The general theory of economics is a simple one: some numbers you want to go up, other numbers you want to go down. A businessman like Donald Trump knows this — but unfortunately, during his second term, many of the wrong kinds of numbers have been going up, up, up.
Case in point: a new Consumer Price Index report issued today by the Department of Labor showed that prices and inflation are up in September, and are significantly higher than they were last year. In September alone, prices rose 0.6 percent, the highest monthly increase in several months, showing that the damage caused by Trump’s economic policies is only increasing. Those prices are, overall, 3.7 percent higher than they were last year.
Even single-digit percentage changes have big impacts on Americans’ lives, especially when some of the most vital stuff we buy has been hit the hardest. Gas prices alone rose 9.1 percent in September, accounting for almost half of the overall price increase. Fuel oil, what most people use to heat their houses, also shot up 15.3 percent. That’s the biggest increase since March, shortly after the beginning of the Iran war, which is still very much unresolved.
“Oil right now is much cheaper than it was under sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump said recently. This is technically true for at least one point in time — the price of a barrel of crude briefly spiked to almost $140 in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine — but fails to note that even after that world-historic event, prices for consumers largely stabilized. Gas, for instance, leveled out around $3.20 per gallon by the end of 2022, and stayed there till Trump took office. The national average today is $4.33.
It doesn’t seem like the Trump administration has any plan to deal with this, either. “TRUST IN TRUMP,” the White House posted back in June. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end — It always does!” Since then, Trump has escalated in Iran and rambled incoherently on the stump while hosting rallies for midterms candidates. He’s asked for strike packages to hit Iran again before the election, if needed. Got a problem with that? “Trust the process,” the White House posted yesterday.
American voters aren’t this stupid, even if Trump thinks they are. With his approval rating in the dirt and even his own party turning against him, it’s clear that people recognize that Trump’s choices — namely, invading Iran and setting up ludicrous tariffs — are what created the economic situation we’re currently dealing with. And the final indignity is that wages simply aren’t catching up. The New York Times notes that hourly wages fell by 0.5 percent in August and are down 0.7 percent in the past year, putting them right around the level they were when Trump first took office. Your pay has not gone up, but the prices have.
The only financial fix to any of this is for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates again, which analysts think will be discussed at the end of October — just in time for the midterms. The idea to raise those rates is to stop people buying stuff, hopefully stopping some inflation. This doesn’t mean life gets easier, of course, it just means taking on a loan gets more expensive. The numbers we like go down, the numbers we don’t like go up. So goes the economic world in Trump’s second term, with no end to the trend in sight.
Siri worked out of Dr. Mehmet Oz’s (right) home in an unofficial role on Kennedy’s transition.Brendan SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey has aimed to allow parents a religious exemption to school vaccinations.West Virginia Governor’s Office
Health Secretary Kennedy served as co-counsel with Siri in 2018.Jim WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
NYPD officers detain Susan Sarandon and pro-Palestinian demonstrators near the United Nations, ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu’s address, on Sept. 24, 2026.CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/Getty Images
Pete Hegseth gestures after giving a State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Sept. 30, 2026 in Quantico, Va.
Pete Hegseth’s ‘Warfighter’ Crusade Isn’t About Killing
Pete Hegseth, to his credit, understands one truth about the world: the military’s job is to kill people.
Hegseth, the newly rebranded “Secretary of War,” is obsessed with showcasing clean-cut troops trained to do just that. He refers to it as “lethality,” a word that he used twice in his roughly hour-long State of the Force speech on Wednesday, which laid out his vision for this new, more-violent military: a force of fit, unified “warfighters,” unburdened by the bureaucracy and norms of the past.
“No more diversity quotas, no more gender pronouns, no more identity months,” Hegseth said, pacing back and forth on stage. “Only the warrior ethos.”
If that wasn’t enough, he doubled down moments later.
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” Hegseth said, stumbling over his words slightly. “No fanny, no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.”
To do this, Hegseth thinks, the military needs to work out. He wants every soldier doing physical training every day. He leads group workouts at the Pentagon, hops in on PT, does pullups and pushups and flexes his muscles. This is all, broadly, fine for a Defense Secretary to do. Go ahead, engage with your troops. (Less normal, perhaps, is his obsession with monitoring troops’ testosterone levels.) But Hegseth’s CrossFit crusade isn’t really about killing.
