before.”

It never happened before because it isn’t happening now. According to the official “Major Investment Announcements” page on the White House website, as of July 5, 2026 “Total U.S. and Foreign Investments: $10.6 Trillion.”

Even if all the figures on that page are accurate, $8.6 trillion is a big miss.

“We’re building more factories in the United States than ever before.”

No, we’re not. Turns out that in 2024 -- yes, we’re talking the Biden Era here — factory construction was at a 40-year high.

And manufacturing employment in the US was higher in 2024 than it is in 2026. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics “June 2026 Employment Situation Summary,” there has been a net loss of 75,000 manufacturing jobs since the beginning of 2025.

Flat rhetoric and flat falsehoods.

Yes, that’s America 250 Freedom 250.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, where he writes primarily for the right column.

A contributing pundit for our left column warns that even if Democrats prevail in the midterms and then fail to flood Capitol Hill with convictions, ethics standards, new voting rights laws and anti-corruption legislation, America’s democracy won’t be worth saving anyway.

Both are on the current front page of The Hustings. If you haven’t seen it yet, let me explain how it works. We run news/news aggregate with context and analysis in the center column.

Comments by contributing pundits and citizen pundits (readers) who identify as moderate conservative to MAGA and anywhere in-between are published in the right column.

Comments by contributing pundits and citizen pundits who identify as moderate liberal to progressive and anywhere in-between are published in the left column.

It’s the political horseshoe without the violent/racist/anti-democratic extremist fringes.

You shouldn’t be left to read only opinions from those you agree with, in echo chambers or silos. You shouldn’t have to worry about extremists and conspiracy theorists from the left or right who try to distract you and draw you into their propaganda chambers.

You should not be exposed to false information. We endeavor to aggregate news from such reliable sources as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Politico, Axios, Congressional Quarterly’s Roll Call, The Hill and the like for the center column, and we add our own reportage whenever we can (State of the Union addresses and televised debates, for example).

This is so you can make up your mind on political news and issues and when so inclined, comment in an email to editors@thehustings.news.

In case you’re waiting for a slogan, here it is: We’re like X-Twitter but without the made-up facts, racism, harassment, echo chambers or trillionaire ownership.

This Independence Day weekend’s right column contains contributing pundits’ comments from a never-Trump conservative, a no-longer MAGA conservative and a pro-MAGA conservative. The left column, plus The Gray Area contains contributing pundits’ comments from moderates to progressives.

There is still time for you to add your thoughts about the condition of and future for American democracy in time for inclusion on our July 4^th weekend page. Simply email your comments to editors@thehustings.news, and please indicate whether you lean right or left (regardless of your position on the specific issue).

Lassa is founding editor of The Hustings.

Perhaps President Donald J., and/or Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, White House son-in-law Jared Kushner, Barron’s namesake Barron? (What about Tiffany’s namesake Tiffany?)

Perhaps combined, their net worth may one day come close to matching the net worth of the world’s richest lifeform, Elon Musk, if they can exponentially build on the rate of growth of the first year of President Trump’s second term in the White House.

While Trump reportedly lost money while in office his first term, he made more than $3 billion during the first year of his second term, Forbes magazine reported, September 9, 2025. That was enough to propel Trump from #319 of richest individuals on the Forbes 400, self-described as the “definitive list of America’s richest people” in 2024 to number 201 in 2025.

The list came more than nine months before President Trump released his 2025 financial disclosure, which revealed that he, or at least the Trump Organization, earned more than $1.2 billion alone off transactions related to the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto business. The Witkoff family, including Trump White House envoy on foreign relations matters Steve, partners with the Trump family in World Liberty Financial, according to The Hill.

Trump’s 927-page disclosure to the US Office of Government Ethics (Joe Biden’s disclosure in the second year of his presidency was 11 pages, according to NPR) shows $2 billion in various earnings for the president and his family, including from real estate deals in 2025.

You might notice that the $2 billion reported in the president’s ethics disclosure is $1 billion less than Forbes estimated he added by last September for a net worth of $7.3 billion. The magazine did not cover a January 1 to December 31 fiscal year, but rather September 2024 to August 31, 2025, and so it’s not clear how much of that $2 billion in earnings disclosed was added after his January 20, 2025 inauguration.

