The cost of diesel that hauls every loaf of bread, every pallet of medicine and every bag of fertilizer in this country just set an all-time record. The national average hit $6.44 a gallon, up 71 percent since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. Gasoline sits at $4.46, at least six states are already above $5, and Californians are paying $6.11. Shipping giant CMA CGM just slapped an emergency fuel surcharge on its cargo, and the Congressional Budget Office projects the war will add half a percentage point to inflation in early 2027.
But at least Iran doesn’t have a nuke, right?
The president’s response to this infuriating perpetuation of a new forever war sure seems like that’s his stance entirely as he tells you to pay up and smile. Last week Trump said Americans are “going to have to pay some extra for gas” to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and called it “a very inexpensive price to pay.” Back in March he was blunter, declaring that anyone who objected to the price spike was a fool: “ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!” This is the same man who campaigned on two-dollar gas and who is still promising it will fall “below Two Dollars a gallon” once we “WIN.”
The problem is that you are being asked to pay for stopping a weapon that, according to most of the world, including Trump’s own intelligence community, Iran was not building. In March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and that Khamenei had not reauthorized the program he suspended in 2003. When reporters asked Trump about that testimony, he replied, “I don’t care what she said.” Days later he bombed Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan and told the nation the sites had been “completely and totally obliterated.” This blatant lie would then set the nefarious stage for an endless conveyor belt of lies that would run for well over a year down the throats of Americans.
If the program was obliterated in June 2025, what exactly were we bombing in February 2026? Trump claimed that without the strikes Iran would have had a bomb within two weeks, while the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said there was no evidence Iran was building one. Gabbard’s own 2026 testimony stated that the intelligence community assessed Iran was not rebuilding its enrichment capability after the 2025 attacks. As he said on our podcast, the nation’s top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned rather than support a war on a country that posed “no imminent threat to our nation.”
Gabbard’s own path tells the story of how Washington swallows people whole and how that assembly line of lies fills their worlds with half-truths and deceptions designed to keep Americans in the dark. In 2019 she warned that a war with Iran would make Iraq “look like a cakewalk,” and in Congress she introduced the No More Presidential Wars Act to require congressional authorization before any attack on Iran. In 2024 she told voters that a vote for Trump was a vote to end wars. Then, after Trump publicly dismissed her, she posted that the “dishonest media” had taken her out of context and that Iran could build a weapon “within weeks to months.” Shameful indeed. When Senator Jon Ossoff asked her point blank whether the intelligence community had assessed an imminent nuclear threat, she answered that only the president can make that determination. Her spine, like that of an earthworm, as she slipped away back to Hawaii, having betrayed all those who supported her.
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