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Trump’s “Affordability Hoax” May Doom the GOP

It's another day and the Iran war continues - with no victorious  exit for the Felon in sight - oil prices remain high, the increased cost of energy is driving up consumer prices (my firm uses FedEx and the cost of sending packages has increased significantly due to s fuel surcharge) , and increased fertilizer costs mean food will be more expensive as well. Through all of this the Felon claims that price increases and "affordability" are a "hoax" fabricated by Democrats. Recently, he even called concerns about prices and affordability "bulls*it" to a crowd in Florida. As always, I cannot comprehend how people believed the Felon's lie that if elected he would lower costs "on day one" even as he offered tariffs as a silver bullet that would save the economy.   Warnings were everywhere that tariffs would increase consumer prices, not lower them, yet individuals chose to believe a pathological liar who cares nothing for citizens unless they are ultra wealthy or billionaires. Insanely, with his poll numbers on his handling of the economy dipping below 30%, the Felon is only doubling down on his lies and claims that the economy is doing well, with frequent efforts to blame everything on Joe Biden even though the Felon has been in office for 16 months now.  And then, there's his foolish war of choice in Iran which has given the Iranians a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz.  A piece in Salon looks at the Felon's fantasies on the economy:

[The Felon] Donald Trump has a difficult relationship with the truth. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that at a time when his approval ratings on the economy are slipping into the 20s, he would double down on his insistence that the economy is actually exploding — and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. On May 4 he made an appearance at The Villages, the community in central Florida restricted to people over 55, where he told his assembled fans, “You know, it’s amazing. I come into office and I say ‘Wow, look how high these prices are,’ and the Democrats start screaming ‘Affordability! Affordability!’ They’re the ones that caused the problem! I’ll tell you one thing: They got one good line of bulls**t. That’s one thing I’ll say about ‘em.”

Those comments marked an unusual step for him: He admitted there was a problem. Yes, there was that week when he was touting himself as “THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT.” But really, ever since he returned to the White House, Trump has been trying to persuade the public that what they say they’re feeling — rising prices, economic unease, anxiety about the future — is nothing more than a Democratic hoax. Now he’s just taken to throwing out nonsense about the American economy being “the hottest in the world,” his favorite line, and “roaring.” 

Few believe that. The latest Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll showed that only 23% believe the president is doing a good job on the cost of living, and his approval rating on inflation fell to 27%. These numbers make his overall number on the economy — 34% — look good.

If affordability is a hoax, a whole lot of people seem to have bought into it. Despite the administration’s tiresome habit of saying that everything is Joe Biden’s fault, people have good reason to blame Trump himself for what’s happening today. The president promised to fix the economy on day one. He’s now been in office for 16 months. 

When he was quizzed during the 2024 campaign about his plans to confront inflation and the cost of living, Trump always said that his tariffs would fix everything and that growth would be so strong that the federal government would be in a position to pay for everything from childcare to medical insurance for the whole country. It was absurd, of course, but a lot of people bought it.

Taking him at his word that the economy over which he presided in his first term was “the greatest economy the world had ever known” — it was not — voters, then, turned against Joe Biden (and later, Kamala Harris) and Democrats in 2024 largely out of anger and frustration over inflation, which had spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Trump has only made it worse. 

Plenty of people who warned Trump and the GOP. Economists of all stripes said that tariffs would almost certainly raise inflation, and while nobody expected the president would start a war with Iran, everyone knows that shocks and disruptions in the oil markets cause prices to rise. Anyone would have assumed that Trump would move heaven and earth to avoid that in the middle of an already-precarious economic recovery, but hey — he marches to his own drummer.

According to the March 2026 consumer price index, overall inflation currently stands at 3.3% — up from 2.4% in March 2025. The price of energy has increased by 12.5%, and gasoline prices are up by a staggering 18.9%. Economists have predicted a rise in the second quarter of 2026.

