Trump “Not in a Rush” to End Hugely Unpopular War as Gas Costs Surge

President Donald Trump accidentally just handed Democrats another sound bite they can use to destroy him.

During an appearance on Fox News Monday, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly was asked to explain Trump’s thinking about high energy prices.

Kelly claimed Trump was “clear-eyed” about the rising gas prices, adding that Iran had been “incredibly decimated” militarily and “totally crippled” economically.

“The president is not in a rush—he has all the cards at his disposal, because he knows that Iran is getting weaker and weaker by the day, while the United States is getting stronger and stronger,” she said.

Kelly’s insistence that Trump is in control of the disaster he created in the Middle East is at once both deluded and damaging.

Shackled by sycophancy, Kelly insisted that Trump maintains a mastery over world events, including the economic disruption that is hurting Americans. He could end our suffering with a snap of his fingers, but he’s “not in a rush.” In reality, Trump’s demonstrated inability to strike a deal with Iran after more than two months shows just how out of control this situation has become.

Meanwhile, the average price of gas in the United States reached more than $4.50 per gallon Sunday, according to the AAA motor club. U.S. households are expected to pay at least $876 more on gas this year than last year, according to Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

But speaking in the Oval Office Monday, Trump claimed that there was no cause for concern, because gas prices would “drop like a rock” as soon as Iran relinquished its grip on the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s not clear this will be anytime soon, as reports suggest Trump has spoken hyperbolically about the extent of destruction in Iran. A recent CIA analysis suggested that Iran could survive another three to four months under the U.S. military blockade without experiencing severe economic hardships. The president has also overstated the damage to Iranian military assets while the Pentagon has downplayed the extensive damage to U.S. military assets.

Jeffrey Epstein associate and former child actor Brock Pierce was a guest at one of Donald Trump’s Florida golf courses last week, helping to unveil a golden statue of the president.

Pierce was a business partner and friend to Epstein for nearly a decade, helping him invest in the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase while emailing him about women. In 2012 Pierce told Epstein, “I had a great time with the girls. Hope they had fun too. Thanks.”

Also that year, Pierce sent Epstein dozens of pictures of a Ukrainian woman named Anastasia, writing that “Ukraine is now my favorite country,” after Epstein asked him to “take photos and find me a present.”

In 2018, Pierce emailed Epstein about how he had “a boat in Antigua full of amazing Ukraine’s finest” waiting for him.

This is the man who was cutting the ribbon for the golden statue at the president’s resort last week.

Senator John Fetterman has aligned himself with one more MAGA talking point.

The Pennsylvania Democrat appeared on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast Monday, laughing alongside the “anti-woke” comedian as the pair mutually praised Donald Trump’s “honest” treatment of the press, including an instance in which the president called a female journalist a “piggy.”

“The things that he says aloud, the way he just voices his interior monologue—there is something not exactly psychologically normal about someone who just voices their interior monologue—but it gives him an authenticity that no one else can possibly match,” Maher said.

“I saw his interview with Norah O’Donnell after the shooting, the next day, and she quotes the assassin who called him a pedophile, Hitler, whatever he called him,” Maher continued, referring to the attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and taking a moment to suggest that Trump is not a pedophile. “But his reaction immediately was, to her, ‘You’re a terrible person.’ And he didn’t just think it—like any politician, that’s exactly what they’re thinking. He just says it.”\

“It’s at the same time horrifying and also kind of like, refreshing. It’s shockingly—the honesty, as someone who loves honesty and has made my career about it as much as I could, it is—there’s some level of it where you tip your hat and you go, ‘Wow, total honesty,’” said the longtime political satirist.

Amused, Fetterman responded: “Yeah, the ultimate—‘Quiet, piggy.’ That’s the president of America.”

