The Las Vegas airport last Friday was chaos. Air Force One was on the tarmac, and nothing moved until the president finished his business. Twenty minutes later, I was still waiting for a bar seat, stuck in that familiar American limbo where power dictates pause and the rest of us adjust.
It was a small thing. A minor inconvenience in a packed terminal. But it crystallized something larger that has been building for years: Trump and the movement around him have spent a decade training Americans to see the world through a narrow lens. Distrust the press that broadens your vision. Doubt institutions that ask you to consider strangers. Treat empathy as weakness. Look inward. Prioritize what you can see and touch.
Now Trump needs that same public to hold a war in its moral imagination. The problem is, he taught them not to.
I drove home to Cleveland for my uncle's funeral. I had planned a Sunday trip to Pittsburgh to visit family and my mother's grave. I didn't make the drive. Gas prices stopped me cold.
Not as a metaphor. As a fact.
The national average hovers just above $4 per gallon, more than a dollar higher than before the conflict began. In the Bay Area, drivers are paying close to $7. A year ago, we thought $3 was steep. The war that dominates headlines arrives in Americans' lives as a line item on a receipt, not as a moral reckoning.
This is by design. The administration no longer frames the conflict in terms of what it destroys. It frames it in terms of when gas prices fall. The treasury secretary predicted $3 by summer. The energy secretary said it might take until 2027. Trump dismissed that as wrong. Nobody knows. The narrative keeps shifting, but the message stays the same: your pain is temporary, your wallet matters more than your conscience, and soon you'll forget this ever happened.
The numbers prove how thoroughly this works. Foreign policy ranks nowhere near the top of public concerns. Gas prices do. Grocery bills. Housing costs. Healthcare. The visible, the immediate, the painful.
Americans don't need a moral case against this war. They already have a reason to resent it: the cost at the pump every time they fill a tank. The bombing of a girls' school in Iran, believed caused by U.S. action, was a war crime. But dead children don't move public opinion the way rising fuel costs do. That's an indictment of how we've been conditioned to think, and Trump's movement built that conditioning on purpose.
He is now being undone by the very instrument he created. A movement trained to judge everything by personal cost is judging this war by personal cost. The aperture never opened. The concern never extended. Trump taught America to care only about what touches the wallet, and a war started in his name is touching wallets across the country.
Here's the danger: if gas prices drop and Trump's approval ratings climb, that won't mean the conflict was justified. It will mean the scheme worked. Break something. Extract enormous costs in money and blood and moral standing. Half-fix it through chaotic diplomacy. Claim victory. Watch Americans exhale, move on, and forget.
Back at the airport, Air Force One eventually lifted off. The runway cleared. Flights resumed. Within the hour, most passengers had boarded and were somewhere over the desert, the delay mostly forgotten, the mechanism complete.
Pain recedes, and we let it take memory with it.
Don't accept that trade this time. Remember the calculation you made at the pump. Remember the trip you decided wasn't worth the cost. This didn't have to happen. None of us had to pay this price, no matter what the people responsible now claim about whether it was worth it.
Author James Rodriguez: "Trump built a politics of willful myopia and is now trapped by it, but that's no comfort to anyone still calculating whether they can afford to drive."
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