One would think it’s surprising that since Trump was an adult businessman during the 1970s, when we last experienced similar economic problems, he would have known this. But the president’s grasp of history, even a period he has lived through, is always tenuous at best. During this era, when he and his father were being sued for discriminating against prospective Black and Puerto Rican rental applicants, the country was suffering from stagflation, a condition caused by stagnant growth, high unemployment and soaring inflation, which started in 1973 and clocked in at 13.5% by 1980. The parallels to today, while not exact, are interesting; along with the Iran hostage crisis, stagflation ended up destroying Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

The problem was finally resolved after Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker threw the country into a brutal recession by raising interest rates to over 20% by mid-1981, causing nearly 11% unemployment.

That was the last time the U.S. experienced any notable inflation until it shot up to just over 6% in 2022, which came as a shock to many consumers. Unlike Americans in the 1980s, they expected prices to come back down, but that will likely not happen. As the data analyst G. Elliott Morris recently wrote, it will take a long time before people have fully adjusted. Memories of the before-time are just too fresh. 

[E]conomist Robert Frank argued that inflation isn’t the villain. Instead, he wrote, “the real culprit was, and remains, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown any willingness to tackle seriously: unprecedentedly high and growing levels of income and wealth inequality.” Frank believes that lavish spending by the wealthy is distorting both the economy and society-at-large, affecting everyone up and down the income ladder — and contributing to this ongoing sense of dissatisfaction and frustration. 

The problem is big and has been building for years; it won’t be solved by a return to 2% inflation or a rise in consumer confidence. And it certainly won’t change because Trump is pushing the bogus claim that America has entered a “golden age” and demanding that people believe him rather than their own lived experiences. 

Affordability is more than a political slogan. It’s a long-term global problem that’s getting worse every day, and Trump and Republicans look set to pay the price in November.

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The Iran War Is Smashing the Felon's Fossil Fuel Dreams

Both the Felon and much of the GOP are beholden to the fossil fuel industries - oil and coal - and have been relentless in their efforts to undermine the development of renewable energy sources, principally wind and solar, in order to please big oil in particular.  With the USA now a net exporter of oil and gas, the Felon seemingly viewed America as being immune to shortages and soaring gas prices that a closure of the Strait of Hormuz might bring.  Now, it is becoming clear that the Iran war - a war of choice for which the Felon is solely responsible - is driving other nations to accelerate efforts to reduce reliance on oil and gas energy sources in favor of wind and solar power. Who benefits from this effort to shift from hydrocarbons?  China, of course, which has come to dominate both the wind and solar energy industries even as the Felon's regime has undermined American efforts to grow both industries. This is yet another of the Felon's strategic failures.  A piece at The New Republic looks at how the Felon's war of choice is backfiring and another in the New York Times looks at how China stands to profit from the efforts of other nations' efforts to build renewable energy sources.  Meanwhile, dominance in both industries has allowed China to lessen its vulnerability to foreign oil sources.  First, here are highlights from TNR:  

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed, and it isn’t poised to open anytime soon. Donald Trump signaled on Wednesday that he intends to keep the U.S. blockade in place until Iran cries “uncle” and says, “We give up.” The longer the strait stays closed, the less likely any sort of return to normalcy gets.

Soon, this mounting human and economic disaster will crash into another climate-changed summer. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, warned last week that the world faces “the biggest energy security threat in history.” Surging jet fuel prices and shortages threaten everything from commercial air travel in Europe to fighting wildfires in the western United States. Making matters worse, a potential super El Niño could trigger heat waves across Asia, further increasing demand for air conditioning and, accordingly, fossil fuels. Droughts or flooding from that weather pattern could force hydropower stations to shut down or reduce output, compelling hydropower-dependent regions to increase their demand for increasingly scarce, pricey supplies of oil and gas. The combination of extreme weather and shortages of gas-derived fertilizers that typically flow through the Strait of Hormuz stands to exacerbate a looming, climate-fueled global food crisis.

While the Trump administration certainly doesn’t seem too concerned about the crises its reckless, illegal war of choice is exacerbating in other parts of the world, the war is continuing to influence one of the few things Trump genuinely seems to care about: gas prices. In the U.S., they have soared to almost $4.30 per gallon. For the U.S., though, war in Iran risks a lot more than pissing off voters who are paying more at the pump. As the war drags on, more countries are souring on the idea that oil and gas are reliable and necessary ingredients for a thriving economy. The White House, meanwhile, is going to elaborate lengths to safeguard the fossil-fueled growth model its war is endangering.

