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The Felon Is Trapped in His Self-Created Energy Crisis

The price of Brent crude oil remains well over $100/barrel, the Saudi east-west pipeline is damaged and my be out of operation for months, Iran and its Houthi allies control two straits critical to the movement of oil from the Middle East, diesel fuel cost is at a record high - something that will push many other cost to rise, including groceries and building materials - and inflation is up with the prospect of the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates that will make mortgage rates increase.  It's an economic mess that has one common thread: the Felon's poorly planned war of choice against Iran is fueling most of it. Add in the Felon's tariffs and trade wars and the result is that rather than lowering costs "on day one" the Felon has made almost everything more expensive and there is no exit from the Iran war that isn't a de facto defeat for the USA. The Felon's only response is to lie and say the war and gas prices will come down shortly after the mid-term elections.  To anyone stupid enough to believe the Felon, I have some ocean front property in Nevada for them. A piece at Salon looks at the Felon's self-created debacle from which he has no exit. Indeed, expect the Iranians to continue to take actions to keep oil prices soaring as the Felon's lies to the American public get more desperate and far fetched.  Here are excerpts:

The first day of [the Felon's] Donald Trump’s second term was a national emergency, at least according to the president himself. On Jan. 20, 2025, he declared a “national energy emergency,” pledging to tap into America’s oil and gas reserves. As Salon reported at the time, experts said it was a false alarm. At the time, the U.S. was doing fine with its fossil fuel production. The bigger problem, one that Trump continues to deny, centers on curbing emissions and addressing our planet’s overheating problem. 

Roughly 18 months later, things have clearly changed. The nation is steeped in an energy crisis of Trump’s own making, largely due to his tariff agenda and war of choice with Iran. Despite a flurry of vague timelines and lofty promises, it doesn’t seem like we’ll be out of the woods any time soon. Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and the recent announcement that the U.S. will take control of the country’s oil fields to the tune of some 65 billion barrels, smacks of desperation. Yes, ExxonMobil has agreed to go along with the theft, but it may be more lip service to the president, as extracting oil from Venezuela would be extremely costly and risky compared to drilling domestically. At any rate, it will be a long time before we see the effects of those moves on gas prices, ethical and environmental ramifications aside.

Meanwhile, Trump keeps making promises that require more than a little faith. On Wednesday, right before he jetted off to his sad little ego-boosting convention in Dallas, the president stopped to talk to reporters at Joint Base Andrews. They asked him about the still soaring price of oil and a timeline for the end of the Iran war. First, he claimed that the U.S. is winning the war, that Iran is in shambles and its economy had all but collapsed, and that the American military even has control over the Strait of Hormuz. The worst will be over, he said, immediately after the November midterm elections. Or maybe a bit later than that.

Don’t get hung up on the timeline, he added. It’ll happen when it happens! Just trust me and vote Republican. That’s his pitch, anyway. 

The last time gas was $2 a gallon was during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for oil was destroyed because many people were staying home to avoid spreading a deadly virus. I can still remember how blue the skies in California seemed during that brief interlude.

[The Felon’s] only gotten richer as gas prices have jumped, thanks to his investments in the industry. A recent report from Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee found that “President Trump saw his wealth go up by as much as $15.5 million just through stocks he owned in oil and gas companies at the end of 2025.”

It may not surprise you that Trump’s prediction about a sudden drop in gas prices seems unlikely. This week, oil came in at slightly over $104 a barrel, the highest it’s been since July, and on Thursday, diesel hit an average of $6 a gallon — for the first time ever. It goes without saying that the ripple effects this will have on shipping and agriculture, and thus food prices, will be profound.

The immediate follow up question was about whether or not there will be a new “nuclear deal” with Iran, something Energy Secretary Chris Wright said earlier this week might not happen any time soon, if at all. “There may not be a nuclear agreement. It may be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. An agreement may await a next administration in Iran. We simply don’t know that,” he told ABC News on Sunday.

But Trump claimed he’d be “doing much more than a nuclear deal,” before immediately admitting that he wasn’t looking to negotiate at the moment. “Originally, I wanted to make a deal,” he said. “We’re so far down the line they have very little country left right now, so we’re not looking for it. Yes, a negotiation could possibly happen but it’s not something we’re looking at. This war will end immediately after our election.”

Isn’t that convenient? Both the Iran war and high gas prices are extremely unpopular among all voters, which virtually all political analysts predict could swing votes in favor of Democrats. Trump’s blustering response to all this is to keep calm and vote MAGA.

