Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Tim Noah: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Reporter (voiceover): And what about people’s concern about gas prices? They’re seeing numbers that give them some heartburn and some heartache and it’s hard for a lot of people to figure out how they’re going to stomach this for much longer.
Sargent: Tim, that stuff about Trump’s great energy record is just made up. But that aside, that’s terrible spin. Wright admits this is hard for people and says, well, Trump knew this would undo his great achievement. Your thoughts?
Sargent: We are going to be in a situation where these prices are going to persist in a major way for weeks, if not months, right?
To undo the damage of that, it’s not going to happen overnight. And that’s going to be incredibly damaging to Trump. Remember that when Joe Biden was running for reelection, inflation came way down months before the election and inflation was still held against Biden in that election.
One U.S. official tells The Post that the Iranian leadership has gotten increasingly confident that they can outlast U.S. political will. Now again, Tim, even if this war ends in five minutes, these leaks are damning in two senses. First, because they badly undercut Trump’s public spin about how close to collapse Iran is. And second, because they show that a lot of insiders want the public to know that what Trump is saying to the public isn’t true. What do you make of all that?
The stock market seems to be the last entity in the United States to actually believe what Donald Trump says about the war being on the verge of being over. I don’t think anybody else believes him, but the stock market does. And it keeps surging every time there’s the vaguest hint that this war may end soon. Now, if it finally penetrates the stock market’s thick skull that this war isn’t going to end soon, we’re going to see the opposite reaction. We’re going to see stocks go down, and that always sends Trump into a panic—and the Iranians know that.
Tim, what would have to happen? What would the timeline have to be for prices—meaning both jet fuel and gasoline—to really come down before the elections to the degree that Republicans would need? Is that even possible?
Sargent: Well, one analyst of gas prices is even more pessimistic about this, telling Axios that gas prices are going to remain high even if the war ends. This analyst says that he expects it to take one to three months for prices to come down one third of where they’ve risen to. And then he says the next third might take three to six months, and we’d finally in this analysis get back to pre-war prices by late 2026 or early 2027—after the midterms.
Noah: This is literally a commodity that moves by ship. So it’s not like the internet, which is what we’re used to thinking of as commerce. Oil moves very slowly. It moves by ship, then it needs to be refined, and then it can be distributed as a final product. So that’s a process of months.
Noah: It’s a trap that he walked right into. Everybody told him he was walking into a trap. His advisors were saying, If you start a war with Iran, they will close the Strait of Hormuz. Analysts have been talking about this scenario for decades. But he had this delusion that he was able to win wars quickly from the air. And that was what he told himself about Iran. Everybody told him he was wrong. But he refused to believe them. He believes what he wants to believe. And now he really has seriously damaged Republicans’ midterm chances.
Sargent: The comparison with Venezuela is really interesting because Donald Trump himself has said publicly that he expects the Iran situation to go the same way the quick in-and-out in Venezuela did. And, you know, that’s just such a crazy way to think about the situation because Iran is a country of 90 million people, and for all sorts of deep cultural reasons and important geographic facts about geography that can’t be just altered with Trump’s magical lying powers—all these things were just going to conspire to make this much harder than Venezuela was. And he wouldn’t hear of it. He just wouldn’t.
Sargent: And one of those presidents actually painstakingly negotiated a very complicated peace deal that will actually prove, I believe, to be better than whatever Trump emerges with at the end of the day. I’m talking, of course, about the Obama nuclear deal.
Sargent: In fact, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just said the other day that our aims have been achieved, the aims of the war have been achieved. It’s just absolutely preposterous, just nonstop bullshit from them in every way. They’ve just told us so many different versions of what their end game or their end goals were. And there’s just no way that they actually achieved their war aims. There’s no way to spin that.
Sargent: Absolutely. Well, just to take the larger view here, it seems like a lot of what we’re seeing is really structurally going to screw over Trump’s own constituencies. Let me just go through the list here. Rural and exurban Americans drive more, so they’re going to be paying more for gas. Farmers are getting hit by rising fertilizer prices and other higher costs. The tariffs hit a lot of lower-income consumers, which means a whole lot of Trump voters.
Noah: No, I think that’s stating it very well. The only caution I would advise is that Donald Trump ran in 2024 having served as president during a terrible, terrible public health crisis that he made considerably worse, arguably lost the 2020 election because of that. And then in 2024 was held harmless for COVID.
Sargent: That’s absolutely crazy. That was one of the greatest public policy debacles ever—certainly one of the biggest ones in modern times.
Sargent: So, Tim, just unspool this for us. Let’s say the war ends, I don’t know, in a week or in a month. What happens over the next six months?
But for a long time, it was going downward very slowly. Now it’s going downward a bit more quickly. And I just don’t see how that doesn’t make trouble for the Republicans if they have Trump with a considerably lower approval rating than he has now.
But do you think, even if the war ends in, I don’t know, days or a week, you don’t think he gets a bump? How do you see it playing out?
Sargent: Yeah, it looks to me like there is just such an enormous pileup of problems that it’s very hard for him to get out from under all of it. The House looks like it’s basically gone for Republicans unless they can gerrymander like 20 states, although I doubt that.
Noah: Thank you, Greg.
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