The national average of the price of a gallon of gasoline now stands at $4.05. It broke through the $4-a-gallon barrier today after spending roughly a week hovering just below it. This isn't really a major change for consumers (it is only the difference of a few pennies), but it is a big psychological barrier that has now been breached. The only time gas prices have been higher in the past decade was at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine (when not only gas prices spiked but the inflation rate skyrocketed as well). Then, the average U.S. price of gas rose to $5.00 per gallon before falling back again.

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At this point, it seems fitting that The Secret Handshake be officially proclaimed Donald Trump's court jester.

The group, as the name implies, is secret. It is an artists' collective but nobody knows who is behind it or a member of it. They use intermediaries to file for National Park permits to display art installations on the National Mall without fanfare, and then they just silently appear. And they've outdone themselves, once again.

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Maybe we need a new word for the way Donald Trump seems to be running the country: "chaocracy." Rule by chaos. The "Madman Theory" writ large. Nobody has any clue what's going to happen next, from Trump himself all the way down to average Americans and the rest of the world.

Of course, this has always been Donald Trump's modus operandi to some extent, but it is much more apparent now that we're in what seems to be a prolonged war. Trump is now attempting a feint in this war, but nobody's really sure what is the feint and what will become reality in the next few weeks. Trump himself probably doesn't know, at this point.

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In all sorts of ways, Donald Trump is getting some very bad numbers these days. Perhaps this has something to do with his newfound eagerness to somehow quickly end his war of choice in Iran? One can only speculate....

Trump's numbers are bad and they just keep right on coming. Within a few weeks, we will get new official inflation numbers which will reflect at least the first few weeks of Trump's War, when the price of gasoline started to skyrocket. And just today, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development put out their new estimates, which aren't good. The O.E.C.D. is now predicting that the inflation rate in America will average out to a whopping 4.2 percent this year -- over a full percentage point up from their last forecast. So it wouldn't surprise me in the least to see the official U.S. inflation number climb well above three percent in the March numbers, and it also won't be a surprise if they top four percent by next month, either.

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The ongoing partial government shutdown is about to break the record for the longest government shutdown in history. It affects only the Department of Homeland Security, which has limited the shutdown's visibility to the average American (in comparison to previous wider-scale shutdowns), but that has been changing over the past few weeks. The Transportation Security Administration is now publicly bearing the brunt of the shutdown, as T.S.A. agents at airports are increasingly deciding not to go to work (some of them can't even afford the gas to get there) or just to quit altogether. This has increased wait times at certain airports, which the media picked up on and has been featuring nightly on the news.

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California voters were supposed to see a gubernatorial debate this evening (well... early evening -- for some reason it was scheduled to run at 5:00 P.M., when most people aren't even home from work yet, but whatever...), but it has now been cancelled. The University of Southern California announced this morning that it was cancelling the debate due to criticism over who would have been allowed on stage and who would have been excluded.

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It's a sad sort of commentary on the times we live in when the leaders of a country we are at war with sound more believable than the American president... but here we are. Donald Trump continues to flail around and issue blustery statements, but as always you have to wonder how much of it is bluster, how much of it is wishful thinking, and how much of it is just sheer delusion.

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Donald Trump seems to be determined to break as many campaign promises as he possibly can, in the shortest period of time possible. Conveniently (for Democrats), he is doing all of this right at the start of the midterm campaign season, as the first states conduct their primaries. This seems like a rather spectacular way to commit political suicide, but then again Trump is a master at avoiding consequences, so who really knows how it will all play out?

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In assessing how Donald Trump's war of choice is proceeding, we turn once again to the metric most Americans are using as their chief measurement: the average nationwide price of a gallon of gasoline now stands at $3.91. That is up $1.16 from the mid-January lowpoint of this year, and it is up 97 cents from the day before the bombing started. It is also only nine cents away from the psychological "four bucks a gallon" milestone (which the media is likely to prominently feature, when we do hit it). And currently, there is absolutely no end in sight to the high prices -- which still have yet to peak.

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As every day of Trump's War progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that Trump and his entire administration are completely clueless about what they are doing. Which (it will come as no surprise to learn) they truly have no one to blame for but themselves. Six months ago, as NOTUS reports, "the Department of State fired its oil and gas experts... the administration laid off staff who would have been responsible for gaming out possible scenarios if the Strait of Hormuz was closed."

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