Dear Weekend Jolter,
For the Trump administration and congressional Republicans — not to mention millions of drivers — the pre–Memorial Day travel forecasts contained some ominous warnings about the summer ahead.
That’s even if the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz crisis are resolved soon.
“The most volatile summer at the pump in years” is how GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan described the travel season, predicting that “it could take a year or more for prices to fully recover” no matter what happens with the strait. And if Hormuz remains choked up, the company predicted fuel prices “could hit $5 per gallon or higher and potentially set new all-time records.”
AAA, reporting that Memorial Day weekend gas prices were the highest in four years, also predicted elevated prices as summer travel gets underway.
As NR’s editorial on the inscrutable and hazy Iran negotiations notes, President Trump is already constrained by the war’s poor polling and relatedly high gas prices. The dissatisfaction is likely to become more acute as those prices not only eat into family budgets but also affect summer plans.
While AAA said Memorial Day travel was expected to set a record, Reuters reported that this was the smallest annual increase in over a decade. Driving habits may soon downshift. A GasBuddy survey showed the percentage of Americans planning to drive more than two hours for the summer dropping to 56 percent, from 69 percent last year. Cost is the biggest factor for travelers, “with 67% saying gas prices are directly impacting their driving plans.”
Those costs only add to the bracing headwinds faced by the party already at a cyclical disadvantage in the midterms. Yet Trump persists in being tin-eared on the subject (and much else) — recently calling gas prices “peanuts” compared with the immensity of the Iranian threat. Jim Geraghty writes that the president’s favorite priorities — whether the ballroom or the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” or, um, the dangers of circumcision — are far out of alignment with those of everyday Americans:
You name the poll, and it shows Americans screaming at the administration: The cost of living is too high, and the economy stresses us. Fox News, the Daily Mail, Gallup, YouGov, Morning Consult — all of them consistently show intense economic pessimism and high public disapproval of how President Trump is handling the economy. . . .
The cost of living is high in vast swaths of the country. Gas prices are too high for most consumers. High gasoline prices make everything else more expensive. . . .
Because Trump just blurts out the first thing that pops into his head, he often makes statements that are tailor-made for Democratic attack ads in the midterms.
The most recent statement that is near-certain to appear in some Democratic ads is his declaration that “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” when negotiating with Iran. Less noticed in that appearance by the president is the fact that, much like his octogenarian predecessor, Trump now misremembers the inflation rate in ways more favorable to his record.
James Carville’s most famous and over-quoted advice still obtains, even if his more recent advice is terrible. As of this writing, the average cost of a gallon of gas is $4.39. The fluctuations, expressed by the gallon, might sound like peanuts. But for a car’s typical 14-gallon tank, it costs over $60 to fill up. As Americans look to the end of the school year and consider their summer plans, that’s a figure that should terrify Republicans just months from the midterms.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Mamdani plays landlord: Mamdani’s Plan to Socialize Housing
On Leo’s encyclical: AI and the Pope
The slippery slope is real: MAID Gone Mad in Canada
In honor of those lost: Memorial Day at 250
ARTICLES
Jeffrey H. Anderson: The Battle for Independence Park
Philip Klein: The Case for JD Vance to Wait
Noah Rothman: The Case for JD Vance to Run
Jim Geraghty: Jill Biden’s Unbelievable Debate ‘Stroke’ Story
Andrew McCarthy: The Carroll–Hoffman Lawfare Mess
Becket Adams: The BBC Has Fallen
Brittany Bernstein: Texas Mom Recorded as Her Premature Daughter Beat the Odds. The Videos Became a Viral Pro-Life Sensation
Mike Pence: The Next Generation of Conservative Leaders Must Embrace Civility
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Are Washington’s Most Important Gulf Allies on a Collision Course?
Ken Fisher: For America’s Service Members, Memorial Day Is a Lifetime
Marc Oestreich: The Empty Desks Are Telling Us Something
Christopher Nye: Beijing’s Disposable Operatives
Jeffrey Blehar: Final Thoughts on the Texas Senate: I Don’t Have to Like Either Paxton or Talarico
Caroline Downey: Does James Talarico Realize He’s Running to Represent Texas?
CAPITAL MATTERS
Richard Morrison writes about a “quiet revolution”: Bank Regulators Finally Back Off ‘Reputational Risk’ Overreach
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen does Chicago, for a Samaras show as well as one of the most charming galleries in America, down in the Art Institute’s basement: A Hermit Gets Naked, Goes Wild. Plus, the Marvel Called the Thorne Rooms
Armond White would prefer we not, actually, talk about Fight Club: Fight Club’s Soy Boy Revival
LOOKIN’ FOR EXCERPTS IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES? LOOK NO FURTHER
Jim Geraghty is calling BS on Jill Biden’s retelling of debate history:
Our problem is not just that we are misgoverned, and our problem is not just, as laid out in yesterday’s newsletter, that the top priorities of the president and his cabinet are not the top priorities of a majority of the electorate. . . .
No, our problem is that a significant chunk of our governing class is nowhere near as smart as they think they are, and in many cases, they’re quite dumb. And they think the American people, collectively, are dumb as well, and are easily fooled. This morning, we find that former first lady Jill Biden, who had the option of just enjoying a quiet retirement with her elderly husband, has instead chosen to emerge from private life to relitigate the notion that Joe Biden was going senile, and/or too old to serve another term.