What we have here might be an example of the Tinkerbell effect, named for the “Peter Pan” character who could be resurrected from death by audience participation, i.e. belief in fairies. . . . . I don’t know if that’s great life advice or not, but it certainly feels germane to the Trump administration’s strategy. Just saying and believing something will happen will make it happen, right? Who would put it past this president to embrace woo-woo manifestation as domestic and foreign policy? There are other conclusions we might draw, of course, such as that the president actually has zero control over the situation, and that things are likely to get more expensive and more explosive before they get better.

He lost this war long ago, and his inability to recognize or admit that truth is what’s really choking the economy.

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The Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Election Edict

The extremist majority on the United States Supreme Court - I will not call them "conservative" because there is nothing conservative about their agenda - has done much to green light the Felon's corruption and lawlessness, including providing broad immunity from prosecution for acts done while in office thereby putting the Felon largely above the law.  Last night, thankfully, the Court rejected the Felon's plan to create chaos with mail-in ballots and in the process likely disenfranchise millions of citizens from voting in the 2026 mid-term elections,  The U.S. Constitution is clear that the states, NOT the federal government govern and handle elections, yet the Felon sought to indirectly take control of elections across the country to make sure millions likely would not have their vote counted. While the majority on the Court said no, Clarence Thomas - the dullard on the Court - and Samuel Alito (who I view as increasingly dangerous) were fine with large scale disenfranchisement. The most ridiculous thing about the Felon's efforts under the guise of preventing "election fraud" is rare and of late those caught engaged in election fraud are Republicans and members of MAGA.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Court's ruling:

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor Donald Trump will stop the United States Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots in the coming midterm elections. Tonight, the Supreme Court handed down an emergency ruling blocking the Trump administration from implementing a new policy that would have made mail-in voting so onerous as to be effectively impossible for election officials to administer. The Court’s decision spares those officials from pointless chaos—and voters from potentially widespread disenfranchisement.

In the United States, election administration is carried out by a patchwork of local officials working state by state across roughly 10,000 different jurisdictions. Usually, USPS’s role in elections is clear: The Postal Service transports mail ballots to voters from state and local election offices; if voters return their ballot by mail, USPS takes care of that too. . . . . The Trump administration looked at this system, which has been popular among voters, and decided to cause havoc by imposing new and arduous criteria for election officials to meet before USPS would commit to mailing ballots.

A number of states and several nonprofits, along with the Democratic Party, quickly brought legal challenges. Before the Court resolved the matter tonight, the cases zagged madly among district and appellate courts, then up to the Supreme Court and back down again. Many judges were skeptical both of the legal basis for the rule and of the speed at which the administration was attempting to implement it, with less than two months to go before the elections.

But despite this broad agreement in the lower courts, experts were uncertain how the Supreme Court would handle the case. The Court’s past friendliness toward even the most legally dubious of Trump’s policies cast into doubt whether the justices would stand against his efforts here, especially after the Court rejected an earlier iteration of the challenge on the grounds that it was premature. . . . . “In a normal world, there would be a zero percent chance” that the Court would allow the USPS rule to go into effect. Yet, he went on, “we don’t live in a normal world anymore.”

Our world is still not a normal one. But this time, a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court decided not to make it worse. In a terse, unsigned paragraph, the Court declared that the Trump administration had failed both to make its case on the law and to show that a ruling in Trump’s favor would not upend the upcoming elections.

That final part of his assessment is obviously correct. USPS’s plan would have required election officials to upload lists of eligible voters through a Postal Service “portal”—yet the government has given no indication that the portal is operational. USPS would also have required election officials to receive Postal Service approval for the design of their ballot envelopes, but officials have already printed their ballot envelopes and do not have the money or time to create new designs.

Election administrators prepare to send out ballots far in advance, and if the USPS rule had gone into effect, election officials might have found themselves unable to count on the Postal Service to mail ballots at all. However conservative the Supreme Court is, “there aren’t five votes for abject chaos,” Levitt wrote to me after the ruling.

Still, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the pair on the Court who most reliably tilt toward Trump, would have allowed the USPS plan to go forward. . . . . As for the last-minute dash to shake up the midterms, Alito manages to blame not the government but the plaintiffs, the lower courts, and even his own colleagues on the bench for the litigation that—he claims—delayed USPS from finalizing its rule.

In a blog post, the UCLA law professor and election scholar Rick Hasen deemed Alito’s dissent “disingenuous.” Among other things, USPS continued working on the rule during the course of the litigation over the summer. And even if the Postal Service had finished the planning process earlier in the summer, state and local jurisdictions still might not have had enough time to rework their envelopes to comply.

