Dem
53
Ties
3
GOP
44
CNN crunched the numbers and discovered that Donald Trump has now outpaced his predecessor in a very important way. Over the 4 years of the Joe Biden administration, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $3.471/gallon. As of Sunday, the average price for a gallon of gasoline during Trump v2.0 has reached $3.473.
Obviously, that does not account for inflation. Still, it is a remarkable "accomplishment" for the current president. First, because the Biden average includes a substantial stretch of pandemic, when gas prices were up due to supply-chain disruptions. Second, because the Trump average was well below $3 at the start of this year. So, Trump has managed to make up a sizable gap in just 9 months' time. Obviously, the primary culprit here is the Iran War.
Trump, of course, is well aware of gas prices. He undoubtedly hears about them every day. But he's a man who sees the silver lining in things. Well, the gold lining. Well, the faux gold lining. And so, at a rally this weekend, he shared the good news with the crowd:
And while oil prices are temporarily high and will be falling dramatically in a short period of time, as soon as that war's over, because there's so much oil. All in the Hormuz Strait, there are ships waiting to come, we're getting them out so fast. The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars... Our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what's happened in the Middle East."
Undoubtedly, people who are struggling to fill their tank so they can get to work will be relieved to learn that at least Big Oil is raking it in right now. It's mind-boggling that any politician, even Trump, would say something so impolitic in the week before an election. But it's real; you can see the video here.
And gas isn't the only thing that (some) people have to worry about. The Big Beautiful Bill has been a wild success in at least one way: It's kicked a lot of people off of food stamp programs. The latest data, which only runs through June of this year, reveals that the number of recipients of food aid has dropped from 41.6 million to 36.5 million. Did every single one of those 5.1 million people really and truly need the assistance? Probably not. Did most of them need it? Probably so. In any event, there are now some millions of people who are now going hungry.
And now, let's talk about jobs. We cannot believe this story is not getting more play, but we've double- and triple-checked it, and it's true. Whenever jobs numbers are first reported, they are estimates. Then, the numbers are revised once more and better data comes in. Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has quietly revised the jobs totals for the entire Trump administration. The roughly 1.2 million jobs added in 2025 that Trump so frequently bragged about? Turns out, it was a shade lower than that. The real total was... 116,000. In total, the revisions released late last week wiped out more than 800,000 jobs that never actually existed.
At the moment, the total number of jobs added during all of Trump v2.0 is about 1 million. That's very poor, and given that the last few months have all been revised downward at least once, there's a chance it could drop even more. Just due to population growth, a president should be able to fall out of bed and add more jobs than that. By way of comparison, during the Biden administration, the U.S. added 16.6 million non-farm jobs. The staff mathematician is currently indisposed, inasmuch as yesterday was National American Beer Day, but we are given to understand that 16.6 million is rather more than 1 million.
And even for those folks who have a job, the news is not necessarily good. Gallup just released the latest entry in what it calls the The American Job Quality Study. They ask respondents to rate their jobs in five areas: (1) Financial Well-Being, (2) Workplace Culture and Safety, (3) Growth and Development Opportunities, (4) Agency and Voice and (5) Work Structure and Autonomy. And then the pollster crunches those numbers, to figure out what percentage of Americans meet the bare minimum qualifications for having a "quality" job. The finding is that only 40% of Americans have one. That is the same figure as last year.
Of course, the way to improve your odds at landing a quality job is to go to college, right? Maybe not so much, at least not for recent college graduates. According to the latest figures released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 42% of college graduates aged 22 to 27 are underemployed. That can mean that they cannot find full-time work, but it more commonly means that they are working at jobs where their degree is not necessary. Obviously, if the majority of people are working at non-quality jobs, and if the path to a quality job is increasingly narrow (even if you go into debt to pay for school), that is going to lead to hopelessness and anger. Indeed, this is a big part of the reason many young people in France are rioting right now.
On the whole, even if you were writing a screenplay, or a case study for a textbook, or a dystopian novel, you would have a hard time designing a more challenging economic environment for an incumbent political party. And you know what voters can and should do in an environment like that? In case you're not clear, J.D. Vance had some useful advice last week:
Vote for the people who have solutions to lower the cost of gas, don't vote for the people who made the problem to begin with.
In case anyone still isn't getting it, Vance built upon that a few days later:
Let's just talk about gas prices. Remember in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and gas prices skyrocketed—they skyrocketed, by the way, far higher than they are today. They skyrocketed in 1979, they skyrocketed in 2001, they skyrocketed in 2007. They skyrocket every time some tin-pot dictator decides to throw a tantrum. And we've got to remember that.
Some very salient analysis from the VP, we'd say. Those temper-tantrum-throwing tin-pot dictators will get you every time.
In short, if the Republicans take it in the teeth next Tuesday, it will not be a surprise at all. And if they don't, then they will have so thoroughly defied the laws of political gravity, you should look out your window, because the pigs will probably be flying. (Z & A)