Trump routinely insults reporters in order to evade their questions. The moment Fetterman referred to took place in November, when Trump ended a line of questioning about the Epstein files by barking at a female Bloomberg News reporter, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

Fetterman has displayed a penchant for Trumpian politics since he moved to Washington, despite the fact that he ran on the progressive ticket. Since Fetterman entered office in 2023, he has sided with Republicans dozens of times, frequently leveraging his position to advance Trump’s agenda.

He also voted to confirm several of Trump’s Cabinet selections, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin as well as the last Homeland Security chief, Kristi Noem, who was transferred to work in a relatively unknown section of the government in March following a string of embarrassing scandals.

Residents in Arizona are struggling to receive SNAP benefits as the state rushes to install new eligibility requirements set by Donald Trump’s “one, big, beautiful bill,” NBC News reported Monday.

Since Trump’s behemoth budget bill passed last July, setting in motion nearly $187 million in cuts from SNAP over the next 10 years, 3.5 million people have fallen off SNAP rolls nationwide. The law requires able-bodied adults between ages 18 and 64 without dependents to work 80 hours a month, or 20 hours a week, to qualify for SNAP benefits.

Arizona has moved rapidly to comply with Trump’s new requirements, increasing the amount of documentation individuals must produce and bolstering the review process. The result: As of March, there had been a 50 percent decrease in the state’s SNAP enrollees compared to just a year earlier—the largest drop-off in the country—including 200,000 children.

In the rush to enforce these new requirements, it seems many eligible Americans have also been pushed off the program.

Following a months-long paperwork back-and-forth with state employees, Tiffany Hudson, a single mother of two young children, decided to show up in person to the state Department of Economic Security office. Despite being exempt from the new work requirements, Hudson said she’d stopped receiving her $600 in SNAP benefits three months ago.

“It’s been really hard. We’ve been going to food banks every week,” Hudson told NBC News. “We’re eating less, we’re eating more frozen stuff.”

After waiting for hours to speak with an employee, she was told she needed to provide more documentation, as well as a written statement from her father clarifying that a birthday gift she’d received over Zelle was not a recurring payment.

Inside the Arizona Department of Economic Security, increased requirements have placed a strain on the employees charged with processing SNAP applications after 400 people were laid off in July. Part of Trump’s “beautiful bill” required states to keep their payment error rate below 6.6 percent or be forced to pay for a portion of SNAP benefits themselves. Arizona’s error rate was 8.8 percent in fiscal year 2024, and projected to be around 10 percent in fiscal year 2025. The state could face up to $208 million in costs if it doesn’t lower that rate this year.

Meanwhile, the Arizonans who are getting kicked off their benefits are turning to donations to survive. St. Mary’s Food Bank, the largest in the state, reported a 12 percent increase in demand across Arizona. Milton Liu, head of St. Mary’s, told NBC News that demand has already increased as much as 25 percent over the past year in some rural counties. He expected that number will only continue to grow.

House Republicans are trying to completely expunge any record of President Trump’s two impeachments.

This latest show of fealty, led by California Representative Darrell Issa, would have Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachments “expunged as if such Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.”

“An impeachment is basically an indictment and it’s an indictment that you can’t really be acquitted from. If you are impeached by the House, famously, ‘Where do you go to get your reputation back?’ is the question,” Issa said to Fox News Digital. “And that’s sort of a problem that we’re dealing with, which is that the president was wrongfully accused, the evidence is now out that there was withheld information and false information, but where do we go to unring this bell? And the answer is we go back to Congress and we go to the House floor and we have a vote.”

The president was not wrongfully accused on either count. There is a wealth of evidence to confirm the first article of Trump’s 2019 impeachment, which came after he tried to convince the Ukrainian government to give him some damning dirt on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. There is a transcript of Trump personally requesting it. As for his second impeachment, the president most certainly incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021. Yet GOP House members are acting as if they have some moral obligation to strike the impeachments from the record.

Even more confusing—both of these impeachment attempts failed spectacularly, and Trump came out of them stronger, winning reelection in 2024. Isn’t that a more compelling story to Republicans than trying to rewrite history with a symbolic expungement for someone who never faced consequences?