Former first lady Jill Biden said she was “frightened” by her husband Joe Biden’s 2024 debate performance and thought he was having a stroke.
“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill Biden told CBS News Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver in an interview airing Sunday on CBS.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”
Bullcrap.
If you are genuinely concerned that the president of the United States is having a stroke or other medical emergency, you interrupt the debate. If the First Lady of the United States says, “stop the debate, I think my husband is having a stroke,” the debate will stop. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash were not going to insist that the president finish. The president travels with a top-tier medical team. They will check him out thoroughly. (Note that for the first time in history, the 90-minute debate featured two commercial breaks.)
We know that Jill Biden did not genuinely think that her husband was having a stroke, because surely even a non-medical doctor like herself knows that if someone is having a stroke, they need medical attention immediately. “With each moment that a stroke goes untreated, the nervous tissue in the brain is rapidly and irreversibly damaged. That is why it’s important to seek immediate medical attention if you or someone you know begins to experience stroke symptoms.” About one quarter of people who suffer a stroke die within one year.
When every second counts, you don’t keep the president suffering an ongoing stroke up on the stage, waiting until the end of the debate and hoping for the best.
What Jill Biden is unwittingly declaring in this implausible nearly-two-years-late spin is, “I thought my husband was suffering a medical emergency that risked permanent brain damage and possibly death, but I concluded that finishing the debate was more important.”
The post-campaign books made clear that former president Biden never finished one of his practice sessions. It is genuinely an open question of whether, in the summer of 2024, Joe Biden could still put together 90 consecutive minutes of sharp, attentive public performance.
Jeffrey H. Anderson, of the American Main Street Initiative, has an update on an important court case set to be heard next week:
As of this January, George Washington was the most heavily criticized individual at Independence Park in Philadelphia. Because he had brought several slaves north to live in the President’s House, National Park Service signs had characterized his actions as “deplorable,” “profoundly disturbing,” and having “mocked the nation’s pretense to be a beacon of liberty.” Those signs, produced during the Obama presidency, accused Washington and other founders of “injustice” and “immorality.” Sign headings read “Washington’s Deceit” and “Washington’s Death and a New Hope for Freedom.” The hero of the American Revolution was portrayed as the villain of Independence Park.
Located just one block north of the hallowed ground of Independence Hall, the President’s House Site contains the ruins of the house where Washington and John Adams lived during most of their presidencies. When visiting the site in August 2025 for a Claremont Review of Books essay, I found that 25 of its 30 signs were about slavery or race relations. The site essentially ignored the watershed events that took place there during America’s first two presidencies, and it discussed slavery without any nuance or even-handedness. In the left’s simplistic oppressor-versus-oppressed narrative, the “Father of His Country” was an oppressor — meriting condemnation, not celebration.
Shortly after the CRB essay ran, the Trump administration’s National Park Service took down the offending signs. Philadelphia sued in federal court and won at the district court level. The NPS put some of the signs back up before the Third Circuit Court issued a stay in response to the Trump administration’s appeal, ordering that no further signs be hung until that court hears oral arguments on June 2. That court’s verdict will determine whether the excellent and attractive replacement signs that the Park Service has produced — but hasn’t yet been allowed to hang — will greet visitors on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this July 4, or whether they’ll see signs condemning the man most responsible for winning that independence.
From our Memorial Day editorial:
In the year of our nation’s 250th birthday, it is fitting to start with those who died to give it birth. The American Revolution, dragging on as it did for eight years, remains the costliest of all our wars in proportion to the population — a war much wider and more destructive per capita for Americans than the Second World War. About one of every 16 free American males of military age died for the nation’s birth. Thousands who died were amateur militia protecting their own communities, such as Doctor Joseph Warren at Bunker Hill. Others perished far from home, such as those who froze in the snows of Quebec in the winter of 1775 (under General Richard Montgomery, who was one of the lost) or who landed at Penobscot in 1779 in a vain effort to liberate Maine. Some, such as Casimir Pulaski, came from across the sea to sacrifice for a new nation they knew more as a cause than as a people. Men died in swamps and rivers and snows, in Brooklyn and the Carolina backcountry, of disease and privation and aboard prison ships. Patriots, all.
The roll has never stopped. Bladensburg, Maryland. Tippecanoe, Indiana. New Orleans. Mexico City. Muddy Flat, near Shanghai. Shiloh, Tennessee. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Little Big Horn, Montana. San Juan Hill, Cuba. The Argonne Forest, France. Archangel, Russia. Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Buna–Gona, New Guinea. Ploești, Romania. Anzio, Italy. Peleliu, the Palau Islands. Chosin Reservoir, Korea. Ia Drang, Vietnam. Beirut, Lebanon. Grenada and Panama. Ramadi, Iraq. Boz Qandahari, Afghanistan. Tongo Tongo, Niger. The current war in Iran has claimed lives on land and at sea and in the sky.
They died in selfless sacrifices: sinking in submarines, gutted in bayonet charges, completing one-way bombing runs, holding rifle fire against oncoming suicide trucks, charging into blasted craters and onto tropical beaches, throwing themselves on grenades for their fellows. . . .
To paraphrase Churchill, so many owe so much to so few. Because our nation has always been a community over space and time, and not only an idea, we share our indebtedness to those who came before us, and who went before their time. May we never forget them or that debt.
CODA
Sonny Rollins, R.I.P.
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