The national average price of a gallon of gasoline has surged 33%, from just under $3 to nearly $4, since the U.S. war against Iran started three weeks ago. As of this writing, oil prices are up 50% to over $100 a barrel. The cost of the war is mounting.
It’s not just gas prices. Today, a reader emailed me a link to a website that estimates the total military cost of the war in real time and puts the price tag at roughly $25 billion in 20 days. (I did a quick Google and found no fewer than five of these sites; my theory is that people are using AI to spin them up quickly. Each site has different numbers, but this one extrapolates from the Pentagon’s briefing to Congress.)
And that number is likely an underestimate! University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers points out that the cost of the war, when measured as the impact on the U.S. economy instead of just in military spending, is not just” in the tens of billions, but the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The topline numbers are obviously bad for the administration. But the intensity of opposition is striking. 44% of all adults said the war is a “very bad” use of taxpayer dollars — nearly three times the 15% who said “very good.” Among Democrats, 73% said “very bad” while 9% said good. Among independents, 45% said “very bad”— nearly double the 23% total who said good or very good.
Look at the Republican numbers. It’s not unanimous by any means.
We also asked whether respondents would support the military action if the war caused gas prices to rise by $1 per gallon (we wrote this question two weeks ago, when the price had only risen a quarter) or more. On that question, 61% said they would oppose the action, compared with 30% who said they would support it.
GOP support after the gas prices question dropped from 68% to 61% and opposition ticked up from 24% to 31%. (Subgroup margins of error are larger than the full-sample MOE, so treat these shifts as directional.)
Trump is clearly thinking about sending in ground troops. Don’t be surprised if he does it. After all, he says that no matter what’s happened in his life it always comes out ok. But most Americans aren’t sanguine.
Trump’s handpicked Commission of Fine Arts approved a general design for a 24k gold commemorative coin for the U.S. 250th anniversary featuring Trump’s image. “I motion to approve this as presented, and with the strong encouragement that you make it as large as possible, all the way to three inches in diameter,” the commission’s vice chair, James McCrery, said. Separately, the Treasury has said it plans to issue a $1 Trump coin that the Commission of Fine Arts approved in January. Straight-up banana republic stuff.
We have never issued a coin for a living person before, much less the sitting president.
But there’s more:
Trump: I have much more power in my second term. I said I'm going to sign an executive order to ensure that the second Saturday in December, is preserved exclusively, nobody is playing football. Not Ohio state against Notre Dame. Not LSU against Alabama. Nobody is going to play… pic.twitter.com/ZDFefu6kSF
“I have much more power in my second term. I said I’m going to sign an executive order to ensure that the second Saturday in December, is preserved exclusively, nobody is playing football. Not Ohio state against Notre Dame. Not LSU against Alabama. Nobody is going to play football for four hours during that very special time of the year in December. It’s preserved forever for the army-navy game. If you don’t want to watch football, you don’t have to. But if you want to watch football, you are only watching one game. You are not watching 19 different games.”
He started a war three weeks ago but this is what he’s talking about today. (He also said they were going to stop women playing in men’s sports…)
“Because we wanted surprise,” Trump replied. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right?”
Late night had a field day:
Jimmy Kimmel said that Americans “often cringe when real leaders come to visit ours, but today I think we hit a new level of discomfort.”
“I guess we should be grateful he didn’t do an accent?” — JIMMY KIMMEL
“Do you mean the movie ‘Pearl Harbor?’ Because Japan didn’t do that — we did that to ourselves.” — SETH MEYERS
“Let me tell you: There’s no doubt in my mind that everything he knows about Pearl Harbor begins and ends with a movie starring Ben Affleck.” — JIMMY KIMMEL
“I haven’t seen an American bomb in front of Japan that badly since — you get the idea.” — JORDAN KLEPPER
“During the same press conference, President Trump praised the Japanese prime minister’s understanding of English and added, ‘I haven’t picked up your language.’ Oh, nobody thought you had picked up Japanese. You already have your hands full with English.” — SETH MEYERS
The verdict is in: “The USA loses its long-term status as a liberal democracy – for the first time in over 50 years.”
Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, a major democracy monitor, has issued its annual report, this year subtitled “Unraveling The Democratic Era?” “THE WEST IN DECLINE” reads one subsection. “Nearly three quarters of the world population (74%, or 6 billion) live in autocracies.” The United States is on track to join them.
V-Dem’s data on the United States goes back to 1789. The group’s founder, Steffan Lindberg, tells The Guardian, “What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country.”
Since 2012, Lindberg has led his small group of researchers in Sweden to become the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy. In their latest report, published on Tuesday, they conclude that the US, for the first time in more than half a century, has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy. The country is now going through a rapid process of what the report’s authors call “autocratisation”.
“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.
US democracy is now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. All progress made since then has been erased, according to the report.
The United States under Donald John Trump has been weighed in the balances and found wanting.
“The world has never before seen as many countries autocratising at the same time,” the report concludes. From page 5:
5. In Focus: Autocratization in the USA
Under Trump’s presidency democracy in the USAhas fallen back to the same level as in 1965. Yet the situation is fundamentally different than during the Civil Rights era.
President Trump’s second term can be summarized as a rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency.
The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.
Legislative Constraints – the worst affected aspect of democracy – is losing one-third of its value in 2025 and reaching its lowest point in over 100 years.
Civil Rights & Equality before the Law, and Freedom of Expression & Media are now at their lowest levels in 60 years.
Electoral components of democracy, however, remain stable – for now
The Guardian continues:
The researchers use 48 different metrics to assess democratic health, such as the freedom of expression and the media, the quality of elections and the observance of the rule of law. The resulting “liberal democracy index” shows that the speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history. The main factor is a “rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency”, Lindberg says. Congress has been marginalised, jeopardising the “checks and balances” (judicial and legislative constraints on the executive) so crucial to US democracy. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly declining and freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the 1940s.
The United States is still leading Western Europe. Just in the wrong direction (V-Dem):
The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is at its lowest level in over 50 years, primarily due to ongoing autocratization in the USA.
The USA loses its long-term status as a liberal democracy – for the first time in over 50 years.
It’s five o’clock somewhere. Even so (V-Dem):
What would it take to stop autocratization in the USA, and turn it around? Roughly 70% of all “third wave” episodes of autocratization have been reversed, making U-turns. Elections were often pivotal windows of opportunity, and the first electoral cycle was often decisive.
“What are you prepared to do?”
Are we there yet? Do lovers of liberal democracy have what it takes? Or do we roll over at let this country die?
Denmark reportedly readied itself for potential attack from the US in January – flying bags of blood to Greenland and explosives to blow up runways in case of a battle with its former closest ally.
During the tense days when Donald Trump threatened to take over Greenland – a largely autonomous territory that is part of the Danish commonwealth – “the hard way”, Copenhagen was so shaken that it started preparing for US invasion, according to Danish public broadcaster DR.
When, in January, Danish soldiers were flown to Greenland, they were reportedly carrying explosives to destroy runways in the capital, Nuuk, and in Kangerlussuaq, a small town north of the capital, to prevent US aircraft from landing in the event of an invasion.
They also carried supplies from Danish blood banks to treat wounded people in the event of battle, according to DR, which had spoken to sources from across the Danish government, authorities and intelligence services in Denmark, France and Germany.
Jesus Christ. And they saw the writing on the wall long before Americans did and it only got worse after Venezuela:
Denmark reportedly started seeking political support from European leaders in a series of secret talks that started soon after the 2024 US election.
The 3 January US attack on Venezuela was a crucial turning point, many of the sources told DR. The following day, Trump said the US needed Greenland “very badly” – renewing fears of a US invasion. The following day, Frederiksen said that an attack by the US on a Nato ally would mean the end of both the military alliance and “post-second world war security”.