Some nations are starting to chart out energy futures that depend less on fossil fuels and the U.S. Leaders from nearly 60 countries gathered this past week in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss getting off of fossil fuels. Part of the inspiration for the meeting was that powerful fossil fuel producing countries—namely Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States—have made such discussions virtually impossible at U.N. climate talks. . . . three-fourths of the world’s population live in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels. . . . “So today,” Hart continued, “the urgency of transitioning away from fossil fuels is no longer only a climate or environmental imperative. It is a security imperative, an economic imperative, and a development imperative.”

Wars in Russia and Iran, however, have helped underline the urgency of that message. Steep declines in the price of renewable energy—thanks largely to China—have made it much more possible for even fast-growing countries to reduce their reliance on imported hydrocarbons in key sectors like power and transportation. For the first time last year, renewables provided more power than coal worldwide.

The war in Iran has helped accelerate shifts that were already underway—and confirmed any and all suspicions that the U.S. is an unreliable partner for energy security. . . . Whether consciously or not, the Trump administration is resorting to increasingly desperate measures to ward off a future where its carbon-intensive products are less important. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has now spent nearly $2 billion bribing developers to ditch offshore wind projects.

The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz is driving up fuel and commodity prices, forcing drillers to halt production, pushing governments and consumers alike to consider lower-carbon alternatives, and endangering what not too long ago had been considered promising growth markets for U.S. companies. In attempting to cling onto U.S. hegemony and global energy dominance, Trump might be ending both.

These highlights from the Times piece look at how China is pulling far ahead of the USA in the wind and solar energy industries:

As the war in Iran threatens to choke off oil and gas supplies from the Persian Gulf, China is seizing the moment to extend its dominance in wind power.

Across China, hilltops are dotted with wind turbines, and long rows of them span many miles in western deserts. Ultrahigh-voltage power lines carry electricity thousands of miles to the energy-hungry factories along China’s coast.

Last year, China installed three times as much wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined, even as its turbine exports jumped. The global industry’s center of gravity has shifted decisively: All of the world’s six largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese, displacing once-dominant European firms and companies like General Electric.

The war has made China’s investments in wind look prescient. Its Asian neighbors, long reliant on Middle Eastern oil and gas, are struggling to secure fuel supplies. Meanwhile, China, with its massive reserves and modern electric grid, is better positioned to weather the energy crisis

The contrast with the United States is stark. Under President Trump, energy policy has swung back toward oil and natural gas. In the past six weeks, the Trump administration has moved to spend nearly $2 billion reimbursing energy companies for abandoning plans to build offshore wind farms. This week, a leading renewable energy group said the administration has stalled more than 150 wind farm projects by delaying military reviews once considered routine.

The United States, the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas, has the luxury of relying on fossil fuels. China, the largest importer, does not. It is moving to reduce its exposure, motivated by concerns over national security, economic stability and climate change.

With the Strait of Hormuz, a critical artery for oil and gas shipments, largely closed for two months, China’s top leaders have grown more emphatic. “Energy is a strategic issue in development — our pioneering development of wind power and solar technology has proved to be forward-looking,” Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, said in late March, three weeks after U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran began.

Wind supplied 10 percent of China’s electricity last year, a share that is growing about one percentage point annually. Coal still accounts for just over half, but its share is slipping a couple of percentage points each year.

China is ramping up wind equipment exports in a hurry, unnerving competitors in the West and India. Exports of wind turbines and components to the European Union jumped 66 percent last year, while shipments to developing countries in China’s Belt and Road Initiative climbed 74 percent.

Chinese manufacturers, led by Envision Energy, are also gaining ground in India. . . . The standoff in Iran and the resulting spike in oil and natural gas prices have accelerated demand. Global wind turbine orders surged this spring, building on a 40 percent increase last year. Vietnam, for example, canceled plans for a major gas plant to focus instead on wind and solar.

