Trump asks that the strait driving diesel to record highs be renamed after him.

…(cont) The second piece arrives in an economist's spreadsheet. Mark Zandi, who runs the numbers for Moody's Analytics for a living and has no reason to lie about them, put the six-month tab at $1,200 and change per American household — not the cost of bullets, the cost of everything the war touched on its way to your kitchen table. Call it a war tax nobody voted on, itemized by a man whose only job is to add.

The third piece arrives at the pump, and it arrived Saturday: diesel at $5.88 a gallon, another record, with gas itself pushing $4. The White House's own party ran the numbers on who gets blamed for that, and their private polling — not ours, theirs — comes back with the president's name on it. "We can't message that away," is how one Republican operative put it to Axios, which is as close to a confession as this town prints.

So here is the arithmetic nobody in Washington wants to do out loud: a family buries a 25-year-old, a household eats $1,200 it never agreed to spend, and a party that started the war can't find a slogan big enough to cover the receipt. In the middle of all this, the president is workshopping whether to put his own name on the strait that caused the shortage in the first place — TRUMP STRAIT, he called it, hotter than ever. He wants the monument before the bill's even paid.

There is a version of this country where the money finds the family that lost its son, or the household eating the $1,200, or the guy idling at the pump doing math he shouldn't have to do. It isn't this version. The money found the war. The rest of us just found out we're covering it, eighteen coffins and $5.88 a gallon at a time — and the invoice isn't done.