According to DR, there was already reportedly a plan for Danish and European forces to send soldiers to Greenland later in they year, but this was rapidly brought forward.
An unnamed top French official told DR that the unprecedented situation had brought Europe closer together. “With the Greenland crisis, Europe realised once and for all that we need to be able to take care of our own security,” the source said.
On Tuesday a successful Iranian drone attack resulted in operations at the Shah gasfield, about 111 miles (180km) south-west of Abu Dhabi, being suspended. The site can produce 1.28bn standard cubic feet of gas a day. It supplies about 20% of the UAE’s gas supply and 5% of the world’s granulated sulphur, which is used in phosphate fertilisers.
On Wednesday an Iranian production facility for the South Pars gasfield, which it shares with Qatar, was struck. The field is the largest in the world and the biggest source of domestic energy in Iran, which sometimes struggles to produce enough electricity.
The strike, which prompted a threat from Tehran of further retaliation against energy infrastructure, was widely reported in Israeli media to have been carried out by Israel with US consent, though neither country immediately confirmed responsibility.
Although Donald Trump said the US had not been given warning of the attack, it seems highly unlikely that US intelligence would not have known about it or that two allies fighting a war together, involving joint military flight traffic control, would not both have been aware.
An Iranian attack subsequently caused “extensive damage” to Qatar’s giant Ras Laffan liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility, sending gas prices rocketing and prompting dire warnings over the global economic impact. The price of European gas jumped 35%. Qatar is one of the world’s top LNG producers, alongside the US, Australia and Russia, and Ras Laffan is the world’s largest LNG hub. Iranian drones also struck a Saudi oil refinery on the Red Sea and caused fires at two others in Kuwait.
Oops:
The strikes on so-called upstream gas production facilities by both sides of the Middle East war mark a significant escalation and could have long-term consequences.
It is the first time facilities connected to the production of fossil fuel energy have been hit, rather than sites associated more generally with the oil and gas industry.
The attack on Qatar’s hub “marks a significant escalation in the Middle East war”, Theresa Fallon, the director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies, wrote on X, adding: “The economic effect will likely be felt for years.”
Although a cessation of hostilities could result in suspended gas and oil shipments returning within months, experts say significant damage to production infrastructure could have an impact that lasts far longer.
Trump knows this is a problem because he’s been threatening to hit these sites repeatedly while always saying that he doesn’t want to do it because it will cripple the industry — which he believes he is entitled to seize for himself.
Israel says Trump knew all about it and of course he did. They’re working together. And Trump is clearly making decisions by simply saying “fuck it — go for it” because he really doesn’t know what else to do. He’s afraid of losing but he has no clue what winning looks like other than Iran waving the white flag and licking his boots.
We’d be better off if he flipped a coin since odds are he’d say no at least some of the time.
It’s a big problem:
One lesson from the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that it took much longer than expected to repair damaged energy production infrastructure. The Bush administration had promised that reconstruction would be funded by oil revenues, but even though contractors were able to access Iraqi plants and $2bn was spent on oil projects, production took more than two years to return to prewar levels.
Energy production in the Gulf has a social, political and diplomatic importance far beyond the economic top line. Social settlements where citizens live under often repressive monarchies are based on the sharing of energy wealth. It is vital to living standards and the ability to attract foreign workers.
Energy is integral to the way countries in the region interact with each other. The brief detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which survived Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year, was a priority for Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, as part of his plans to diversify the Saudi economy. He assessed that tensions with Iran were a drain on resources. On the Iranian side the detente was driven by an economy slowly imploding under US-led sanctions.
Historically closer to Iran because of a shared interest in the South Pars field, Qatar’s anxiety over the attack has been palpable. The field has at times acted as a diplomatic bridge not only between Doha and Tehran but more widely.
