It was a surreal week, bursting with surreal news generated by the surreal idiot who sits in the White House, but maybe the most surreal headline of all was the one I saw Thursday morning telling me that Costco was rationing motor oil. The limit they’ve set is very likely more than your average motorist needs, but still. Rationing! Am I in England in the 1950s? And on top of that, the price has nearly doubled since April, to $58 for a 10-quart pack.

Or maybe it was the news that diesel had topped $6 a gallon. Before the war in Iran, it was about $3.60 a gallon. Some stations, in fact, are out of diesel. That’s right, on the signs that normally list the price per gallon of diesel fuel, it just says “Out.” Diesel powers trucks and delivery vans and tractors and other farm equipment. (Harvest season is around the corner, by the way.) Also freight trains. And buses and ships and barges and tugboats. And bulldozers and backhoes and cranes, and I guess that also means forklifts—you know, the kind seen this week crashing repeatedly into the Kennedy Center. The nation’s, and the world’s, commerce, in other words, runs on diesel gasoline.

For years, we’ve wondered whether American democracy would survive Donald Trump. We still do, of course, and by the way, if you haven’t read Judge Michael Luttig’s terrifying piece on that subject that we posted last week, do so immediately (well, after you finish this). But now, we need to fret that capitalism may not survive Trump, and that between now and January 2029, assuming the GOP doesn’t go Twenty-Fifth Amendment on him, he’ll single-handedly bring not only the American but the global economy to its knees.

America is finally coming to terms with just what an ignoramus Trump is. In his first term, he inherited a steady economy with a record 75 consecutive months of job growth. Until the pandemic hit, he didn’t do anything to screw it up. He inflicted horror after horror on the nation in other realms, but until March 2020, his economy was fine to good.

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