How is Trump going to become the next Elon Musk?

Even if the other five or six Trumps and in-laws listed in the opening paragraph, plus the Witkoff family, are each worth $7 billion or $8 billion, that’s a total of roughly $64 billion, which is a bit more than one-fifth what Musk reportedly lost when the value of his 42% of SpaceX shares fell from its post-initial public offering price spike a month ago.

Forbes reports that Musk’s net worth is about $1.1 trillion, down from about $1.4 trillion, counting his large minority ownership of SpaceX and smaller, 20% stake in Tesla. In any event, he’s the world’s first trillionaire.

One factoid that has stuck in my memory for at least 1 billion seconds of my life is that it takes 32 years for a human to live for his, her, their first 1 billion seconds.

One trillion equals 1,000 billion, so it would take 32,000 years to live your first 1 trillion seconds (not that Silicon Valley’s tech-oligarch bros aren’t trying).

The Musk who would be king had his first shot at the job when Trump essentially made him co-president last year as appointed chainsaw-meister leading the Department of Government Efficiency.

By late spring of 2025, the White House turned out to be too small to contain both Trump and Musk, and it wasn’t too farfetched to think the DOGE chief, as he was pouring millions of dollars into local and state elections such as the race for a pivotal Wisconsin supreme court seat, might consider a run for president in 2028.

Musk is ineligible to run for president because he is a South African native, of course, but that constitutional rule didn’t stop Republicans in the pre-Tea Party ‘00s from talking about an amendment that would have allowed then-California Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger (R), native of Austria, from running for the GOP nomination.

Democrats weren’t above making such a move, either. More recently, there was talk of carving out some sort of exception for Canada native Jennifer Granholm, governor of Michigan from 2003-2011 and later President Biden’s Energy secretary.

To be clear, no such changes or exceptions ever were raised for Musk, even as he and Trump quickly but quietly made up after last summer’s schism.

It wouldn’t be enough for Musk, who wants to be King of the World. As world’s first trillionaire, separating him from other tech-oligarch bros like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and, especially, Open AI nemesis Sam Altman, Musk probably metaphorically wears the crown already.

King Musk’s greatest goal is to colonize Mars. Like Bezos, he considers empathy an unproductive human quality and believes that what his corporate endeavors produce for society is far more useful for mankind than any modicum of philanthropy.

“If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they are philanthropy,” Musk said recently, referring to SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and The Boring Company, as quoted in the Daily Mail (UK).

Musk has touted the Grok AI robots soon to be assembled in Tesla’s factory near Austin, Texas, as potentially the most profitable product of any kind, of all time because eventually, every human on Earth will possess one. Really.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Trump has stopped taunting the press and enticing MAGA about whether he might run for a third term. The president is pressing Senate Republicans to kill the filibuster so Congress can pass his SAVE Act to keep a potential Democratic House majority from impeaching him.

But what happens after November 3? Seems like Trump sees the future of his power coming not so much from the White House, but in his family building as much wealth as it can.

Watch your back, King Elon.

Lassa is founding editor of The Hustings.

Let’s not forget Trump’s famous 2018 observation: “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening. Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.”

“Just stick with us.”

And there are plenty who do, especially those who carry his water, like the junior senator from Kansas, Roger Marshall, a Republican who was on NBC’s Meet the Press on June 28.

After making some fanciful claims about the war in Iran, Marshall said to substitute host Ryan Nobles (who deserves that host chair full-time): “I’m concerned about the cost of living right now. Under Joe Biden we saw the cost of housing, health care, childcare all go up 50% and we’re still reeling from that, but we are getting back in the game again, America is truly back, real wages are outpacing inflation right now.”

First of all, Donald Trump has been president for 523 days as of June 28, so somehow harping about Joe Biden is rather sad. At what point is it accepted that it is Trump’s economy?

Then there is that claim about the costs of housing, health care and childcare all going up 50%.

While the costs of those three things did go up from January 2021 to January 2025, the increases were far from 50% according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Housing was up 22%; health care 12% and childcare 25%.

Surely looks like Marshall is consulting something else.

