On this Labor Day, Trump offers no sympathy to working Americans

A Truth Social post in which President Donald Trump declared that there are "too many non-working holidays in America” and demanded that “it must change,” went viral on X this week, with analysts — incorrectly — labeling the post Trump’s 2026 “Labor Day message” to Americans.

The post was actually written on June 19, 2025, more than a year earlier, yet its content and the economic conditions it describes have changed little enough in the interim that the mis-dating is almost irrelevant.

As the War against Iran (or as JD Vance and the White House insist we refer to it: the “operation” in Iran) has entered its sixth month with no end in sight, and as American families continue to bear the costs of the conflict both directly through their tax dollars and indirectly through inflation, the Trump administration has settled on a midterm message that is essentially: everything is fine, and in fact, it could be worse, so stop complaining.

This was the spirit of JD Vance’s White House press conference on Thursday, where the Hillbilly Elegy author told Americans who are now paying a national average of $4.15 per gallon of regular gas that fuel prices “frankly, could have been much, much higher were it not for our efforts,” attributing the problem to Iran being “really, really crazy,” and suggesting that Americans should be grateful for the current prices. This is recognizably propaganda, of the weakest variety.

On February 27, one day before the war began, AAA reported the national average price of regular gas was $2.98 per gallon. But after the U.S. and Israel launched the war by bombing a girls’ school and murdering the spiritual leader of Shia Islam, Iran did what analysts had long predicted it would in that situation and asserted control over the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil normally passes.

Iran has said that in order to re-open that crucial waterway, the U.S. must lift its naval blockade, end its sanctions regime, release frozen Iranian assets, pay compensation for war damage, and end “war and aggression against Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq,” conditions that are hardly unexpected and perhaps unrealistic, but would be a straightforward starting point for negotiations for most governments, except apparently our own.

It is the U.S. bombing civilians and serving Israeli interests — rather than the supposedly crazy behavior of Iran’s leaders — that explain why six months later, American households have absorbed roughly $640 in additional fuel costs, as calculated by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The chief economist at Moody’s Analytics recently told NBC News that the Iran War has cost the average American household at least $1,200 more than they would have paid if it had never started. This does not include the costs of sustaining military operations, which are also siphoned away from American families through their taxes, with internal Pentagon estimates of that cost reaching up to $100 billion.

The tens and perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars foisted upon Americans comes as the nation suffers through a grueling affordability crisis, which has only been exacerbated by the record rise in diesel prices — the fuel necessary to transport and produce goods caused by Iran War disruptions to global transit.

A May story from local Louisiana news channel KTAL reported that “meals that once cost under $10 are now pushing closer to $15 or $20” at fast food restaurants across the country and attributed the problem to “food prices, transportation expenses, and supply chain pressures,” each of which has risen significantly due to the Iran War.

The response from MAGA influencers like March Thiessen and Ben Shapiro, whose leader ascended to power on a promise to lower prices, has been to shame Americans and tell them it’s their own fault. This is exactly what Rep. Dan Crenshaw did when he posted that ungrateful Americans should “stop whining, get a job, [and] eat Ramen.”

The demands for Americans to treat fast food slop as a luxury item comes as the total U.S. household debt reached a record $18.6 trillion in the first quarter of the year, according to the New York Federal Reserve, and buy-now-pay-later borrowing — largely invisible to the credit files regulators and lenders monitor — adds to that number. A Lending Tree poll cited by CBS News in early September shows that nearly 30% of BNPL customers use the financial services to pay for groceries, 23% of respondents use BNPL to pay for medical, dental or veterinary expenses, or rent, while “more than half of those borrowers — 54 percent — say they wouldn’t be able to make ends meet without the loans.”

The dire straits of Americans — and the refusal of the U.S. federal government to intervene to resolve the national interest of mitigating debt peonage— have been identified by Israelis as ripe for exploitation, with a viral Jerusalem Post op-ed this week suggesting that the U.S. government should use the record indebtedness of today’s youth as leverage to compel them to join the U.S. military. The op-ed argued that this would be necessary for achieving the Israeli goal of “a ground invasion of Iran,” that would certainly kill hundreds if not thousands of young Americans.

Absurd as it is, the proposal seems more realistic than expecting the federal government to intervene on behalf of a national interest it has already abandoned. Because on a holiday meant to honor American workers, the administration’s response to mass discontent around surging debt and affordability has been to demand they pay even more for a war they didn’t choose, and to stop complaining about it.