A Blaze media propagandist from Iowa, Steve Deace, had a rant yesterday about how badly the Iran War is endangering GOP candidates in his state; it attracted millions of views on Xitter.
It started by revealing that, “Iowa House Republicans were informed by their own pollsters that if you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006.”
That’s actually not surprising. Both Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks (those who would be described as underwater here) are among the Republicans whose districts are in play, and both flip-flopped to vote against the Iran War last week. After confessing he thought about withholding this news, Deace instead ranted for four paragraphs stating:
Whatever we’re doing or not doing in Iran/Hormuz has become a 2020 Covid lockdown level of political albatross. This is approaching TARP bailout levels of unpopular in my home state. We are risking what’s left of the Trump presidency on this, because if Democrats take control the legislative branch the Trump domestic agenda we all voted for will largely cease between what a Democrat Congress will do and the courts have already been doing. Not to mention what it will cost individual states like my own, which we have worked so hard to make so red these last 20 years (with Trump’s help).
This whatever/kinda/sorta/but not really war has become an existential misuse of political capital. Many of us never thought it was worth it, and more and more it appears voters agree. We have to save our own country and our own way of life first before we can save anyone else. We have to save America before we can save the world. If a plane is endangered, you are told to put on your mask first otherwise you’re of no use to help save anyone else.
I desperately want us to win. I desperately want this presidency to fulfill all the great promise it had coming out of the 2024 election. But whatever this currently is, isn’t it. We don’t have to just sit here and take the L. It doesn’t have to end this way. We can still win. There’s plenty of ammunition to hammer the Democrats with.
We need the president out on the stump asap. We need better and way more aggressive messaging. Stop running fake and gay ads about how often so-and-so shows up for votes, and instead mercilessly hammer Democrats on the wickedness they’re voting for. Articulate specifically what the mission/victory is in Iran/Hormuz, because out here in the cheap seats it feels like another Middle East War quagmire regular folks are paying for on both ends all over again.
I confess I, like a great many people on both sides of the aisle, am spending a too much time compulsively gobbling posts like this and poll results like over-buttered popcorn. Deace’s flopsweat gives the popcorn just the right amount of saltiness.
But I invite you to look closer at the illogic in Deace’s rant. The right spent 20 years making Iowa and much of the country red, and Trump came into his second term offering a lot of promises and with those promises wielding a great deal of political capital, and then he squandered all that by launching the Iran War for reasons that those “out here in the cheap seats” don’t understand and it has become as oppressive as the COVID lockdown.
Deace has a very fraught relationship with Trump here, though he avoids naming him in about four different places in one rant, even while demanding that Trump and his graveyard approval numbers hit the stump asap.
Poor Deace doesn’t think through why, after the two past failures he invoked — COVID lockdown and the bailout — he still believed Trump came in with political capital. Why he believed in Trump at all.
I’ll come back to Deace’s half-spoken sense of betrayal. Trump is scrambling to do some of what Deace wants, to find a message to address the demands of Republicans losing because of the Iran War (though he’s doing far less to address the demands of those losing because of Stephen Miller’s dragnet). Chief among them, at least this mid-week, is a heated fight to impose a diesel export ban.
Yahoo explains the basic rules of capitalism why this wouldn’t work.
While the idea could work in the US in theory, economists and oil market experts argue that such a ban could create more problems than solutions.
The first is free-market correction, Joe Brusuelas, chief economist of RSM US, wrote to clients on Wednesday. A ban intended to artificially lower distillate prices would lower revenues throughout the US energy industry, he argued. If that were to occur, he said, energy firms would likely rein in their production levels until prices reach a new equilibrium, thereby only displacing — instead of addressing — the price dynamics.
[snip]
The White House will also struggle to address the dislocated nature of diesel production in the US, said GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick de Haan.
The largest share of US diesel production occurs along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, the heart of the US refining complex, while shortages are emerging throughout the Northeast and West Coast. With overland pipelines already operating at or near full capacity, excess fuel supplies traveling from the Gulf to the coasts must be transported by water, adding time and expense.
[snip]
“Supplies leave because the world is paying more, not because politicians are forcing them to,” Gas Buddy’s de Haan wrote. “An export ban would shove that diesel back into a domestic market that’s already well supplied, risking refinery run cuts, while doing nothing about the global shortage that is actually the mechanism leading diesel prices to record levels.”
WSJ describes how the oil industry has mobilized to oppose a ban.
When the oil-and-gas industry heard President Trump back the idea of a ban on diesel exports, it pulled out the bazooka.
Shortly after Trump made his suggestion Tuesday, Mike Sommers, chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s top lobby, issued a statement condemning the move. He said restricting U.S. exports “would only compound the problem” of rising diesel costs. API also issued a press release on the dangers of an export ban.
“Restricting U.S. diesel exports would wreak havoc on fuel markets at home and abroad, destabilize refinery operations and deepen a global refining crisis already putting upward pressure on U.S. prices,” the group said.
Around the same time, a loose group of CEOs affiliated with API and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a trade group that represents refiners, sprang into action.
Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, Phillips 66 CEO Mark Lashier and other senior executives started calling their contacts in the administration to push back on the idea of a ban, according to people close to the situation. The executives have different relationships with different members of the administration and they made their discontent known.
Paul Krugman, in a post that also provides more economic lessons on why a diesel export ban would not work, predicts Trump will attempt it anyway because breaking contracts is what Trump does.
Now Trump is considering an export ban of American diesel in order to temporarily reduce domestic diesel prices. As of this morning, it’s unclear whether this will actually happen. But I think a diesel export ban is highly likely, and not just because it would be one of the few Hail Mary plays left for an epically corrupt president who must greatly fear the prospect of facing Democrats with subpoena power and criminal referrals.
Beyond that, a sudden ban on diesel exports would, in effect, be a broken promise — a de facto breach of multiple contracts. It would be a betrayal of energy companies that invested in refining capacity. More important, it would be a breach of trust with America’s allies, especially anyone who bought into Trump’s vision of an America-centered energy future.
And breaking trust, breaching contracts, is a very Trumpian thing to do. As a businessman, he was famous for stiffing contractors, refusing to pay them for their work or demanding that they settle for partial payment. His tariff policies involve, at their core, breaking decades’ worth of solemn international agreements. His track record on domestic policy has been one broken promise after another.
And Politico describes why Krugman may be right: Because inside the White House, Trump and his handlers are looking for something, anything, to maintain the con, to appear as if they are doing something.
Some GOP lawmakers, refining industry executives and even some administration officials are still trying to convince President Donald Trump that a ban would be a bad idea, one that could backfire by eventually raising prices for gasoline, jet fuel and other fuels, said people familiar with the discussions who were granted anonymity to describe internal White House communications.
But as high energy prices continue to bedevil Republican candidates going into tough midterm elections in less than seven weeks, Trump is inclined to announce a ban by the end of the week and consider any blowback “a December problem,” said one oil industry executive who has discussed the ban with senior White House officials.
“What has overpowered cooler heads [in the White House] is the absolutely, sky-is-falling, we-have-to-do-something concern about prices at the pump” faction, said this person, who was granted anonymity to discuss conversations with White House officials. “That camp has been swept aside by the political camp, which says, ‘dammit, something has to happen.’”
An oil exec quotes someone senior in the White House calling the fully expected unintended consequences of a diesel ban “a December problem,” a problem created by the need to salvage the election which he’ll deal with, whether or not Republicans win the election, in December.
There are a lot of other things being put off until after the election: a trade deal with China, funding government, strengthening the Epstein Transparency Act, impeaching Pete Hegseth.
December problems, all of them.
But it betrays the attitude with which Trump has approached the Iran War from the start — the most important quote from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book.
Tucker Carlson, the commentator who had emerged as another prominent skeptic of intervention on the right, had come to the Oval Office several times over the previous year to warn Mr. Trump that a war with Iran would destroy his presidency. A couple weeks before the war began, Mr. Trump, who had known Mr. Carlson for years, tried to reassure him over the phone. “I know you’re worried about it, but it’s going to be OK,” the president said. Mr. Carlson asked how he knew. “Because it always is,” Mr. Trump replied.
It’s going to be OK, because it always is. Whatever problems it causes — whatever turmoil it causes to the world economy and US empire? Those are December problems, a problem Trump will find a way to con himself out of once he gets there.
Though, in an interview released today with Steve Inskeep (after 26:00), Tucker corrects that. He claims that days before the war, after Carlson told Trump that Israel’s goals were to limit Iran, constrain the GCC, and get US bases out of the Middle East, Trump responded by saying, “In the end, we all die anyway.”
The US press seems to be forgetting that these Iran problems are not going to simply go away. Trump’s spring efforts to sustain the con, which largely consisted of draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, will soon create new problems. Scott Bessent’s efforts to tame the bond markets responding to this underlying inflation are beginning to fail too. Trump’s efforts — this time voiced by Marco Rubio, who this week got promoted to full-time National Security Adviser — to pretend that Trump’s son-in-law and developer buddy are negotiators of any competence continue to be treated far more seriously than they deserve; perhaps that is part of what mellowed the Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia, another of the things Trump seems to be putting off.
Maybe Trump thinks Putin’s G-20 visit in December will solve all of this, a final capitulation to the easiest way out of the disaster Trump created?
But none of this will provide the least little benefit for the US, whose loss of hegemony Americans have not yet begun to contemplate.
Poor Steven Deace wants to know, seven months in, why we’re at war, whether this is “another Middle East War quagmire regular folks are paying for on both ends all over again” And what the guy who seemingly forgets that both the lockdown and the bailout (and with it the fraud Trump is claiming to combat on the back end) were Trump’s implementation, last term’s effort to get through to December problems. And what he doesn’t understand is that’s all there ever is, the well-worn belief that “it’s going to be OK, because it always is.”
He’s just trying to sustain the con, Steve. And there’s a very good chance that, this time, the con fails us all.
The post “December problems:” The Iran War Is a Reality that Exists Outside Trump’s Attempt to Con the Election appeared first on emptywheel.