Two decades ago, the wind industry was dominated by non-Chinese manufacturers: Vestas, General Electric, Germany’s Enercon, Spain’s Gamesa and Suzlon.

That began to change in 2005 when Beijing issued a directive, known as Notice 1204, requiring China’s wind farms to source at least 70 percent of their equipment domestically. Beijing’s top economic planning agency warned that projects failing to meet this threshold would not be approved.

Vestas, General Electric, Gamesa and Suzlon responded by building factories in China. Gamesa, which then held a 30 percent market share, localized nearly all its production. By 2009, its turbines for China were assembled with 95 percent Chinese components.

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The Felon, Rubio and America’s Global Decline

Since 2015 the Felon's mantra has been "Make America Great Again" yet in his second regime, no one has weakened America more than the Felon and his white nationalist policies that have seen America's soft power through foreign aid slashed if not eliminated, openly racist policies at home - the killing of the Voting Rights Act by the Felon's majority on the Supreme Court yet the latest example - that have sullied America's reputation abroad, and the Felon's alienation of long time allies, particularly in Europe. And then there's the Felon's war of choice with Iran that has depleted America's munitions and cause oil and gas prices to soar - and from which the Felon has no exit strategy.  Ironically, when a U.S. fighter jet was shot down by Iranians, the Felon reportedly was upset over the potential of the airmen being held hostage.  While the airmen were found, the real Iranian hostage is the Felon himself.  The war has shown the limits of airpower against Iran and, more importantly, the Iranian leadership appears to understand that all it needs to do is keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and oil prices high to destroy the viability of the Felon and the GOP on the home front. They realize that high oil prices through November could be catastrophic for the GOP and the Felon for whom a Democrat controlled Congress would be a nightmare.  A piece at Salon looks at America's decline in the world thanks to the Felon's deliberate policies:

Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran is a strategic failure that has exposed the limits of America’s power and influence in the Middle East and around the world. In a highly unusual move, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been conspicuously absent from the negotiations with the Islamic Republic that led to a tenuous ceasefire, ceding the diplomatic spotlight to Vice President JD Vance, along with the administration’s “peace envoys” Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real estate developer and Trump friend. 

A recent New York Times report detailed how expansive Rubio’s absence has been. In addition to missing peace negotiations with Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan, he did not attend meetings in Doha and Geneva. He has not visited the Middle East since last October, nor has he played a direct role in diplomatic negotiations over Ukraine and Gaza.

But the secretary’s absence on the world stage doesn’t mean he has been idle. As the first person to serve simultaneously as secretary of state and national security adviser since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, for Rubio “less time abroad means more time at the side of an impulsive president prone to making critical national security decisions at any moment.”

While also attending to Trump’s needs, Rubio has been busy remaking the State Department in the MAGA image — an act that is undermining democracy at home and accelerating strategic failures abroad. What the administration calls “America First” is, in practice, white racial authoritarianism and white Christian nationalism that governs who and what is deemed to be in America’s vital interests.

Historically, the State Department has emphasized cultural pluralism, secularism and inclusiveness in its public messaging and other communications — a deliberate choice rooted in the reality that American diplomacy takes place around the world. 

During the Cold War, America’s elites understood that racism at home made America weak abroad. Jim and Jane Crow were an international embarrassment, giving the Soviet Union a powerful counternarrative about American hypocrisy and the color line. How could a nation that oppressed its own Black citizens claim to be the world’s beacon of freedom against communism?

Civil rights activists understood this and used it for tactical and strategic leverage. Presidents from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson were forced to see that Jim Crow was not just a moral catastrophe but a geopolitical liability. Ralph Bunche, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat and civil rights leader, connected the fight against American segregation to the broader struggle for human rights and peace around the world.

These traditions have been largely abandoned under Rubio at the behest of Trump.

