Remember when Biden put a three-dollar per gallon surcharge on gas to pay for transition surgery for trans volleyball players?

Those were the days my friend:

Meanwhile in right-wing fantasyland:

MAGA is trying to deal with its affordability crisis simply by denying reality. Over the past few days multiple prominent Republicans have gone on TV to insist that gas prices are falling. On Thursday Sen. Tim Scott said that “gas prices continue to come down,” while House Majority Leader Steve Scalise declared that gas is much cheaper than it was “two years ago,” when, he claimed, it was $6 a gallon. The average price then was actually $3.66.

And Pete Hegseth, the Defense secretary, told Congress that gas prices in California were $8 a gallon on the eve of the Iran war; the average was actually $4.64.

What’s striking about these efforts to create an alternate reality isn’t merely the fact that politicians are lying. It’s the fact that they’re lying about a subject in which the truth is more or less literally in everyone’s face every day. Lies about, say, immigrant crime are difficult for ordinary Americans to check. But gas prices are displayed on giant signs all around America — and drivers face a reality check on fuel costs every time they fill their tanks.

Why, then, do Republicans believe that these lies will work for them politically?

Part of the explanation is their belief that they can flush the majority of Joe Biden’s presidency down the memory hole, that they can pretend that Trump took office just after the inflation surge of 2021-2022, not after the “immaculate disinflation” — falling inflation without high unemployment — that followed. 

That would be a difficult thing to pull off if Trump’s hardcore supporters were even tenuously attached to reality, or minimally concerned with whether or not what their god-emperor says is “true,” to use an old-fashioned term.

But they aren’t, so Trump’s support can’t collapse beyond a certain point, even if gas goes to ten dollars per gallon.

The Ariana Grande voters are a very different story, though. They’re fleeing in droves, because they don’t worship a god-emperor, they just want the “great businessman” of The Apprentice to bring back 2019 prices, by using Common Sense, and getting all those clowns in Washington to stop being clowns.

As they very very slowly figure out that that isn’t happening and isn’t going to happen, future elections become increasingly problematic for Confederate Jesus’ favorite president, and the political cult that supports him.

‘Another example,’ he said. ‘Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three onetime Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession — were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.’

An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was the photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.

‘It exists!’ he cried.

‘No,’ said O’Brien.

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.

‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’

‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’

‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.