Yeah, he’s blown things up. And if it’s repairable, which is questionable, it’s going to take a lot of time, many people are going to die, there will probably be terrorist attacks and a refugee crisis and the economy’s going to be stressed at the very least. And remember, this was for absolutely no reason. There was no imminent threat, the U.S. had set back their nuclear program (after tearing up a treaty that had been working, also for no reason) and the world, while in flux, was not in crisis. Now it is.
Thanks Trump. You’ve really made America great again.
THE FACTION OF MAGA PERSONALITIES angry about Donald Trump’s war with Iran now has a martyr, and he’s one of their own.
The resignation of National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent this week—and the ensuing Trump administration attacks on him—have lent a new prestige to Iran-war critics like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Kent cited his disagreement with the war as the reason for his resignation (along with some wink-wink antisemitism about the war’s origins, too). In doing so, he gave likeminded allies a vessel onto which they could attach their own grievances.
He also did something those allies had been unable to do to this point: put real pressure on figures within the administration to make difficult calculations about their own political careers. If Kent could resign over the war—they might be asked in the not-too-distant future—why couldn’t they, too?
Here’s one reason:
The FBI has opened a leak investigation into a top former intelligence official who resigned Tuesday in protest over the war in Iran.
The investigation into former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent is focused on allegations that he improperly shared classified information, four people with direct knowledge of the investigation told Semafor.
In his resignation letter, Kent wrote that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation” and accused President Donald Trump of starting the war because of “pressure from Israel.”
They say he’s been under investigation for months. Ok.
So far the MAGAs and most of the Republicans are sticking with Dear Leader. But Sommer thinks this is going to be significant and I think he’s right. Kent’s a hero to the Tucker Carlson and Candace Owen crowd which may not be a big deal while Trump is still in charge but it could be very important as this war drags on and the presidential election looms. As Sommer points out:
JOE KENT’S DECISION TO QUIT will hasten and heighten the showdown between Donald Trump and his right-wing critics. In a way, this current moment has echoes of Democratic factionalism in the runup to the Iraq War, or the grassroots conservative revolt to the George W. Bush administration’s push for a legal pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
In each case, a vocal group of activists in the party was unhappy with the pursuits of the party’s leadership. But the leadership went ahead anyway, wrongly convinced they knew better than the neophytes which way the political winds were blowing.
In a few years, the Iran war will probably be unpopular on the right, read through the same anti-Israel lens through which they came to see the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
For anyone in the administration with political ambitions who might believe this is where things are heading—and who might want to get there more quickly—Kent has raised the stakes for what it will take to do so convincingly: a loud resignation. JD Vance and Marco Rubio will likely be stuck on the wrong side of that debate in 2028. But Kent and Carlson won’t be.
I just don’t know what to say. These people would rather have endless wars, massive refugee crises, starvation and environmental disaster than use alternative energy.
We’re well on our way to their future. And we have very little time to reverse course.
Say what you will about Donald Trump: While he may have only ever had a handful of ideas, he’s been consistent about espousing them for more than half a century. Take, for instance, his view that America’s allies are a bunch of freeloaders who should be paying the U.S. protection money for defending them. The way he’s always seen it, the collective security umbrella that has existed since World War II is nothing more than a business arrangement that should be turning America a profit.
In 1987 he even took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to make his case. He said, “It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours.”
Trump even had a specific example of an ally being ungrateful to the U.S., which is interesting in light of current events in the Middle East. “Saudi Arabia, a country whose very existence is in the hands of the United States, last week refused to allow us to use their mine sweepers (which are, sadly, far more advanced than ours) to police the Gulf. The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”
Titled “There’s nothing wrong with American Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone won’t cure,” the ad was the first articulation of what Trump’s eventual America First slogan, which he pilfered from an earlier generation of the far-right and has never acknowledged, actually meant.
Nearly 40 years later, that theft has led people into misunderstanding what Trump was talking about.
Many of those World War II conservatives had a not-so-subtle crush on a certain German führer. They were isolationists, determined to keep the U.S. out of what they considered Europe’s war.
