June 1, 2026

Suck It Up, Buttercup

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Picture the schoolyard. There’s always one kid — you know the type. Chubby, well-fed, never missed a meal in his life, his daddy’s money practically visible in the stitching of his jacket. He’s seven years old and he has somehow already learned to sneer. He takes your lunch money, shoves you into the chain-link fence, and then — this is the part that stays with you — he looks genuinely confused when you cry. Why are you making such a big deal out of this? It’s not like you needed it.

That kid grew up — physically, and certainly materially. But his thought process never evolved beyond the schoolyard. He just got better at stealing lunch money.

Donald Trump has spent the better part of five decades extracting wealth from ordinary Americans with the cheerful efficiency of a toll booth that only runs in one direction. The Trump University settlements. The charity fraud. The inflated insurance valuations. The bankruptcies that protected him while contractors, vendors, and small business owners swallowed the losses. The man has been monetizing other people’s misfortune since before most of his current supporters were born, and he has done it all with the breezy confidence of someone who has never once had to decide between filling the tank and buying groceries.

Which makes his recent remarks not merely offensive, but clarifying.

Last week, asked whether rising costs for ordinary Americans were weighing on him as he negotiated with Iran, the President of the United States delivered what may be the most honest sentence of his political career: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

He wasn’t being glib. He wasn’t caught off-guard. He said it the way you say something you’ve always believed and never before been asked to defend out loud.

And then, as if to make absolutely certain the point had landed, he followed it up this week by calling the surge in gas prices — now averaging $4.56 a gallon nationally, topping four dollars in all fifty states for the first time in four years, while California motorists stare down six-dollar signs at the pump — “peanuts.” He delivered this verdict while standing at the construction site of a $400 million White House ballroom. The setting was not accidental. The man has a gift for mise-en-scène, even when he doesn’t know what that means.

“This is peanuts,” he said. “I appreciate everybody putting up with it for a little while.”

There it is. The seven-year-old bully, grown enormous, standing in the rubble of your financial security and asking you to appreciate his patience with your suffering.

Let us be clear about what “peanuts” means in practice. It means that the average American family, which according to the AAA is now spending roughly sixty dollars more per tank than it did when this war began, is dealing with an abstraction too small to register in the mental universe of a man who just billed taxpayers a billion dollars for a ballroom. It means that the nurse in Arizona staring at a $4.99 gallon, or the delivery driver in Pennsylvania whose margins evaporated somewhere around March, or the retiree in New Hampshire rationing weekend drives — these people and their choices and their quiet, undramatic desperation are simply beneath calculation.

Newsweek reported this week that Trump’s economic approval rating has now sunk to 37 percent. The White House responded by praising the President’s “historic progress.” The disconnect between those two sentences is a poem unto itself.

Democrats reacted with appropriate outrage, which is to say, they reacted in the only way available to people who are not currently building ballrooms. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro noted that gas in his state had crossed $4.60 a gallon and that the President, by his own admission, “literally doesn’t give a damn.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island — perhaps with a wink to Planters — pointed out that the price increase amounts to roughly the cost of a $1.59 packet of peanuts per gallon. Representative Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania calculated that American drivers have collectively paid forty billion dollars more for gas since the war began.

Forty billion dollars. That is not peanuts to anyone who has ever pumped their own gas.

When offered the opportunity to walk back any of this — “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” or “peanuts,” or any of it — Trump called his remarks “perfect.” Which is the rhetorical equivalent of the schoolyard bully, confronted by a teacher, shrugging and saying he was just playing around and besides it wasn’t even that hard a shove.

These remarks came in the same week that Trump claimed to have lowered prices “incredibly” — which he has not — and to have achieved a “very substantial” drop in gas prices — which also has not happened. The bully, it seems, is not only indifferent to your pain. He’s now insisting you’re imagining it.

There’s a particular cruelty in wealth that has never been earned in any meaningful sense — wealth assembled through leverage, litigation, and other people’s losses. It produces a specific kind of blindness, not the blindness of ignorance but the blindness of entitlement, the incapacity to imagine that other people’s money is real in the way that your money is real. To someone who has spent his life treating bankruptcy as a business strategy and working people as line items, the idea that a fifty-cent spike in gas prices could reroute a family’s month simply does not compute. It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s that the concept doesn’t load.

That is the thing about the fat kid in the schoolyard. He wasn’t evil. He was just profoundly, constitutionally unable to understand that the lunch money was yours to begin with.

The difference is that he eventually graduated. This one got elected.

FTS