As Israeli and U.S. forces continue their bombardments of Iranian targets across Tehran and the whole of the Islamic Republic, President Donald Trump and his allies have struggled to articulate their basic timetable for a war that threatens to spill across the broader Middle East. After just over a week of combat operations, the war is “very complete, pretty much,” said Trump to CBS on Monday. However, his message of fait accompli was “quite different from what he would say later that afternoon,” said CNN, when the president would insist American forces “haven’t won enough.”

Despite, or perhaps as a result of, Trump’s scattershot timeline predictions, it’s the president who ultimately “gets to control the throttle,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said yesterday at a Pentagon press briefing. It’s “not for me to posit whether it’s the beginning, the middle or the end.” 

Hegseth’s caution comes as the “ever-shifting goals” Trump has “laid out for the war in Iran” have left staff, allies and aides “struggling to keep up and at times contradicting the president,” said The New York Times. Trump’s declarations of near victory, followed shortly by his vow on Truth Social to bomb Iranian targets “20 times harder” should oil transportation be disrupted in the Strait of Hormuz, came as markets “went into shock over fears of supply disruptions,” then “fell back after Trump suggested the war might end soon,” said NPR. 

While the Trump administration struggles to speak in a single voice when it comes to the goals and timeline of the Iran war, Republican lawmakers who have largely supported anti-Iranian efforts are suddenly sounding the alarm on a downstream, if predictable, effect of regional violence: astronomical gas prices. GOP lawmakers are “growing worried” about Trump’s bet on the public’s willingness to “swallow higher gas prices due to the conflict with Iran” ahead of the November midterms, said The Hill. 

The war has sent oil prices “soaring to levels not seen since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” prompting some Republicans to wonder whether Trump’s claim that higher prices are a “very small price to pay” may cause trouble as they head into a political season that “could be perilous for the party in power,” said the outlet. Gas prices are “something obviously we have got to pay attention to,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said on Monday. “Hopefully,” the ongoing war “won’t be an extended situation.” 

While many in the president’s party have publicly backed his assertion that elevated prices are a short-term problem, GOP lawmakers who were “granted anonymity to speak candidly” expressed “real alarm” over rising fuel costs, said Politico. “If you are a Republican and not concerned right now, you are stupid,” said one lawmaker to the outlet. For conservatives looking to November, previously falling gas prices were the “one thing that they have been touting as an economic win,” said Republican pollster Mitchell Brown to The Wall Street Journal. Any reversal on that “obviously makes the message harder.”

The state’s latest Democratic senate hopeful has brought an overtly religious message to his progressive campaign. Will other Democrats take note?