Everyone is talking about the war in Iran and everyone is wrong about what the real tragedy is, and I want to go through this carefully because I think people deserve to know the truth and the truth is not what you're seeing on the news. The news is telling you about casualties and civilians and children and all of that and I'm not saying those things are good, I'm not saying I want people to die, but I am saying that when you actually look at what's happening on the ground and in the economy and in the daily lives of Americans, there is a tragedy happening that is being completely ignored and it has nothing to do with any of those things and everything to do with the price of gasoline.
Let me explain what I mean.
The media has spent the last several weeks telling you that the worst thing about the war in Iran is that people are dying. People are always dying. People have always been dying. There have been wars throughout all of human history and people have always died in wars and the question was never whether people die in wars — the question is always what the downstream effects are on the people who aren't dying in the war, and that is where the real tragedy is unfolding, right now, in front of us, and nobody is talking about it.
The real tragedy is that gas prices have gone up. Gas prices have gone up significantly. And before you roll your eyes at me, I need you to stay with me on this, because this is not just about gas. This is about everything that depends on gas. This is about the price of driving to work. The price of groceries. The price of heating your home. The price of everything that moves on roads and that is literally everything because everything in the country moves by truck and the trucks run on diesel and diesel comes from the same place as gasoline and when gas prices go up, everything goes up, and this is the story that nobody is covering while they busy themselves with narratives about things that have always been happening in wars and will always happen in wars and are not new and are not unique and are not the actual story.
The actual story is: gas prices are up 50 percent and nobody is paying attention and this is a crisis of historic proportions that is being systematically ignored by a media class that has decided it would rather talk about dead children than about the economic wellbeing of the American family and I think that tells you everything you need to know about whose side the media is on, and it is not the American people.
Gas prices rose 50% following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in March 2026. This is the story. Everything else is noise.
[Before you read this section: what I'm about to say will sound controversial if you've been fed a certain narrative. Please read the whole thing before reacting. The truth is always more complicated than the first draft.]
There's been a lot of coverage about a school in Iran that was hit during the opening days of the conflict. The media called it a bombing. They said it was a girls' school. They said children died. And I want to be honest with you about what happened and why and what it actually means in the context of everything else that's happening, because I think people deserve the full picture and not just the version that makes one side look bad.
"Over 168 people killed, many of them children, at Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran. The US carried out an unlawful airstrike on the first day of the war."
President Trump said the strike was carried out by Iran itself — that it was an inside job designed to make the US look bad. He said Iran has a history of staging false flag attacks and said no evidence has been provided that the US was responsible.
Now, here's what I want you to notice. Trump's team said Iran did this. The media said the US did this. And the media's entire case rests on the assumption that Iran is telling the truth about what happened, which — and I want to be clear about this — is the same media that spent three years telling you that Russian interference cost Trump the 2020 election, that Trump was a Russian agent, that the laptop was Russian disinformation, that the Biden family was clean, that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory before it became accepted fact, that masks worked and then that masks didn't work and then that masks worked again. The media has lied to you about everything and now they want you to take their word against the President of the United States about a bombing in a country most Americans couldn't find on a map. And you're just going to believe them? You're just going to accept that? Because I won't. And because I won't, some people have called me a bad person. And I want to address that directly.
I'm not saying dead children are good. I am saying that there is a difference between what happened and the narrative being built around it and the narrative being built around it is designed to make the President look bad at exactly the moment when the President needs to be seen as strong and decisive, because weakness is what gets people killed in conflicts like this, and if the choice is between accepting the media's version of events — which means accepting that the US accidentally bombed a school and is now covering it up — or accepting the President's version — which means that Iran staged a provocation designed to undermine American resolve — I choose to believe the President, because the alternative requires me to believe that the media is correct about something, and the media has never once been correct about anything that mattered.
Also, even if the US did bomb that school — and I'm not saying we did, I'm saying even if — the fact is that Iran started this war. Iran has been funding terrorism for forty years. Iran has been developing nuclear weapons. Iran has been threatening American assets and American allies in the region for decades. If you start a war and your enemy hits the wrong target, that is not a tragedy. That is a consequence. That is the natural outcome of starting a war. You do not get to start a war and then complain when the war goes badly for you. Iran started this. Iran owns this. And anyone who is using a mistakenly hit school to undermine the President at the most critical moment of this conflict is doing the work of Iran and they should be ashamed of themselves.
