At today’s Pentagon press briefing on the ongoing war in Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth started the show laser-focused on what really matters: not that more American service members had lost their lives in the Middle East, but how unfair the big bad media’s being to the administration.

“People look up at the TV and they see banners, they see headlines . . . ‘Mideast War Intensifies,’ splashing on the screen the last couple days,” Hegseth fumed. “What should the banner read instead? How about ‘Iran Increasingly Desperate.’ Because they are.”

Not to worry, though: Trump’s billionaire pals are buying up more and more of the media every day!

“More fake news from CNN—reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz,” Hegseth said. “It’s a fundamentally unserious report. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” Happy Friday.

Magical Thinking

by Andrew Egger

Wake up, babe: Donald Trump is field-testing a new Iran-war messaging strategy. Spiking oil prices, he informed us by tweet yesterday, are good, actually: “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”

If this sounds like a flailing attempt to stanch a massive political wound—well, that’s because it is. But it’s also an illustration of the exact mindset that led Trump to do so much damage to the U.S. economy even before the war: his insistence that tuning the economy to the benefit of a few favored producers is a victory, even if it harms the vast majority of consumers.

A spike in oil prices distributes strain across the economy. Consumers feel it directly in higher prices at the pump, but the costs to them don’t end there: more costly gas makes moving all people and goods around more expensive, pushing up prices on pretty much everything. U.S. oil producers do well (provided they’re not themselves too exposed to the Strait-of-Hormuz woes); everybody else suffers.

Trump didn’t set out to make this happen, of course. But what he’s done to oil by accident is pretty much exactly what he’s spent a year doing to commodities like steel and aluminum and derivative products like copper pipes on purpose. This is the whole point, after all, of commodity tariffs: to artificially raise the costs of stuff out there coming in here to let the people making and selling the same stuff here charge more.

And although the costs may not be quite as screamingly obvious as more expensive oil equals more expensive gas, the ripple effects are the same. More expensive metal commodities means more expensive metal goods—cars, housing, electronics, the four cans of La Croix I drank while writing this. It also means more strain on the manufacturers that turn those commodities into those goods, who are forced to be the bearers of economic bad news.

Trump is far from the first politician to embrace tariffs for political ends. But he may well be the first to treat them not as a porky handout to a favored constituency, but as a no-downside win for the entire economy. For past politicians, tariffs were a hacky political trick: trumpet the concentrated benefit to a favored class while quietly ignoring the distributed cost to everybody else. But it takes a mind as unique as Trump’s to suggest: Why not just fix the WHOLE economy by putting tariffs on EVERYTHING?

In some respects, reality has begun to intrude. The tariffs have intensified consumer anxieties about affordability while also hammering American manufacturing broadly. As our Catherine Rampell put it last month, downstream manufacturers—firms that make machinery, computer parts, or transportation equipment—are “screwed and shedding workers.” It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that the White House has quietly begun looking for ways to roll back certain metal tariffs. The Financial Times reported last month that “trade officials in the commerce department and US trade representative’s office believed the tariffs were hurting consumers by raising prices for goods such as pie tins and food and drink cans.”

But don’t think for a moment that Trump’s magical thinking has changed. He retains his unique economic perspective—the kind that looks out over a global spike in oil prices and thinks, Okay, so what’s the bad news?