Cracks are opening inside the Trump coalition. They are not coming from the left. They are coming from Heritage Foundation economists and from within Trump’s own counterterrorism apparatus — driven by an Iran war that is pushing oil to $110 a barrel.
E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a principal architect of Project 2025 and a former Trump nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is not a critic of U.S. imperialism. He is a reliable voice of the hard right. On March 19, he told the Financial Times that the U.S. economy cannot absorb $100-a-barrel oil — and that the war is now pushing it well past that.
“The economy is weaker than we thought it was, and inflation is worse than we thought it was,” Antoni said. He warned that the energy price drop of 2025 had been doing real work suppressing inflation across the economy — and that the reversal is now doing the opposite.
The numbers bear him out. Brent crude surged 5% on March 18, closing just under $110 a barrel. Gas prices at the pump have risen from $2.92 to $3.84 a gallon in a single month. Diesel has exceeded $5 a gallon, hitting trucking and logistics costs throughout the supply chain. Every dollar added to energy prices moves through food, freight and manufacturing.
The day before Antoni’s remarks, Joe Kent — director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center and a Trump loyalist — resigned in protest over the Iran war. It was the first significant defection from inside the administration since Operation Epic Fury began Feb. 28.
The ruling class is fracturing — over strategy, over electoral survival, over whether this war is economically sustainable. Who pays for it is not in dispute.
The costs Antoni and congressional Republicans are worried about are electoral and macroeconomic — the kind that threaten political stability at the top. The costs the working class is already absorbing are different.
Gas at $3.84 is not an abstraction for workers commuting on shrunken paychecks. Diesel at $5 moves directly into the price of groceries.
The war’s financial structure makes those costs permanent, not temporary. The first six days of Operation Epic Fury cost at least $11.3 billion, most of it unbudgeted. The Washington Post reported March 19 that the Pentagon has asked the White House to approve a supplemental request of more than $200 billion — quadruple the figure circulating just days earlier. The Iraq War cost roughly $140 billion per year at its peak. The Pentagon is now asking for more than that in a single request — just three weeks into the war.
That spending does not fall on Lockheed Martin — whose stock has risen 43% in three months — or on Raytheon’s parent RTX, up 40% year to date. It falls on the federal budget, and through the budget on health care and food programs already being stripped before the first missile was fired.
On July 4, 2025, Trump signed a budget law cutting Medicaid by more than $1 trillion over 10 years and slashing food assistance by $186 billion — the largest SNAP cut in history, affecting 40 million people. That money did not disappear. It was redirected toward the war apparatus now burning through SM-3 interceptors and THAAD missiles faster than manufacturers can replace them.
Antoni’s complaint is real, but its logic stops at the ruling class’s door. He warns that federal worker layoffs — thousands cut under the DOGE cost-cutting campaign — are dragging on job growth. He is right that the policy is producing economic damage. What he does not say is that the damage was built in. An economy in which working-class consumption is suppressed through benefit cuts, wage stagnation and public-sector layoffs is not positioned to absorb an oil shock. That is the condition Operation Epic Fury was launched into.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply passes, has seen tanker traffic collapse since Feb. 28. Qatar halted liquefied natural gas production after Iranian strikes on its facilities. The petrodollar system — in which Gulf oil is priced in dollars and recycled through U.S. Treasury bonds — depends on that flow. That flow is now severely disrupted.
The administration is now weighing steps that would deepen the crisis further. Reuters reported March 19 that it is considering deploying thousands of additional troops to the region. The options include securing tanker passage through the Strait of Hormuz through air and naval deployments, and potentially placing ground forces along Iran’s shoreline. The administration has also discussed sending forces to Kharg Island, the hub for 90% of Iran’s oil exports.
One U.S. official described such an operation as “very risky,” noting that Iran can reach the island with missiles and drones. A ground assault on Kharg Island would not reopen the oil flow. It would target the infrastructure that makes Iranian exports possible — a direct strike at the petrostate structure the petrodollar system was built to incorporate, not destroy.
The fractures inside the Trump coalition are real. They reflect growing strain inside the ruling class over how to manage a war that is driving up prices and expanding deficits. But they are not a break with the war itself. They are a dispute over how to contain its fallout — and over who will pay for it.
That question is not being debated in theory. It is being settled in rising prices, shrinking public programs and a war bill that is only beginning to come due.
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