“Just a Little More Expensive”

MAGA Meets the Gas Pump

Trump’s most devoted admirers increasingly seem unable to understand what exactly the American president is performing for them anymore: a comedy or a tragedy. The scene staged several days ago strikes directly at the center of everyday American comfort - the gasoline tank of the family car and the heating bill for the home.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 77 percent of Americans personally blame Donald Trump for rising fuel prices. Among Democrats, the figure reaches an almost statistical maximum of 95 percent. But the truly lethal number lies elsewhere: among Republican voters themselves, a majority - 55 percent - believes Trump is responsible for higher gasoline prices. And among those 55 percent are the very people who wore red MAGA hats and shouted slogans in support of the sitting president.

The rise in prices is merely the trigger. The real problem is the administration’s accelerating detachment from reality. When a journalist asks the president what is essentially a rhetorical question about the prospect of $200 oil - expecting either a rescue plan or at least an imitation of concern - Trump responds with the calmness of a man living in a parallel economic universe: “It’s not a big deal. Fuel will just become a little more expensive. There’s nothing worse than nuclear weapons.”

The president of a country literally built around the internal combustion engine - a country where the truck driver is a cultural archetype and logistics functions as the bloodstream of the economy - describes a doubling in the price of that system’s core fuel as “a little more expensive.”

The American voter has always been self-centered in the healthiest possible sense of the word. Domestic life mattered. Events beyond U.S. borders existed as a blurred yellow stain somewhere on the globe - background noise rather than a matter of emotional investment. Any foreign-policy adventure remains acceptable only until it begins strangling the domestic consumer and small business owner. That basic social contract is now broken. Trump’s foreign policy has ceased to be an extension of domestic policy and has instead become its direct antagonist.

Almost all of Trump’s key domestic initiatives have failed. U.S. Customs is preparing to return nearly $160 billion in illegally collected tariffs. The tariff war, marketed as reindustrialization and national revival, turned out to be a legally hollow and financially destructive mechanism - essentially an additional tax on Americans, recognized as such by the Supreme Court. Returning the money is harder than taking it in the first place. As the old saying goes: taking someone else’s money is easy, giving back your own is harder.

Things are no better on the front of illegal immigration - another cornerstone of Trump’s political brand. Large-scale ICE raids and demonstrations of force collided with intense local civil resistance, especially in strongholds like Minneapolis. Instead of escalating pressure, the administration blinked. Officials accused of excessive zeal were dismissed, deportation numbers dropped sharply, and the machine designed to frighten violators became frightened of electoral consequences itself.

Trump’s only obvious triumph was the capture of Nicolás Maduro. Yet this is precisely where the devil of political alchemy was hiding. A successful operation against Maduro was a chip Trump needed to cash in immediately. A fast trade: sanctions relief or licenses for American companies to work with Venezuelan oil in exchange for tacit recognition of what had happened. That would have produced an instant effect - gratitude from oil donors, additional crude flowing onto global markets, restrained gasoline prices inside the United States, and rising approval ratings.

Instead, Trump continued escalating with Iran, using the Venezuelan episode as proof of his willingness to go all the way. And he miscalculated. Rather than stopping at the right moment, he collided with the reaction of a cornered state that unexpectedly - perhaps even to itself - exposed the limited capabilities of a hegemon accustomed to frightening the world merely through its presence.

In doing so, Trump handed a gift to his opponents. Democrats, without offering any coherent alternative of their own, are catching up to Republicans simply by benefiting from public backlash against Trump’s actions. And by all appearances, Trump will continue burying both himself and the movement he created.

American foreign policy has ceased to be an extension of domestic policy because it no longer serves domestic interests. It has become a gigantic mirror reflecting not strength, but accumulated internal dysfunctions. Americans are beginning to realize that their leader is looking everywhere except at them - at Caracas, at Tehran, at nuclear programs - anywhere but at the American voter.