By any objective measurement, the U.S. military is plenty good at killing. We have more bombs and more planes and more ships and better-trained and equipped troops than any country in the world. The “warrior ethos” Hegseth is so obsessed with is the relic of recruitment videos from the peak of the War on Terror, the years of bearded operators with ropy muscle covered in Kevlar fabric, who kicked in doors and sniped off heads and got their hands dirty. Those guys still exist, of course. They haven’t gone away. If they’re needed again, they will be there.
But combat doesn’t look like that anymore.
On the same day that Hegseth delivered his speech, the U.S. formally withdrew from Iraq, one of America’s last active presences in the wars of occupation that defined the military for the past two decades. War is different now. It is fought with drones and cruise missiles from the decks of ships in the Persian Gulf and dusty air-bases outside of the glittering megacities of America’s Middle Eastern oil merchants. Does every soldier involved in this need a perfect waist-to-shoulder ratio? Does it physically impede America’s interests abroad to have diversity, equity, and inclusion policies? Has the existence of trans servicemembers ever stopped the U.S. military from killing even a single person that it wanted to kill, anywhere in the world, at any time?
Hegseth, I think, would say yes. He has a personal chip on his shoulder. The “woke” elements of Army bureaucracy once removed him from service at Joe Biden’s inauguration because he has a tattoo on his arm that reads “DEUS VULT,” a common rallying cry for a very particular kind of extremist Christian nationalism. But most rational observers, people who are clear-eyed about America’s unparalleled ability to Blow Shit Up, can recognize that all of these arguments are battles of cultural semantics that have basically nothing to do with the military’s ability to kill. With respect to “lethality,” the U.S. military is pretty much fine. If you doubt this, ask an Iraqi.
Hegseth’s relentless focus on violent language and imagery is largely a marketing tactic for what is a more holistic cultural and political shift. Hegseth does not want a military that is indicative of America’s cumbersome, bureaucratic state apparatus in the same way that Trump is relentlessly focused on cutting red tape and federal “waste.” There are certainly inefficiencies in the federal system, but much of that bureaucracy exists for precisely the reason that Hegseth and Trump want it gone: it is a check on unitary power. Hegseth wants a united, homogenous military of soldiers who share his cultural prejudices, who share his bloodthirsty ethos, and who share his religion. In the State of the Force speech and many other recent public appearances, Hegseth has quoted scripture and explicitly referenced his Christian faith, a tacit assumption that he expects the men and women in uniform below him to be Christian. He wants a force that, in his own words, does not buy into the “fake news” media’s “disingenuous headlines about deployment lengths, patently false claims of low troop morale or flat-out propaganda.”
A more malleable military is also a better business opportunity. The Trump administration has been terribly effective at streamlining the process by which they can redistribute money to the oligarchs they choose. The so-called Department of War is no different. In his speech, Hegseth announced an initiative called “Project Meridian,” a sort of tech incubator for military contractors that will be run by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and, bizarrely, Newt Gingrich, who Hegseth said would be joined by “hand-picked private sector leaders.”
“Their work will be focused on discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes without any creative limitations or restrictions,” Hegseth said. “On any future battlefield, from under the earth to beyond the moon, our American warriors will be armed with absolute technological superiority because we will have the foresight to prepare today for tomorrow.”
That’s the window dressing. There’s truth there, of course: the military does have a lot of work to do to adapt to the new forms of warfare playing out in Ukraine. Battle has shifted. But what Project Meridian represents is a shift to a faster, less regulated version of the military industrial complex. There will be less oversight. The money will move where Trump and Hegseth want it to, delivered to the tech barons and traditional defense contractors who best curry favor with the administration. This is for the good of the soldier, regardless of what Hegseth says. It does not make us more deadly. It just makes a select few — some of whom aren’t even American — that much more rich.
After all, that’s the goal, right? A prosperous, united, Christian nation, led by titans of industry who bow only to a single leader who can reshape the world on a whim. No fatties, no weirdos, no radicals. No dissent, crucially. Dissent is traitorous. As soldiers, as civilians, even, all we should think about is how to kill. Hegseth and his hand-picked private sector will handle the rest.