And there is one thing that is readily forgotten regarding one of the reasons why there were those increases. It was something that Donald Trump claimed would “just go away”: COVID.

Given everything from disrupted supply chains to lockdowns it is surprising those increases weren’t on the order of 50%.

But they weren’t.

Nobles pointed out to Marshal that real wages aren’t outpacing inflation right now.

Nobles didn’t say it, but the inflation rate for the 12 months ending May 2026 is 4.2% and annual wage growth 3.7%. Which means earnings are down -0.7%.

That inflation number, by the way, is a three-year high.

Marshall: “Well, Ryan, again to push back, I think real wages are up since President Trump became president. We do have a little blip going on right now, but as the gasoline prices come down inflation’s gonna come down and wages will get back up.”

If I said the Moon is made of green cheese, that doesn’t make it so.

The fact is while there was wage growth initially, that oh-so-clever businessman has managed to flip that scenario and now inflation is higher.

Let’s talk about that “blip” and gasoline.

Before the war in Iran started, according to AAA, the US average retail price of a gallon of gas was $2.98.

For more than 120 days Americans have been paying more for gasoline than they did before the Iran war started — some 120 days ago, or 23% of Trump’s time in office.

Somehow 17 weeks — or about a third of a year — doesn’t seem like a “blip.”

And while gas prices are decreasing, they are still high. Using AAA’s $2.98 pre-war cost and its current national average of $3.86, gas now is still 30% higher than it was back at the end of February.

Given these unsubstantiated claims put out on a national platform, one might recommend: “don’t believe the crap you see from these people.”

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, where his columns appear primarily in the right (conservative) column.

Or, to put it more fundamentally, say things that just aren’t true in the sense that most people consider veracity.

For example, JD Vance said after arriving in Switzerland for talks with the Iranians that the Strait of Hormuz was open, even though the Iranians said it was closed. Now it may be that the US Navy isn’t keeping the passage shut, which could mean to Vance that it is open, but if the Iranian government says it is closed, do you think that if you were the captain of a giant oil tanker you’d want to risk going through? If you were the owner — or the insurer — of a tanker would you give sailing orders to the captain?

One of the consequences of the war is that the Iranians now know that they have a chokehold on the important passage.

Donald Trump told Fox News on Sunday that he had spoken to Iranian officials and told them, “You close it and you won’t have a country.”

Clearly, deft negotiating tactics, rolling out with the threats of obliteration.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Fox News Sunday, “What we’re demonstrating to the Iranians is we can have [a] flow of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz with or without them.”

Wright said that in the previous 24 hours 67 ships, guarded by US military assets, made it through the strait.

Which could be true.

But there are several things to keep in mind.

Prior to the war, ships didn’t need the US Navy to make it through the Strait.

Presumably there are limited naval resources that can be deployed to escort ships, so this is going to be a slow — and expensive to US taxpayers — undertaking.

What’s more — or actually less — 67 is about half the number of ships that passed through the Strait on average in a given 24-hour period before the war.

And at present, according to Lloyd’s List, the venerable British journal that collects such information, there are as many as 600 commercial vessels that are stuck inside the Persian Gulf.

So if it is 67 in 24 hours, that’s about three ships per hour. If there are 500 left in the Gulf, this means it would be seven 24-hour days to get them through. And realize that these are vessels that are stuck there, and before the war there was regular passage in and out, so just getting a handful of ships through isn’t much of an advantage. A start, sure, but not some sort of open passage — especially as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps dumped mines into the Strait.

Then there’s this from Senator Linsey Graham on CBS News’ Face the Nation Sunday.

While he had been critical when the Memorandum of Understanding was released, Graham since has slid back to his supine position, telling host Margaret Brennan, “I spent four-and-a-half hours with President Trump Friday.” Whoa! He’s quite the guy being able to spend so much time with his liege lord.

As you may or may not know, Graham received his law degree in 1981 and was in the US Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps for 33 years (6.5 years in active duty; 6 in the Air National Guard; 20 Air Force Reserve).

Graham also said this on Face the Nation:

“If this deal fails, President Trump is going to take the Strait of Hormuz over by force. The United States will control the Strait of Hormuz. We’ll charge a fee for all those who go through to pay for the operation.”