Fortunately, officials won’t need to scramble to submit envelope designs to USPS to be measured down to fractions of an inch, or upload voter names into a portal that doesn’t exist. Election workers will likely face plenty of challenges in the month and a half before the midterms. Mailing ballots, though, will not be among them.

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Trump Loses the Other Strait

The adverse impacts of the Felon's and Pete Hegseth's war of choice against Iran continue to multiply and it becomes increasingly clear to anyone not drinking the MAGA Kool-Aid that this war was extremely poorly planned and possible consequences never considered.  Now, the Houthis - Iranian allies - have more or less seized control of the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb and with the Iranians can hold a third of the world oil production hostage, pushing oil prices likely higher and leaving Saudi oil production more vulnerable. The potential for where the USA and by extension, the world, now finds itself should have been foreseen by anyone remotely competent, yet the Felon and his cheerleader Hegseth seemingly ignore anyone and everyone who had cautioned them against attacking Iran. With America's mid-term elections getting closer and closer, it is likely a safe bet that Iran and the Houthis will take actions to cause oil prices to soar and harm the Felon and Republican's political prospects. Again, ANYONE remotely competent should have foreseen the current mess, but not the Felon and his circle of sycophants.  A piece in The Atlantic look's at the Felon's self-created nightmare:

As recently as last week, the Iran war appeared to be turning slightly in America’s favor. The Houthis—the Yemen-based militia that is Iran’s most formidable remaining ally in the Middle East—were under pressure from their local rivals, and the Saudi air force was pounding them with air strikes. The president of Yemen’s internationally recognized government issued a triumphant statement declaring that the Houthis’ miscalculations “will open the door to their complete collapse.” With their Houthi partners wounded, Iran’s leaders would have one more reason to back down and agree to Donald Trump’s terms.

Yesterday morning, those delusions drifted away like smoke as Houthi forces broke through their enemies’ defenses and seized the towns and islands around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the most important maritime choke points in the world.

That loss leaves [the Felon] Trump, who had been hoping to win back control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, with a bitter surprise. His enemies now control both of the two important straits in the Middle East, through which a combined total of about a third of the world’s oil shipments pass every day.

It also underscores a stubborn fact: For all the setbacks suffered by Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” over the past year or two, its forces retain an ideological fervor and an esprit de corps that is sorely lacking on the other side. The Gulf states’ failure to work together against the Houthis has been catastrophic, and it echoes Trump’s own failure to devise a plausible or coordinated strategy against Iran.

Although the Houthis already had the ability to threaten shipping in the Red Sea, the capture of the Bab el-Mandeb “means you can literally sit on the coast and fire at passing ships,” April Longley Alley, a Yemen expert at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy and the former political adviser to the United Nations special envoy for Yemen, told me. “It makes it easier and cheaper, and it solidifies, from a military and political point of view, that they have a stranglehold on the strait.”

The United States might not be able to do much about this, even if the Pentagon launches a new round of air strikes on the Houthis. (The Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, called Trump twice yesterday urging him to strike the Houthis, Axios reported.) Bombs and missiles would achieve little without a ground force to take advantage of them, and America’s Yemeni allies are now battered and divided.

The Houthi advance is even worse news for Saudi Arabia. For many years, the Saudis have been struggling to tamp down the Houthi threat on its border. Now the Houthis have inherited a great deal of Saudi and Emirati supplies left behind by the official Yemeni government’s retreating forces.

The mess that Saudi Arabia faces in Yemen is partly of its own making. The Houthis were born three decades ago in reaction to Saudi meddling in Yemen’s religious and political sphere. In December, tensions between the Saudi and Emirati leadership led Riyadh to demand that the Emiratis—their nominal allies—withdraw from Yemen, leaving the Saudis in charge of a patchwork of militias with divided loyalties. . . . “There was no coordination between commanders, between the intelligence and the drones, between the coast guard and the army—nothing,” Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemen specialist at the think tank Chatham House, told me.

The Houthis, meanwhile, were disciplined and focused. “They sacrificed hundreds if not thousands of fighters,” a member of Yemen’s officially recognized government, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions, told me. “Our bullshit activists were putting out fake news about victories, while the Houthis were working in silence.”

With the momentum on their side, the Houthis could now go on to seize more terrain in other parts of Yemen, including Marib province, where much of Yemen’s oil is located. They could also extend their power bloodlessly, by cutting deals with tribal and regional leaders in the south and east. All of this would further consolidate their power and strengthen their Iranian patrons.

[U]nlike their enemies, the Houthis and the Iranians have a deep ideological bond, one that their soldiers willingly die for. And the Houthis do not need to win every battle. As long as they can sink an occasional oil tanker, they will hold a whip hand over their Saudi neighbors, and over the rest of the world too.

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