Weekend Report: What’s going on?

Trump keeps changing Iran war goal posts, now back to regime change. Gas prices surge as White House panics. Jobs numbers dismal as recessions fears grow.

It’s hard to keep up with both rationales for Donald Trump taking the country to war in Iran and what the endgame is. That is clearly because there has never been a plan, and Trump and administration officials are making it up as they go, having believed this would be over relatively quickly. It now has Trump making grand statements, such that Iran must offer “unconditionally surrender,” which seems like pure desperation—Iran responded by saying the “Epstein gang” would not run its country—and clearly signals a longer regime-change plan. But a leaked assessment from the CIA warns that no war, including a large-scale one, is likely tp oust the Iranian regime.

The Pentagon and White House are promoting online memes that make the war into a fun video game—as children are being killed and as the U.S. economy is threatened. The conflict has already had a jarring effect on an already unstable global and U.S. economy. As oil prices have surged, gas prices in the U.S. have skyrocketed. With many people already struggling—and with a subset of GOP voters always casting their vote based on the price of gas—GOP political strategists are shaken as White House aides try to contain the economic fallout.

But the Friday jobs numbers show an economy already perilously close to recession. The new numbers for February showed a loss of almost 100,000 jobs when a gain was expected and unemployment rising to 4.4%, sounding the alarm. And none of that includes the impact of the war, which economists fear will be the tipping point.