How We’re All Now Paying the Price for the Myth of Trump’s Competence

The administration’s war with Iran is setting a mountain of taxpayer dollars on fire every day—mostly because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

At some point, early Wednesday morning, the cost of the Iran War will top $10 billion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a paper last week pegging the cost of this latest misadventure at $891 million a day. I’ve seen higher estimates, but CSIS is a respected nonpartisan outfit, so let’s go with their number for now. The report states that the vast majority of this money had not been previously budgeted, especially the spending on munitions. One Patriot interceptor missile costs close to $4 million, and we’re apparently burning through them. And “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth promises that we’re just getting revved up.

None of us knows how long this war is going to last. But it’s certainly no Venezuela, which took—ready?—two and a half hours. Donald Trump may have told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the weekend that the war was “already won.” But also over the weekend, a pre-war intelligence report was leaked to two Washington Post reporters showing that the National Intelligence Council, a panel of independent intel experts, seems to think that dislodging the regime could take a very long time indeed—at $37 million an hour, a rate that is almost sure to rise, especially if ground troops get involved.

Meanwhile, gas prices went up about 60 cents a gallon in the war’s first week. The Dow fell 453 points Friday. (It’s well below 50,000 now, so I guess that means,........

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