Banning the export of diesel as King Donald can start wars, but cannot win them.

Diesel fuel prices have shot up since King Donny thought that beating Iran would be a cheap and easy matter, and hence attacked them.

What the war is about is not really clear.  King Donald has given multiple excuses for it but with the price of fuel shooting up, he's latched on to the "Iran was going to get a bomb" line.  According to an article in Scientific American Iran was, in fact, nowhere close to being able to do that.

And there are other reasons to suspect that was only in the background.  The war really looks like an idea that Bibi Netanyahu had knowing that Trump was pliable and probably that the administration was packed with far right wing Evangelicals who see whatever  Israel does as sanctioned by God to some degree.  You can't blame Bibi for that, it was a golden opportunity to knock a major Israeli enemy down a few pegs, if not out of the enemy category entirely.

It didn't work.

Right now, we're stuck in what looks like an endless war with Iran.  All the conventional theories about how to win the war are wrong. The war turns out to be as Clausewitzian as any.  In order to win, we'd have to invade the country with ground troops and not even King Donald is up for that.

In the meantime, the economic warfare Iran is conducting is working really well.  Iran has brought its clients, the Houthis, into the fight, and they've hit Saudi Arabia.  The US has done nothing about that, in spite of a Saudi request for assistance.  Indeed, we've apparently told the Houthis, who have "Death to America" as part of their slogan, that we'll turn a blind eye to that spat. The Saudi military is not widely regarded as a very good one, which is problematic as they are being put in a situation in which they may well have to conduct a ground invasion of Yemen.

So the price of diesel is way up.

Of course, King Donald and his flunkies insist that its up as Ukraine his hitting Russian petroleum facilities.  That claim is partially true, but they've been doing that for years now.  The price didn't start to skyrocket until recently.

King Donny, you own this.

And that will impact the price of everything.  The trucking industry likes to boast that "everything comes by truck". Well, a lot does, and that's a problem.  Everything that comes by truck is going to have its price go up. Everything that goes by rail will as well.

In short, everything.

And we haven't even touched on the costs to agriculture.

So, in desperation, some members of Congress have noticed that the US experts diesel fuel.  If we prohibit that, the price will go down, right?

Probably not. 

Petroleum products in general are one of scale.  If there's less of a market, refiners might just switch to something else.  And of course the price of petroleum itself will likely not go down.

And hence this.

Diesel, and gasoline, prices may be Trump's one real lasting legacy.

They might never go down.