Hi, everyone. It's 4 o'clock in New York on a Friday. Donald Trump woke up today between a rock and a hard place.

The rock came in the form of surging inflation and gas prices. And the hard place is the fool,

first lady Melania Trump made out of his acting attorney

general Todd Blanche, who brushed away the Jeffrey Epstein story as old news earlier this week.

First, the crippling economic news. Inflation surged to its highest levels in the United

States in two years because of the global energy crisis created by the war with Iran.

March saw a record 25% jump in gas prices for U.S. consumers hovering near $4 a gallon.

If you wanted to go on a European vacation this summer, now there's this to worry about.

Airports there are bracing for a jet fuel shortage if oil can't pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Over in Ireland, the Irish government had to call in the army today to quell protests over fuel shortages caused by the war with Iran.

It is a full-scale global economic crisis that might actually be even worse than those headlines and

worse than we think because the prices of oil that we track don't fully capture the full scale

of this disruption. And there's no sign of relief right now either, thanks to the fact that

despite the two-week truce, Iran is maintaining its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran is using it as a geopolitical and economic advantage. On that, the New York Times writes

this, quote, Iran is giving priority to a trickle of vessels from countries that either trade

directly with it or not viewed as hostile to the Iranian government. It's putting Donald Trump on the

defensive. Trump wrote this, quote, there are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going

through the Hormuz trade. They better not be, and if they are, they better stop now, exclamation point.

Susan Glasser writes in The New Yorker that it is a

failure on multiple fronts in terms of Donald Trump's objectives, quote, Iran has not only retained

control of the strait through which one-fifth of the world's oil and gas supply flows. It now asserts

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