On April 1 the State Department announced a series of “reforms” to the foreign service exam with the aim of eradicating “the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda” that the administration claimed was plaguing the department and diplomatic corps. As Puck’s Julia Ioffe memorably noted, these changes — which included an orientation curriculum centered on “America First” — were nothing short of “ideological screenings” and “political tests,” requiring prospective foreign service officers to “affirm their support for Trump’s executive orders…and demonstrate their ‘fidelity’ at every turn.”

Previous administrations understood that having a diverse State Department was a necessity, given how the majority of the world’s population is not white. Limiting the number of Black and brown diplomatic corps members at a time when China is making great inroads in Africa and other parts of the non-white world through infrastructure development, securing rare earth and other vital resources, and building military bases is a strategic blunder.  

The department has also overseen the systematic dismantling of America’s soft power. The gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and related programs that support public health have already contributed to an estimated 762,000 preventable deaths. Experts estimate that these cuts will lead to 14 million preventable deaths by 2030 if funding is not restored.  

Before Rubio’s tenure, Voice of America (VOA) served for more than eight decades as one of the country’s most powerful tools for exporting democracy and American values to people living under authoritarian regimes. Once a credible voice, under the leadership of Kari Lake, a Republican who served as Arizona secretary of state and ran for governor, experienced journalists have been fired and VOA now amplifies the administration’s talking points and disinformation.

Since Trump’s return to power, the United States has been repositioning itself as an explicitly Judeo-Christian nation — and government departments and agencies are following suit. On Easter Sunday Rubio shared a video on social media in which he passionately described the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The department’s Instagram account has featured images of Christian crosses and references to “Christ’s sacrifice.” As reported by the Intercept, the account has stopped marking Islamic holidays and other widely observed non-Christian religious observances.

Under Rubio, the department is cutting back on student visas, and it has begun monitoring the social media accounts of immigrants and travelers for material the administration defines as “hateful ideologies” and “hostile attitudes” and other thought crimes. 

At White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s urging, White South Africans, a group that enforced and benefitted from the white supremacist system of apartheid, are now being given refugee status on the grounds that they now face oppression under Black majority rule. In a cruel historical irony, White South Africans are now working as laborers under the H-2A guest worker program in Mississippi, where they are now displacing Black American farmers whose families and communities survived Jim Crow, America’s own form of apartheid. It is estimated that 25,000 South Africans came to the United States during the 2024-25 farming season alone under that program. 

Refugee status is also being revoked for Haitians and Somalis, communities that Trump and his administration have repeatedly dehumanized with racist screeds that have included calling them “poison,” “leeches” and “invaders.” These and other Black and brown refugees and immigrants now live in a state of existential fear from being deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or targeted by racist vigilantes.

In total, the State Department now serves as an enthusiastic enforcer for Trump’s nativist project and fortress America.

In December 2025, the Trump administration announced its new National Security Strategy, which is based on the premise that Europe is facing a common “civilizational erasure,” a lack of economic vitality, “cratering birthrates” and loss of “national identities” from migrants and other non-whites whose values are deemed incompatible with Western values. To survive, the document holds, Europe must move away from its pluralistic and cosmopolitan values. These are far-right talking points evoking racist books such as Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints” and Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race.” Previous American leaders would have condemned such a policy as antithetical to America’s democratic norms and values. 

Under Rubio’s leadership, the State Department has abandoned this tradition and strategic vision. As a senator, Rubio was a strong advocate for global democracy. He wanted America to be more confrontational with Russia and backed Ukraine in its freedom struggle. Now, while enduring the president’s humiliation rituals — the public debasements Trump uses to test and bind the loyalty of those around him — Rubio has adopted his values.

As secretary, he now sits fourth in the line of presidential succession, and there is speculation that Trump may see him as a potential successor. According to reports, Trump has taken to asking confidantes if they prefer Vance or Rubio as the party’s 2028 nominee, and focus groups indicate that Trump Republicans are also warming up to the secretary ahead of 2028. Many see him as a stabilizing force, as well as a more presentable and traditional representative for their “America First” nationalism and so-called conservative values.  

Rubio sacrificed his values and the storied institutional legacy of the State Department itself to be in closer proximity to Donald Trump, a chaos agent — and America’s reputation and power are collapsing.

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