Standing alongside his son’s Ford pickup truck at a central Iowa gas station off Interstate 80, Francisco Castillo was not happy.
He had voted for President Donald Trump in the last election. He believed Trump had strengthened the economy in his first term, and he wanted more of that.
“I thought that he was going to bring some of those things back,” said Castillo, a 43-year-old factory worker. And now? “He said he was going to bring gas down, but the war in Iran is now making everything worse.”
It seems a country divided on so many fronts is finding common ground in pain at the pump, where the cost of the Iran war is hitting Americans squarely in the wallet and aggravating people across the political spectrum.


That’s the one that blows my mind. I’ll be talking to reactionary centrists (that are probably voting Republican at least sometimes) and they will often concede a lot, but then say something like, “yeah, but at least Republicans know how to run an economy”?
It’s like…in what fucking universe? They like to point to Covid as somehow bringing it all down for poor PEDOnald, but cannot really show how he was remarkably better than the economy under Obama prior to Covid? Also, they cannot really point to what policy of Biden’s was so bad for the economy?