In assessing how Donald Trump's war of choice is proceeding, we turn once again to the metric most Americans are using as their chief measurement: the average nationwide price of a gallon of gasoline now stands at $3.91. That is up $1.16 from the mid-January lowpoint of this year, and it is up 97 cents from the day before the bombing started. It is also only nine cents away from the psychological "four bucks a gallon" milestone (which the media is likely to prominently feature, when we do hit it). And currently, there is absolutely no end in sight to the high prices -- which still have yet to peak.

Obviously, this is a big political problem for Trump. But of course, he has only himself to blame. He did not prepare the American people for this war, he did not consult with any of America's allies, he did not listen to military experts who warned him what Iran would likely do (close the Strait of Hormuz), and he simply has no "Plan B" for how to extricate the country from his growing mess. If he had done any of those things differently, perhaps we would still be in the same position right now, but Trump might have built more solid support (both at home and worldwide) and the economic pain might not be such a looming political disaster for him.

Trump is obviously just flailing around now, desperately trying to do something that somehow changes the basic equation (of skyrocketing gas prices). He's even floating an idea which is absolutely insane (when you stop and think about it) -- dropping sanctions on Iranian oil that is already at sea, loaded on tankers. This would have the effect of giving Iran more money to wage war against us, which is why it is so insane. It's not exactly a textbook military strategy, or a chapter in The Art Of War or anything. But it could happen -- we've already dropped sanctions on Russian oil, which feeds money to a country that one of our allies is at war with. These are desperation moves that Trump hopes will stem the rise in oil prices worldwide. He's tried other moves as well, but so far none of them have been having much effect. The price of crude oil briefly hit $119 a barrel today (before slipping back to $109 by the end of the day). This is up roughly 50 percent from where it was before Trump started his war.

Israel hit a major Iranian natural gas field yesterday, after which Iran hit back by targeting a Gulf state's natural gas facility. Trump is openly musing about just sending in the Marines to take Kharg Island, the Iranian oil-pumping facility that handles 90 percent of their exports. But what this would do would be to remove all Iranian oil from the world marketplace, which would send the price rocketing even higher. So it would achieve a military objective -- starving Iran of money -- but it would also have a severe blowback effect that would hit the rest of the world very hard too (including American consumers, at the gas pumps).

As of now, there are no plans in place to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Escorting oil tankers through the narrow waterway sounds like a good idea in the abstract, but it would require a lot of warships and warplanes and missiles -- and a lot of money. This is a classic example of asymmetric warfare, since all Iran has to do is send a few very cheap drones or lay a few very cheap mines, and if they managed to sink one ship all of the money and technology we had deployed would be seen as a failure.

Trump still harbors the dream that all of this will be over very soon now, that he will be able to declare victory and go home, and that the price of oil will magically return to where it was before he started launching Tomahawk missiles at Iran. American voters will quickly forget about the very-temporary price spikes and be ready to vote for Republicans come November. This is likely no more than a pipe dream.

Much more likely to happen is the scenario where prices stay high for months -- including the annual "summer price surge" when the travel season hits its highpoint -- and only come down very slowly. A safe bet right now would be that the price of gas on Election Day this November will be above the price it was ($3.09) when Donald Trump took office. It could be a lot higher than that, too.

Ending America's involvement in this war is not likely to result in an immediate reversal of all of its effects. It's not like flipping a switch. Even if Iran did open the Strait of Hormuz and shipping through it was a safe thing to do, there's a huge backlog of ships that will have to move through it before the region can return to any sort of normalcy. The refineries and shipping hubs will have to be restarted, which doesn't exactly happen overnight. The facilities that have been damaged or destroyed will have to be repaired or fully rebuilt -- a process that can take years. So even if all hostilities ceased tomorrow, it will be months (at the very earliest) before things get back to a pre-war normal again. And even then, prices are likely to stay elevated for a while, until all the refining and pumping facilities get back online again (which again, could take years). This is why it's a fairly safe bet that the price of gas at an American gas pump will still be higher in November than it was when Trump took office, no matter how long Trump's war lasts.

Trump can rant and rave about how monstrously unfair it is for the public to judge his war only on the price of gas, but it won't change that reality one bit. As mentioned, he might have deflected some of this blame by preparing the American public for the war in advance (or even "right as it began," or "at any point while it is being waged"). But he didn't, and hasn't.

Trump is even exacerbating the problem for himself, by continually showing his complete indifference to the economic pain American drivers are experiencing. Trump's never been a big "I feel your pain" kind of guy, but he's really outdoing himself every time he brushes off the subject of high gas prices. "They'll come down, at some point" doesn't really inspire much hope. But Trump almost has to ignore the high price of gas, because his personality is such that he never admits any mistakes. Nothing bad could ever happen as a direct result of his own actions, and now that they have Trump just does not want to hear about it.

This is all going to have a big ripple effect as well, which is not going to help Trump out politically either. Diesel prices have gone up faster than gasoline prices, which affects the cost of shipping pretty much all goods in America. Fertilizer prices are way up (that's "if farmers can even find enough to buy"), which will cause food prices to rise. And even before those effects are felt, at the beginning of next month new inflation numbers will appear -- and they will reflect at least the early effects of Trump's war (the rise in gas prices during the first few weeks of this month). Inflation may spike up and not come down until the price of gas does. None of this is going to help Republicans make the case to American voters that they are the best stewards of the economy.

Before all of this started, the politically-savvy folks in the White House had a plan. Donald Trump was going to focus specifically on affordability and make the case to the public that his wonderful tax cuts were so awesome that they more than made up for all the rise in prices consumers have been suffering through for the past year. They'd get Trump to tout all the policies he has managed to implement that brought any prices for anything down, while brushing off any rising prices on other products. Trump would steal the whole "affordability" issue away from the Democrats and thus avoid losing either chamber of Congress in the midterm elections. That was the plan, at any rate.

One of the biggest things Trump was going to be bragging about was how gas prices had come down. He would (of course) overstate this case by lying about what average Americans were paying, but at least he'd be on semi-solid ground (since gas prices had indeed come down somewhat). That is no longer going to work, obviously.

Trump's war of choice can now be seen as a gigantic present from him to the Democratic Party, in fact. Not only is the price of gas the biggest and most visible measure of the economy in America (with giant signs showing the price to motorists on every street corner), but Trump has now made it pathetically easy for Democrats to make the case that Donald Trump caused this to happen. It didn't need to happen. It wasn't inevitable -- it was the direct result of Trump's own actions, period. If they make that case, then voter anger over what Trump has done to gas prices (and inflation) will cause the only payback Trump is likely to feel over any of this -- at the ballot box.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant