The Weekend Round- Up

4 May, 2026

Over the weekend, Donald spoke at The Villages in Florida. The Villages is an almost exclusively white, fairly wealthy part of the state, and Donald was there to address a crowd of mostly senior supporters. What was billed as a policy speech felt much more like a campaign rally. As is almost always the case with him, it revealed just how disconnected he is from reality.

He spoke about a new word he has learned, or maybe invented. Who’s to say. The word is affordability. This is what he said:

Donald: And the Democrats start screaming, affordability, affordability. They’re the ones that caused the problem. I’ll tell you one thing. They got one good line of bullshit. That’s one thing I’ll say about it. They are so bad. They are so bad. It’s true. Affordability. It’s the first time I heard the word, I’m two days in and I watched a sleazebag, one of these crazy congressmen get up and he’s being interviewed. He said, affordability, prices are too high. I’ve just got there. But we brought prices way down. They gave us tremendously high prices and they’ll give them to you again if they take over.

Your periodic reminder that this language is now presidential.

Affordability is a very serious issue for the American people, and almost every economic and national security policy Donald has imposed has made the issue worse. So of course, he needs to convince his followers that it is a hoax, a Democratic hoax.

Another periodic reminder that it is the people in the audience who laugh at his unseemly rhetoric and who swallow his lies who are the problem.

Donald continued this weekend to distance himself from ever getting the coveted Nobel Peace Prize by making it clear that his ambitions go beyond Iran and Venezuela. He is now floating the idea that Cuba could be next as part of an expanding pressure campaign. This is what he said:

Donald: Originally a place called Cuba, which we will be taking over almost immediately. What we’ll do on the way back from Iran, we’ll have one of our big, maybe the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, the biggest in the world. We’ll have that come in, stop about a hundred yards offshore, and they’ll say, Thank you very much. We give up.

Yes. I’m sure that is exactly how that is going to play out.

The fact that the President of the United States is using such menacing language should alarm everybody, but again, the people in the audience found it funny.

Also, the Iranian situation is not anywhere near over. This is a quagmire Donald chose to put us in the middle of, and so far, it is Iran that holds the upper hand and has all the cards.

On Sunday’s Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan asked National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett whether the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz amounts to an act of war. Hassett struggled to define what even constitutes a war. This is what he said:

Margaret Brennan: You said the blockade is still on. A blockade is an act of war. Are we at war with Iran?

Kevin Hassett: Iran shut down the straits. Iran shut down the straits. And the only ones they were letting through were Iranian ships and President Trump didn’t think that was acceptable.

Margaret Brennan: So we are still at war with Iran?

Kevin Hassett: I don’t know what the definition of war is when we’re not shooting and we’re negotiating and they’re under a lot of pressure. There’s no reason, I think, right now to do anything other than what we’re doing.

Iran shut down the strait, so we decided to shut it down more.

As for the definition of war, Hassett clearly did not have an answer.

This morning on Fox Business, Transportation Secretary and MTV’s Road Rules contestant, Sean Duffy was asked when Americans could expect some relief from surging gas prices. This is what he said:

Sean Duffy: So a couple things. Again, when the Strait Hormuz opens, you’re going to see, I think, oil prices come down consistently when that takes place. But a lot of Democrats are making hay on this issue… So in the Democrat world, the alternative is to have a nuclear Iran, number one, but do you think Democrats want energy prices to come down? President Trump, the exact opposite. We want to have American energy dominance, drill, baby, drill, more energy coming out. At some point, we have to have a little bit longer viewpoint. If we actually have the straits open, not controlled by Iran, Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons. We’re drilling in America, producing energy in America. I recognize that prices have come up, but they will start to go down immediately once the straight issues are resolved. So this is strong leadership by the president.

In other words, he did not answer the question.

If the Strait of Hormuz were to open tomorrow, which is unlikely, it would take time for oil prices to stabilize. They would not go down overnight.

When asked whether rising fuel costs could trigger more corporate strain after the collapse of Spirit Airlines, Kevin Hassett again avoided the question. This is what he said:

Kevin Hassett: Well, don’t forget that the Spirit Airlines was chapter 11 twice because they basically didn’t have a business model that was working. That’s right. And the other airlines are still operating…they have thought ahead way more than the management of Spirit is hedge their jet fuel purchases and so on so that short-term energy shocks don’t have a big effect on their business. Certainly it’ll affect profits for the airlines for a quarter or so, but they’re very, very healthy right now.

Sorry, but I sense a pattern here. Kevin Hassett clearly does not want to answer the question either. Spirit Airlines was not in the best financial position, that much is true. It was a budget airline with very little margin to absorb an economic downturn or a sharp increase in fuel costs. But that does not change the reality that rising gas prices are a significant factor in its collapse.

As for the claim that other airlines are doing just fine, that may be true on the surface. But it is not because they are insulated from higher fuel costs. It is because they are passing those increased costs on to consumers.

Over on Fox, Commerce Secretary Scott Bessent was asked about Spirit Airlines and what went wrong. This is what he said:

Scott Bessent: …So this is just more of the mess we inherited from the Biden administration. In September 2022, Elizabeth Warren, who loves to write letters, sent a letter to the Justice Department, to the Transport Department saying that they should oppose the merger with Spirit Airlines… It wasn’t treasury, it was commerce that was trying to put something together, but the reason we were here was because the merger, the Biden administration opposed the merger. We shouldn’t have been here in the first place.

Again, none of this has anything to do with Donald’s disastrous economic policies. According to them, it is all Joe Biden’s fault. Elizabeth Warren’s name was invoked as well, as though she bears responsibility for the collapse of Spirit Airlines. At a certain point, the argument becomes almost absurd. It rained over the weekend. I had wanted to go to the beach. I suppose that, too, is Joe Biden’s fault. That is the level of seriousness we are dealing with.

You heard Scott Bessent cite Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, as somehow contributing to the Spirit Airlines debacle.

Speaking of people without a moral compass, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made the Sunday rounds and was asked by Meet the Press host Kristen Welker whether individuals posting messages like James Comey did, or those selling “86” merchandise, could also face prosecution for what is now being treated as a criminal act.

This is what he said:

Todd Blanche: … Every one of those statements do not result in indictments, of course. There are facts, there are circumstances, there are investigations that have to take place. And we have charged dozens and dozens of men and women this year with threatening President Trump and others. So this isn’t a new charge we’re bringing.

Todd Blanche: … the seashells are part of that case. I mean, that’s what the public sees, but without a doubt, and it should be evident by the fact that it’s been 11 months since the posting and the indictment, there is an investigation that takes place and that’s the result. The result of that investigation is the indictment that was returned last week.

It took eleven months to bring an indictment over a photograph of seashells.

And again, because one of the Republican Party’s defining characteristics is hypocrisy, the same people insisting that this is a serious matter continue to ignore the countless instances that do not serve their narrative.