“The Yemeni militant Houthi group says it’s targeting vital Saudi Arabian energy facilities – a situation that threatens to harden high gasoline prices at a precarious moment for Republicans ahead of the midterms. The Houthis’ target: Abqaiq, the world’s largest crude oil processing facility, which is responsible for stabilizing about 7 percent of the world’s crude oil. Many of its critical components are custom-built and irreplaceable on any short timeline,” writes Politico in the lede to a Friday story headlined “Iran-backed militant group’s threat to Saudi energy hub could upend Trump’s midterm message” that maybe, just maybe, could’ve used another set of eyes before they clicked “publish.”
A fresh set of eyes, one maybe from outside the whole Beltway Media ecosystem that would read it and then, quite reasonably, have said “Hey guys. Um, you come across as just sort of awfully fucking myopic when you deem an imminent disruption to 7 percent of the world’s oil supply as primarily a threat to ‘Trump’s midterm message,’ rather than, you know, the entire global economy.”
“It’s not that’s false to write that such an attack on Abqaiq could come at the ‘worst possible moment for President Donald Trump’ and ‘the Republican majority in Congress,’ so much as that there are another 8 billion people on the planet whose lives and livelihoods would feel an oil shortage much harder than would Donald Trump and the other 272 elected Republicans in DC. So maybe you could have found some space to mention them or – even better – actually put them first and then worked your way toward the domestic political salience of this possible imminent attack on this crucial lynchpin of the global oil supply,” this outsider would have added, quite helpfully.
Seriously. It’s not even like there’s a lot of analysis about how this specific Houthi threat percolates to the GOP’s midterm outlook. All of the color quotes are from energy policy and Middle East experts rather than anonymous Congressmen or Republican operatives. The piece quite possibly started as a straightforward look at the Iranian proxy Yemeni Shiite minority group militia’s nefarious ambitions to destroy Abqaiq and then some editor saw it was ripe for strapping “Trump’s midterm message” into the headline, lede, and then a few scattered mentions in there. So it’s not even like they fully committed to that bit, let alone the political impacts of rising energy prices to endangered incumbent parties elsewhere in developed economies. Hell the Politico staff didn’t even bother to elucidate what “Trump’s midterm message” is supposed to be in this context.
🚨 BREAKING: Two commercial ships have reportedly come under attack in the Strait of Hormuz—as tensions continue to escalate between the U.S. and Iran.
President Trump: "I'm losing faith in them because they do lie and they do misrepresent." pic.twitter.com/8tMb9MGfP2
— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) August 1, 2026
Then again, it’s not like he has one besides “the communist Dumbocrats made up the word ‘affordability'” and bitching about how duplicitously the Iranians are conducting themselves in the nonexistent negotiations. There’s also that Trump unilaterally decided to start this misadventure so naturally the political consequences of his failures should be front and center. It’s just that the Politico article kind of doesn’t really follow through and thus falls short on its own diffuse terms.
Politico sucks, have their heads up their own asses, and also somehow manage to suck even at reporting from that vantage point cloistered within their colorectal cavities.