President Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran has achieved a significant milestone, but it's not one that many US voters will likely appreciate. Data published by the American Automobile Association (AAA) on Monday show that the average…
Page A10From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
Trump strikes Iran, gas tops $4 every August day for the first time ever; he meets oil refiners.
As it ran on the front
Words matter, so let's use the ones in the wire copy. 'Trade strikes' is what they're calling it — August, the United States and Iran, first time in weeks, more coming, according to the man in the Oval Office who said so himself. 'Trade' is an interesting verb for a thing that produces no goods and no services, only wreckage and a drone Iran flew at the UAE two days later, in what's being called a new wave of retaliation. Retaliation for a trade. Follow that logic to the end of the bar.
Meanwhile the number that actually shows up on a receipt did what numbers do when a war starts: it went up and it stayed up. Every single day in August, gas ran above four dollars a gallon — first time that has ever happened, not this year, not this decade, ever, according to the same wire that's tracking the strikes. That's not a coincidence with a straight face. That's a household budget with a foreign policy attached to it.…
…(cont) Here's the part that should make you put the glass down. The President's response to a gas price problem his own strikes helped produce was not a meeting with the people paying four dollars a gallon. It was a meeting with the oil refiners. Not a rebate. Not a price cap. A sit-down with the industry that sells the product whose price just set a record — the week after the war that helped set it.
This is not a hard chain to follow, and that's what should worry you. Strike, retaliation, price spike, meeting with the sellers. Every link in that chain is in the public record, filed by three different wire services, none of them accusing anybody of anything — just reporting, in order, what happened. The order is the whole story. You don't need a motive. You need a calendar.
The people at that meeting in the refiners' conference room are not the people standing at the pump doing math on their fingers. They never are. That's not a theory. That's the guest list.
“They call it 'trading strikes,' like it's a hockey game, and somehow the scoreboard always ends up on your gas pump. Every day in August, above four bucks, first time ever — and the guy who ordered the strikes spends the week meeting with the oil companies, not the people paying the four bucks. Follow the money, it never goes where the war went.”
“The strikes were measured and proportional, and gas prices reflect global commodity markets, not domestic policy — the President meeting with refiners is standard energy security coordination. Did I say the strikes caused the prices? That's not — look, correlation isn't causation, except when this office needs it to be a talking point about supply.”
The receipts
President Trump is expected to meet with fuel refiners and distributors Tuesday as gasoline prices remain stubbornly high and are expected to be a major midterm issue. The president is expected to discuss how to expand U.S. refining…
Iran fired a drone at the United Arab Emirates on Monday in its latest retaliatory attack on the region after America fired fresh airstrikes over the weekend.
President Trump says the U.S. will hit Iran hard after it targeted American bases, which Tehran said was in retaliation for U.S. attacks in the Strait of Hormuz.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.