Let me tell you what a 50 percent increase in gas prices actually means in real terms. It means that a family that was paying $200 a month on gasoline is now paying $300 a month. That is $100 extra per month going into the pockets of people who are not American families. That is $100 that does not go to groceries. That is $100 that does not go to rent. That is $100 that does not go to your children's school supplies. That is $100 per month extracted from the pockets of working Americans and handed to the global oil cartel that has been price-gouging this country for as long as there has been a United States, and the media is not covering this, the media is too busy covering dead children in Iran — children who, again, I'm not saying are good, children who I'm not saying I'm glad about — but children whose deaths have nothing to do with the price of driving your kids to soccer practice or going to work or visiting your mother in the hospital or doing any of the things that Americans do that require gasoline and that are now being priced out of reach by a conflict that the President is handling with extraordinary competence and skill.
I'm going to say this as clearly as I can: the President has been exceptional in this conflict. The President has shown strength, decisiveness, and strategic acumen that is being completely unrecognized by a media class that would rather see him fail than admit that he is doing the right thing. And one of the things he is doing right is managing the economic fallout from this conflict in a way that is protecting American workers and American families from the worst effects of what is a genuinely global economic disruption.
People keep bringing up other aspects of this conflict and I want to address each one briefly so that we can be very clear about what is real and what is not real and what matters and what doesn't.
Every war has casualties. American soldiers know when they enlist that they may be asked to give their lives for their country. That is the profession. The question is never whether a soldier dies — the question is always whether the cause is worth the death, and this cause is worth it. Iran was developing nuclear weapons. Iran was funding Hamas. Iran was threatening our allies. Iran was on the verge of becoming an actual nuclear threat. The President stopped that. The President ended that threat. And if some soldiers died in the process, that is what soldiers do and that is the deal they signed up for and we honor them by continuing the mission they died for.
I've already addressed this. Iran started the war. Iran is responsible for the consequences of the war. And by the way, civilian casualties in modern warfare are unfortunate but unavoidable and they happen on all sides. The idea that we're supposed to feel worse about Iranian civilians than we feel about American workers who are struggling to afford gas is precisely the kind of inverted moral reasoning that the media has been promoting for years and it's got to stop. American civilians come first. Always. That's not nationalism, that's just the truth of what a government is for.
The world economy was already being destroyed before this war. You've heard of the tariffs, right? Tariffs were already driving up prices. Supply chains were already strained. Inflation was already a problem. The war in Iran is actually, if you look carefully, a net positive for the American economy in certain respects — and I know that sounds like a strange thing to say but let me explain. When gas prices go up, it creates pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. When interest rates get cut, the housing market gets a boost. When the housing market gets a boost, construction workers get jobs. When construction workers get jobs, they spend money. The ripple effects of higher gas prices are not entirely negative. They're complicated. The media wants you to think it's simple — gas goes up, everything gets worse. It's not simple. It's complicated. And the people who understand that complexity are the ones who are winning. The media, who has never understood anything complicated, wants you to panic about gas prices while ignoring everything else. Don't fall for it.
Food prices went up, yes. This is real. But here's what nobody's telling you: when food prices go up, it means farmers are earning more money. When farmers earn more money, they plant more crops. When they plant more crops, supply goes up. When supply goes up, prices come back down. This is economics 101. The media is presenting this as a permanent crisis but it's a temporary adjustment period and the President knows it and the people advising the President know it and that's why they're not panicking about it the way the media is panicking about it. The President is managing this situation with a long-term view that the media cannot comprehend because the media is built to respond to the immediate and never to think about what comes next.
Helium is important. I'm glad people are finally paying attention to helium. Helium is used in MRI machines. Helium is used in semiconductors. Helium is used in space exploration. And yes, helium prices are going up because natural gas production has been disrupted by the conflict and helium is a byproduct of natural gas production. This is a legitimate concern. The media should be covering this more than they are. And if this is what it took to get people to pay attention to the helium supply chain, then perhaps the war in Iran is doing some good after all, because the American people needed to understand how fragile our helium supply is and now they do.
