The economy is fine. This is true, and it is the most useful sentence the administration owns this summer, because both halves of it are doing precisely the work they were assigned. The aggregate holds. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development will tell you, accurately, that the United States is a net energy exporter, and that stronger export earnings cushion the national accounts even while the war the President started keeps the Strait of Hormuz dark and the price of a barrel climbing from roughly a hundred dollars toward the hundred and thirty to one hundred seventy the futures desks are modeling if the closure holds through August. The number called the American economy can absorb that. The number can chug along almost indefinitely. The number was never the thing that bleeds.
He called it a small price to pay. He said it into a camera, surveying a supply disruption the International Energy Agency described as the largest in the history of the global oil market, and the phrasing was, as it always is, more honest than he meant it to be. The price is small. It is small to him. The entire architecture of the sentence depends on the cost being absorbed by an abstraction, the world, the market, the aggregate, anyone at all other than the specific man invoicing it from a podium in front of an aircraft. But the invoice is real, and it prints daily, in foot-high digits, outside every gas station in every contested district in the country. The only question worth asking is who is standing at the register when it does.