That’s never been Trump’s goal, and he’s never really said it was. Sure, he campaigned against the “forever wars” of his predecessors — mainly because opposing anything they did was the only way he knew how to talk about foreign policy — and he donned the populist, xenophobic hat to malign immigrants and foreign nations alike.
Donald Trump was never a pacifist nor an isolationist. In fact he is the opposite — a domineering strongman who seeks to bully everyone around him into compliance.
But Donald Trump was never a pacifist nor an isolationist. In fact he is the opposite — a domineering strongman who seeks to bully everyone around him into compliance. Many of his followers doubtless find that his most appealing quality, but the rest of the world is no longer amused.
The president’s demeaning of America’s allies is nothing new. Throughout his first term, he denigrated NATO while cozying up to adversaries, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, as if they were long-lost brothers.
But since his return to the White House, Trump has really pushed the envelope, treating countries except Russia, Israel and wealthy Middle Eastern nations like vassal states. He began by disrespecting Mexico and Canada, our closest neighbors, so crudely that the rift he created may be permanent. He unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and demanded the media go along with it. Then he repeatedly demeaned Canada as America’s “51st state” and has referred to the prime minister as “governor.” These insults add up to a display of dominance based on nothing more than a desire to humiliate America’s friends, and all just to preen for his cultish following.
Since his early January raid on Venezuela and capture of the nation’s president and first lady, Trump has strutted the world stage, insulting everyone in sight, often purely for sport. He set his sights on Greenland, apparently at the behest of a cosmetics heir pal. By mid-January he had pushed things to the point that it looked likely he would send in troops to conquer the island nation, despite the fact that it’s a dominion of Denmark, one of America’s closest allies. His crude move left Europe reeling, and it brought home the fact that Trump’s virtual abandonment of Ukraine to Russia was a preview of what he was prepared to do if Putin expanded his war into Europe itself: nothing. With all Trump’s Greenland talk, some had to wonder if he wouldn’t actively take Russia’s side.
The threats reached a fever pitch just as global political and business elites gathered in Davos for their annual meet-and-greet. Trump gave a horrific speech in which he did back off any plans to use military force to take the “piece of ice,” but what followed was so ugly and vulgar that it appeared to be the final straw for America’s friends and allies. (Among his claims was that the U.S. has “never gotten anything” from NATO — despite being the only member of the alliance to invoke Article 5, requesting and getting “collective defence” after 9/11 — that America was paying for “virtually 100%” of the organization and that the U.S. “gave
Something had shifted over those few days, a shift most eloquently expressed in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s keynote address. “Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order,” he began, “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.”
Carney correctly acknowledged that the old world order was over and that the hegemons, especially the United States — although he didn’t name it — were setting out new rules for themselves to benefit.
Carney correctly acknowledged that the old world order was over and that the hegemons, especially the United States — although he didn’t name it — were setting out new rules for themselves to benefit. He called for the world’s “middle powers” to work together to forge a new path away from the coercion and dominance of America. Carney’s speech was lauded around the world, and in many quarters here in the U.S., for its clarity and insight.
The rupture is real. Driven by delusions of grandeur and megalomania, Trump has entrenched the United States into a war in the Middle East.
Trump’s war of choice against Iran, launched in partnership with Israel and without any semblance of an imminent threat, was the fulfillment of a nearly 50-year-old right-wing wish fantasy. It goes against international law and common sense. Massive numbers of Iranians are being killed or displaced — a precursor to a major refugee crisis. The global oil market is being held hostage, and an already fragile world economy is hanging in the balance. Assuming that Iran would cry uncle on the first day and come crawling to him waving a white flag, Trump is stuck and doesn’t know what to do now that he’s belatedly realized that the famously dispersed Iranian opposition has no plans of its own.
Trump has demanded that NATO countries, as well as China, Japan, South Korea and Australia, “come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory.” They have all declined in no uncertain terms.
Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius bluntly said, “This is not our war; we did not start it.” French president Emmanuel Macron stated, “We are not party to the conflict and therefore France will never take part in operations to open or liberate the Strait of Hormuz in the current context.” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that his country will not be drawn into a “wider war.” Japan and Australia have both given thumbs down.
In response, Trump has had so many tantrums it would be impossible to list them all. Suffice to say that he’s not handling this well. He has persisted in insulting the leaders of these countries for failing to bail him out of his jam, writing long screeds on social media that rail against their alleged perfidy. Concluding one on Tuesday, he wailed, “speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!”
His America First chickens, first unleashed all those years ago in that ad, have finally come home to roost. It’s now America alone — and he did that all by his lonesome.
Federal judges have grown tired of the antics of Donald Trump’s Department of Justice under A.G. Pam Bondi. And yet the illegal antics continue. We’ll get to why in a minute.
Judge Zahid N. Quraishi on Monday ejected from his courtroom a prosecutor from the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, the New York Times reported:
Judge Quraishi grew frustrated with the office’s head of appeals, Mark Coyne, who had not formally disclosed that he would appear, and fiercely interrogated a more junior prosecutor about whether the former interim U.S. attorney, Alina Habba, still had some role in operating the office.
Judge Quraishi eventually threw Mr. Coyne out.
The judge then ordered the three leaders of the New Jersey office, who last week were found to be occupying their positions unlawfully, to appear to testify about their office’s leadership structure. Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed the unconventional three-person leadership team in December after Ms. Habba was disqualified. The leaders are Philip Lamparello, Jordan Fox and Ari Fontecchio.
It gets worse.
Last week, the judge who disqualified Ms. Habba, Matthew W. Brann, found that the office’s three-person leadership team was unlawful. He wrote that President Trump’s reliance on illegal maneuvers to appoint New Jersey’s top prosecutors might mean that “scores of dangerous criminals” could have cases dismissed or convictions reversed, because the law would be in their favor.
Quraishi dressed down the prosecution team for its agreeing to a lower sentence for a man accused of child pornography involving prepubescent children and bestiality.
The DOJ’s credibility is in the toilet.
But you knew that. What caught my attention as an exchange about that Wednesday afternoon during the second hour of “Deadline: White House.” Sarah Fitzpatrick of The Atlantic speaks to why Bondi’s DOJ and the trained lawyers in it continue to flaut the law despite their seeking a vocation based in it.
People are frightened, Fitzpatrick explains. A source told her that when people are under pressure, that is when character reveals itself. This is an administration determined to inflict retribution, public retribution, on anyone who gets sideways with Trump. It’s not simply a matter of professional consequences. With Trump’s inflamed MAGA base, Trump’s ire comes with the real threat of physical harm.
“Once safety gets engaged in the human brain,” Fitzpatrick reflects, “regardless of how educated, regardless of how well you know the law, that is a major factor that can override [better judgement].”
Or, Fitzpatrick doesn’t loop back to say, reveal someone’s true character.
The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol this morning, considers whether anyone inside his administration will tell Trump just how badly his war with Iran is going. Likely, anyone so bold would be immediately removed from the Oval Office.
Kristol presents a menu of disasters in the making, none of which any Trump adviser will tell him. (Fitzpatrick explained why above.) He writes:
Instead of receiving intelligence briefings, President Trump is watching Fox. And what he heard last night was his most influential aide, Stephen Miller, telling Laura Ingraham that “President Trump has calculated through every permutation and every degree of strategy,” and that we are en route to “an overwhelming victory.”
And so, as we find ourselves in an increasingly dangerous hole of our own making, we will keep on digging.
Trump’s justification of the Iran war is evolving from Iranian nukes, to control of oil and gas supplies. pic.twitter.com/ZUtcT5LSAL
As always, there is no bottom. And as usual, no one in Congress in either party will march into the Oval Office and demand that grandpa hand over his car keys.