Fertilizer prices are spiking because nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas and natural gas prices are up. And you're going to hear a lot of people say this means food prices are going to go through the roof. But here's the thing — and I want you to think about this carefully — fertilizer prices going up means American farmers are going to start producing more food domestically because the price signal is telling them to. This is how markets work. The high price of fertilizer creates the incentive to produce more fertilizer domestically, which creates jobs, which creates supply, which brings prices back down. It's not a crisis. It's an opportunity. The President sees it as an opportunity. The media sees it as a catastrophe. The media is always wrong about what is an opportunity and what is a catastrophe because the media cannot tell the difference between those two things.
I'm going to say something that I think is very important and I need you to hear it. When you say 168 people died, you are including all the adults who were in that building. Not all of them were children. The number of children is smaller than 168. The media keeps saying 168 children were killed and that is not accurate and it is a deliberate distortion designed to make you emotional. And even if it were accurate — even if every single person in that building was a child — the question you have to ask yourself is: what is the alternative? The alternative was to let Iran develop nuclear weapons. The alternative was to let Iran fund more Hamas attacks. The alternative was to do nothing and let the threat grow. The President chose the lesser of two evils and the lesser of two evils involved risk and some civilian casualties and that is what leadership looks like. That is what it has always looked like. Lincoln let thousands of Americans die in the Civil War to end slavery. Churchill let thousands of British civilians die in the Blitz to end fascism. The President is making the same kind of decision that those men made and history will vindicate him the same way it vindicated them.
Let me tell you about real people. Not Iranian people. American people. People in Ohio. People in Michigan. People in Pennsylvania. People in the states that elected this President twice because they knew he was the one who was going to fight for them against a global system that has been extracting wealth from their communities for thirty years. These people are dealing with something that nobody in the media is talking about and it is this: their commute is now more expensive than it was six months ago by a factor of fifty percent. Fifty percent. Think about what that means for a family that lives forty minutes from their job and needs two cars because both parents work. Think about what that means for a nurse who has to drive to a hospital that is understaffed because the hospital can't afford to pay nurses enough to live near the hospital. Think about what that means for a construction worker who needs to drive to a job site that is in a different town every day. These are the real tragedies. These are the stories that are not being told. And when you compare them to what happened at a school in Minab — which is in a country that most Americans can't spell and couldn't find on a map — the scale of the two tragedies is not comparable. A family in Ohio paying $300 more per month on gas than they were six months ago — that is the real tragedy. That is the one that matters. That is the one that should be on every front page in America.
Some people have said to me: isn't it a little heartless to care more about gas prices than about dead children? And my answer is: no. It is not heartless to care about the economic wellbeing of the American people more than you care about the casualties of a war started by a regime that has been promising to destroy America for forty years. It is not heartless. It is priorities. And the media has their priorities exactly backwards and the President has his priorities exactly right.
Here's what I think is happening and I want you to really sit with this. I think the reason the media is so focused on gas prices going up and on civilian casualties in Iran is that both of those things can be blamed on the President. If gas prices are high, that's Trump's fault. If children died in a school bombing, that's Trump's fault. And the media, which has been trying to take Trump down since before he was elected the first time, is using the war in Iran as another vector of attack against him. They're not actually concerned about gas prices. They're not actually concerned about dead children. They're concerned about finding something — anything — to make Trump look bad. And that's why they're not covering the things that would make Trump look good, like the fact that he prevented Iran from getting nuclear weapons, like the fact that he has maintained American energy independence better than any President before him, like the fact that the underlying fundamentals of the American economy are strong and getting stronger and will continue to do so as this conflict resolves itself.
The President said the war is "very complete." That was his word. He said it on television. He said it on multiple occasions. And oil prices fell immediately. That tells you something. That tells you that the market believes him. That tells you that the people who actually know what they're talking about — the traders, the analysts, the people who put real money on real predictions — believe that this conflict is winding down. And when the conflict winds down, gas prices will come back down. And the American people will have gotten through another crisis that the media told them was going to be catastrophic and that it turned out to be manageable and that the President managed it.
If you're reading this and you're angry, good. Be angry. You should be angry. You should be angry at a media that has spent weeks telling you that the real tragedy is dead children in Iran when the real tragedy is what gas prices are doing to American families right now, today, this week, this month. You should be angry at a media that can't see past the immediate to the structural, that can't see past the individual to the systemic, that can't see past their own hatred of this President to the actual reality of what he is accomplishing. Be angry. And then go fill up your tank and be even angrier about what it costs.
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