The whole notion of taking over the Strait “by force” aside (presumably this would require troops on the ground), there’s that “We’ll charge a fee for all those who go through.”

As an attorney dealing at levels that those lawyers who run constant TV commercials never experience you’d think Graham would know a little something about the law, and while he was in the Air Force, and not the Navy, you’d think his long legislative career would have made him familiar with maritime law, like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which explicitly states there can be no tolls for passage in international straits like Hormuz.

Oh, but he calls it a “fee.” Perhaps that’s something to make up for the ~$300,000 per day it costs to operate a naval destroyer.

When you think of what it means for the Strait to be “open,” chances are you don’t think of the need for escort ships of any sort.

But Donald Trump doesn’t dance around the finer points of language.

On June 20 he put this on his social media platform:

“There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired, unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not be completed, for services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement of costs. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!! President DJT”

That’s right, NO TOLLS “unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America. . .for services retendered at the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present and future reimbursement of costs.”

Even NO apparently doesn’t mean NO in Trump World. Until it does, which is when he says it does.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings.

That was Donald Trump during a press conference on June 16 at Évian-les-Bains, France.

He noted there need be no hurry to get the nuclear material he was referring to because there are satellites with “very powerful cameras” keeping watch on the Iranian nuclear sites — which, of course, he noted are all under rubble. Should the Iranians make a move, then additional action will be taken.

But in the meantime, “when all is calm,” he said, the nuclear material will be taken.

(How? Well, that’s not clear.)

Think about this for a moment.

Trump is absolutely lackadaisical about the nuclear material, yet from the start throughout most of the war he kept making it sound like the Iranians were hell-bent on producing a bomb that was going to be lobbed to a location near you.

There he was, essentially saying like an adolescent, “whenever.”

During his June 17 press conference, he said, “If we didn’t do this deal, we could have dropped more bombs for another three weeks, two to four weeks.” He also noted several times that if the Iranians don’t do what he wants them to do, behave the way he thinks he should, the bombing will resume, he’ll bomb them.

Still, if he’d continued the bombing “you would never have the Hormuz Strait open. You would never have success; your market would have, instead of going up at levels that nobody’s ever seen before, would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before.”

Success, apparently, is having the Strait of Hormuz open, something that was never closed until Trump started the war. Now he is positioning that as some sort of wonderful success.

He broke it. He claims to have fixed it. And that’s something special?

As for the market, consider this: On March 2, the first Monday after Operation Epic Fury began, the S&P 500 was at 6,881. It began a decline to March 28, when it reached 6,343. It didn’t get back to 6,881 until April 13.

In other words, somebodies have lost money in the market for roughly a month and a half. Yet those losses are never mentioned.

Yes, on June 17 the S&P 500 closed at 7,420, but where would it have been had there not been this pointless war? Isn’t in conceivable that it could be much higher?

Trump boasts about oil prices going down. But why did they go up?

Because of a war whose mission now seems to be the stuff of a shrug.

Consider this from the memorandum of understanding:

“8. The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.”

Reaffirms? The “re” indicates that this is confirming again something that has already been said. So in other words, Iran already said it. What did Trump accomplish?

Less than nothing.

And as 8 leads to 9:

“9. Pending the final deal, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree to maintain the status quo. The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions and will not deploy additional forces in the region.”

“Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program”?

It doesn’t take an expert in Latin to know that “status quo” means it is going to be what it was.

So what was accomplished?

How many kids didn’t get a prom dress because of the prices driven up by the war — driven up on top of the tariff price increases?

How many parents had to cut back on that high school graduation gift because of the inflated price of gas, gas needed simply to get to work?

“We’re in no rush”?

What has he accomplished, not only for what seems to matter to him first and foremost, his reputation, but for the American people?

Clearly, he thought that Iran would be like Venezuela. The US would sweep in, take care of business, and declare victory. Trump would be triumphant, doing something none of those previous weak, stupid presidents could accomplish.

Instead, he did nothing but strengthen the Iranian hand, which raises the obvious question: Are you better off today than you were February 27, 2026?

Macaulay is pundit-at-large forThe Hustings.