Pete Hegseth and Juan Ciscomani are buddies. But GasBuddy is not their buddy.
We were going to write about Affordability, the mid-term election topic important to voters. But it turns out, one can’t write about Affordability without first addressing the Iran War. We call it Donald, Pete, and Juan’s War because Donald Trump mindlessly started it, his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has no idea how to conduct it, and Trump’s GOP toadies in Congress, including our very own Juan Ciscomani, do nothing to persuade him to quit the loser’s game into which he has gotten the US. As we often say at Unseat Ciscomani, “Silence is Compliance.”.
Two and half months since its start the bombing of Iran has accomplished little in the military way besides death and destruction (including Iranian-waged retaliation on our Middle Eastern allies). It is true, though, that the great tycoon Donald Trump has given the murderous Iranian regime a really sweet real estate deal—almost total control over the Strait of Hormuz bottleneck that has stopped the shipping of Middle East crude oil and liquid natural gas, among other commodities. Iran’s choke hold on the Strait threatens America and the rest of the world with economic catastrophe.
As a result:
- Economic blogger Justin Wolfers writes “economists at [the investment bank] Goldman Sachs reckon that U.S. economic growth will be 0.5 percentage points lower as a result of the war. If it takes a couple of years for the economy to return to normal, that slower growth rate would mean around $400 billion in lost income, and Goldman warns it could be nearly twice as bad.”
- “Executives across retail, restaurants and packaged goods are increasingly worried about US shoppers with tighter budgets amid surging gas prices caused by the conflict in the Middle East,” says Bloomberg News.
- Here’s an historic graph of gasoline prices in Tucson, courtesy of Gasbuddy.com. The dizzying climb to the far right is when the bombs began falling on Iranian soil.
Juan Ciscomani tells us everything is under control (what else could he say, he’s as stuck being a Trump yes-man as tankers are stuck in the Persian Gulf). ”The conflict is ‘very close to being over,’ he stated a week ago.
But just Monday, “President Donald Trump said the ceasefire between the US and Iran was on ‘massive life support’ after he rejected Tehran’s latest peace offer,” according to Bloomberg News.
The bottom line? Well-respected foreign affairs author Robert Kagan’s view is that “With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world…the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.”
Ciscomani’s done nothing except act as Trump and Hegseth’s cheerleader as ordinary folks in the US will suffer noticeable, and perhaps serious, hits to their economic welfare. He deserves to be voted out in November.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/opinion/hegseth-war-
https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts
https://www.azpm.org/s/103261-ciscomani-iran-war-is-very-close-to-being-over
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/05/iran-war-trump-losing/687094
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