Trump Loves Inflation

Trump's war shut the Strait of Hormuz, inflation hit 4.2%, and he called the numbers great.

This is “What I’m Hearing” — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.

“I Love the Inflation.”

Asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday whether he was worried about the morning’s inflation report, the President of the United States said: “No, I love it, the numbers were great… I love the inflation.”

The numbers were not great. May inflation came in at 4.2% year over year, the highest in three years and the first time it’s topped 4% since 2023. It’s the third straight month prices accelerated. And the cause is the war. Fuel oil is up 59% from a year ago, gasoline up 41%, and airfares up 27%. Strip out food and energy, and core inflation was a tame 2.9%, right where economists expected. It turns out that closing the Strait of Hormuz is not good for our economy. And things are likely to get worse before they get better.

The war is now 100 days old, and this week it got worse. After an Iranian drone downed a U.S. Army helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, Trump ordered two straight nights of strikes on Iran. Iran responded by declaring the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint a fifth of the world’s oil passes through, fully closed. The Financial Times reports that roughly 15 ships a day are getting through now, compared with about 135 before the war. The U.S. Navy has escorted just over 200 ships in a month; the pre-war norm was around 3,000.

Asked why oil hasn’t hit the $250 a barrel analysts predicted, Trump described a “secret mission”: “We took out the other night, 22 ships, late at night, with no lights, because they don’t have any radar, because we blasted the crap out of it.” He claimed the U.S. has been quietly pulling “millions of barrels of oil” out of the strait. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, testifying before Congress the same day, said he was not aware of any such operation.

And the strikes are no longer hitting only military targets. NYT visual investigators confirmed that a U.S. strike destroyed what appears to be a drinking-water facility near Sirik; Iran says the hit cut water to 20,000 people. Targeting civilian water infrastructure can be a war crime. Trump’s message to Iran from the Situation Room, delivered over the phone to a Fox News reporter, was that if they don’t sign his deal, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” and that “in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island.” JD Vance told CBS a deal “could happen in the next week.” What A Day notes Trump has now claimed a deal is imminent at least 38 times.

So that’s the picture behind “I love the inflation.” A war with no congressional authorization, now 100 days long, escalating toward an island invasion, with the world’s most important oil passage shut and civilian targets on the list — and the resulting price spike landing on Americans at the gas pump and the grocery store. Trump’s net approval on the economy has cratered to minus 34, down from plus 12. He told a reporter prices will “come down like a rock” after the war. There is no sign the war is ending, and he just promised to widen it.

Read more: Letters from an American, Robert Hubbell, The Bulwark, Semafor.

They’re Building the 2026 Fraud Lie Right Now.

The MAGA uproar over the election results in California foreshadows how Trump plans to challenge the midterm elections.

Start with what happened after Nithya Raman overtook Spencer Pratt in the LA count. Trump posted that there was “BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California,” and the Republican Party fell in line. As The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger documents, Speaker Mike Johnson called the supposed fraud “so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove.” Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, and Ron DeSantis piled on. Egger’s warning is the one to sit with: unlike 2020, the base no longer even asks for fake evidence. Johnson is selling fraud that is, by his own admission, impossible to prove.

Bill Essayli, a federal prosecutor, is publicly promising California election-fraud charges in “one to two months” — while admitting “what we need now are witnesses.” Read that again. He has announced the charges and is now looking for the evidence to support them. Meanwhile, JD Vance referred Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison to the DOJ over Medicaid fraud that Minnesota’s own agencies had already caught and acted on. And Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 fraud convicts who together owe roughly $700 million in restitution. Actual fraud gets pardoned, while invented fraud gets a prosecutor and a press release.

The road to a House majority runs through California. After last year’s Prop 50 redistricting, the state is expected to deliver Democrats somewhere between three and five seats — and Republicans’ House majority is thin enough that five seats flip the chamber. The catch is which seats. The decisive districts are in the Central Valley and inland Southern California — places like David Valadao’s and Darrell Issa’s seats — and they count exactly the way Los Angeles just did: slowly, by mail, with the Democratic votes arriving last. One of these districts was decided by fewer than 200 votes in 2024.

So picture November. Control of the House comes down to a handful of California seats. On election night, as the in-person and early votes are counted first, the Republican leads in several of them. Over the next week or two, exactly as every election expert predicts, the mail ballots come in, they break Democratic, and the Democrat pulls ahead and takes the seat that hands the party the majority. That two-week gap, the one that is normal and legal and happens every single cycle in California, is the gap Mike Johnson and Donald Trump are right now rehearsing how to exploit. They are not litigating the LA mayor’s race because they care about the LA mayor’s race. They are practicing the move they intend to run when the House is on the line.

What weakens it is a blowout. If turnout is big and the Democratic wave is undeniable, the “it was stolen” story is much harder to sell over the noise of an obvious national verdict. What feeds it is a squeaker: a few close California seats, a two-week count, just enough ambiguity to pour the lie into. The defense, then, is the same as last week, only bigger: say plainly, now and through November, that a slow count is not a stolen one.

Read more: The Bulwark (Egger), Robert Hubbell, Hopium Chronicles.

The Man Who Buried the Epstein Files Is Up for Attorney General.

We now have a detailed account of how the Trump administration tried to make the Epstein story go away, and the lawyer at the center of it is the same man Trump just nominated to run the Justice Department.

The account comes from “Regime Change,” the forthcoming book by the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, excerpted this week. On July 17, 2025, ten days after the DOJ declared there was no Epstein client list, the administration’s most senior officials gathered in the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker built for national-security crises — to manage the political fallout from a dead sex offender’s files. In the room or on the phone: JD Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, then-AG Pam Bondi, then-Deputy AG Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Two ideas came out of that meeting. Vance floated enlisting Tucker Carlson to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, in hopes she’d say on camera that Trump was never involved in Epstein’s crimes. Blanche offered a variation: he, or another DOJ lawyer, would interview her instead. And Blanche proposed petitioning the courts to unseal the Epstein grand-jury testimony — knowing, the authors write, that grand-jury material is almost never released, and the request would almost certainly be denied. It was a way to appear transparent while guaranteeing that nothing would come out. A week later, Blanche personally interviewed Maxwell, who was given limited immunity and said she’d never seen anything untoward involving Trump. Shortly after, she was moved from her Florida prison to a lower-security federal camp in Texas.

Andrew Egger’s summary is hard to improve on: Trump found his new Roy Cohn. This is the man now nominated to be the permanent Attorney General — and it’s worth remembering what else he’s done in the acting role. Blanche indicted James Comey. He signed, alone, the settlement immunizing Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization from future IRS claims, the one we covered last week that survived the slush fund’s death. Former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann’s verdict on that immunity is plain: “You cannot give immunity for future crimes.”

His confirmation hearing is about a month out. Brian Beutler argues Democrats should stop being “incredibly inhibited about wielding procedural power” and force impeachment votes on Blanche and Bill Pulte rather than wait. The simpler point is the one every senator will have to answer: a vote to confirm Todd Blanche is a vote for the man who ran the Epstein cover-up. The senators to watch, per Semafor, are Tillis, Kennedy, and Cornyn.

Read more: Letters from an American, The Bulwark (Kristol & Egger), Off Message (Beutler), Zeteo.

That's your Thursday. Inflation hit a three-year high, and Trump said he loves it. The lawyer who ran the Epstein cover-up is up for Attorney General. And the big lie is back.