Trump walked into the Oval Office to talk about airport infrastructure and walked out having told the country that America’s air traffic control towers are “literally falling down”—not one has—and that grass “is a life also.” That was the warm-up. Over the next several minutes he misplaced Mardi Gras by five months, called the United Kingdom a “prime suspect,” shrugged off a direct question about Xi arming Iran, and reached for “the Star War thing” when he meant a monorail. David Shuster has the whole tape, in sequence, and in sequence it is considerably worse than whichever twenty seconds of it crossed your feed.
But the glitch reel is not why this one is behind the wall. In the back half of that same news conference, Trump talked himself from annihilation to grace and back inside a single breath—and from there the segment turns to the story almost nobody in American media is covering yet. An oil inventory curve that has been running down for weeks. A Persian Gulf that Iran has said it will keep closed. And a date that the analysts who trade this for a living have started circling on the calendar. Shuster names the date, the number you will see at the pump, and the long-dead president Trump is now being measured against. If they are right, the grass line will be the least of it.
Cliff’s Note: The first half of David’s piece is a glitch reel. Glitch reels are cheap—every outlet in America can cut one, and most of them did this week. The second half is not cheap. That is David doing the work almost nobody in this business is doing right now: reading the oil inventory curve, talking to the people who trade this stuff for a living, and putting a date and a number on something that is going to show up in your gas tank and your grocery bill before Labor Day. That reporting costs money. It costs David’s time and it costs ours, and we do not have a hedge fund or a billionaire standing behind us. We have you.
If you are already paying: thank you. You are the reason this exists.
If you are not, this is a good week to start.
—Cliff
