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Trump: Iran’s Newest Hostage

I won't comment as yet on the gunman who reportedly rushed a security position at the White House correspondent dinner last evening, other than to note some memes on the Internet are suggesting the scene was faked - an extension of the growing belief among in MAGA world that the Butler, Pennsylvania "assassination attempt" was staged. One can understand why in some ways given the Felon's desperation to change the conversation from his cratering poll numbers, the stalemate in the Iran war that sees Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz (oil is currently at $95.00/barrel), and growing reports of corruption and insider trading by the Felon and his regime. Time will tell whether or not the chaos witnessed last evening was staged or not - Viktor Orban had contemplated a stage assassination attempt during his losing election campaign in Hungary.  Meanwhile, a column in the New York Times looks at how the Felon has set himself up to be Iran's latest hostage with not clear way out of the quagmire of his own creation. With negotiations currently canceled and the world still reeling from the loss of oil that would normally transit the Strait, the Felon is increasingly in an untenable position.  Here are column highlights:

“It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.” That’s the opening of the classic O. Henry short story “The Ransom of Red Chief.” The tale, written in 1907, is the ultimate parable about the perils of trying to seize and control a hellion so devious, so maniacal, so awful that the captors become the captives.

[The Felon] President Trump went along with Bibi Netanyahu’s Panglossian case for slamming Iran. It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.

After nearly two months of tangling with the demonic Iranian leadership and its allies, [the Felon] Trump looks desperate to run for the hills. He constantly says he has defeated the mullahs and “obliterated” their military power, and yet Iran refuses to be subdued.

Trump says there’s a new regime that’s easier to deal with, but actually it’s the same regime but worse — run by hardened, fanatical generals. Iran has not turned over its enriched uranium, and negotiations are touch-and-go. The Strait of Hormuz, which Trump keeps insisting is open, is closed. Trump is blockading the Iranian blockade.

“Iran has proven to be far more resilient and resourceful than he was prepared for,” Richard Haass, a foreign policy adviser for President George W. Bush, wrote in his newsletter, “Home & Away.” “Almost all the administration’s assumptions have been proven wrong.”

Aside from the weakening of Iran’s conventional military capability, Haass said, “virtually every other metric shows the United States, the region and the world to be worse off.”

The Iranians are tormenting Trump — even as they out-troll the master troller, viciously mocking the president as a “L.O.S.E.R.” and Bibi puppet who wants to distract from the Epstein files.  One viral Iranian rap addressing Trump calls the conflict “a trap you couldn’t see. Welcome to the graveyard of your vanity.”

Now that Iran has flexed power in the strait, [the Felon] Trump has to bargain with it to get back to where things were before.

He is pinioned in a weird nook and cranny of the planet that seems almost medieval, sitting next to a backward, villainous theocracy. And yet ships carrying over 20 percent of the world’s oil must traverse the narrow passage to get to the Arabian Sea.

[The Felon] Trump, who grew overconfident after his adventurism in Venezuela, is being driven to distraction.

He got so rattled when the two American airmen were shot down, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey reported in The Wall Street Journal, that he “screamed at aides for hours.” Last month, Trump talked about the danger of becoming another Jimmy Carter, spiraling amid the hostages and a failed rescue with eight helicopters lost.

Trump tried to scare the Iranians with a profane post on Easter and a wild threat to destroy their civilization. But Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq. The Iranian mullahs and generals are the terrors of the strait.

[The Felon] Trump has forsaken the one good Middle East policy he had: avoiding the mirage of quick wins while getting sucked once more into “blood and sand,” as he dismissively called it during his first term.

But, seduced by the detestable Bibi, he got suckered into the blood and sand. Unlike W., who had the good grace to trump up a case for war, Trump let Bibi lead him by the nose into this one, blowing off Congress, our allies and many furious MAGA acolytes.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reveal in their forthcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” that the [Felon] president brushed aside Gen. Dan Caine’s warnings that a war with Iran would drastically deplete our weapons stockpiles and jeopardize the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. . . the United States has burned through half — around 1,100 — of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China.

The president with the attention span of a gnat posted on Truth Social that “I have all the Time in the World, but Iran doesn’t — The clock is ticking!” But he is the one who has lost control of the timeline, and himself. . . . now, in frantic Truth Social posts, in calls with reporters and in interviews, he employs hyperbolic wishful thinking. His staff is resigned to a midterm electoral disaster brought on by higher gas prices and a lack of focus on the economy.

And he keeps returning to his gargantuan ballroom. According to a Washington Post analysis, “Trump has invoked the ballroom on about a third of the days this year.” It’s a pleasant mental escape, now that he has tied himself into a Gordian knot with Iran.

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Let’s Hope The Felon's War Doesn’t Become Tragic

This morning, the price of oil is hovering around $95.00/barrel - 50% higher than before the Felon at Israel's urging went to war with Iran - and there remains no end in sight.  Recent polls show that the Felon's war of choice remains very unpopular and that a super majority of Americans blame the Felon for the current gas prices - which may worsen as scarcity in other parts of the world comes home to roost in America.  What's perhaps most upsetting (at least outside of MAGA Kool-Aid drinking circles) is that the entire Iran mess was created by the Felon, beginning with his decision to  tear up the agreement the Obama administration had negotiated. Frighteningly, to the Felon and his idiot Secretary of Defense, the war in some ways continues to be a live video game with little concern for the lives lost or damaged or the economic pain being suffered by other nations around the world. All to the delight of Vladimir Putin who revels in America's self-destruction under the Felon's misrule.  A piece at The New Republic traces out how the Felon set this whole mess in motion and the very real concerns that in his desperation to escape his self-created mess, something tragic may happen:

As we barrel toward the ninth week of this two- or three-week war, virtually all of the reporting and most of the commentary is focused on the strategery of the moment: who really controls the Strait of Hormuz, when the ceasefire might actually end, what Donald Trump might do next. That’s all understandable. But it also means that this is a good time to take a step back and summarize exactly what Trump has done here, because if we look at it from 30,000 feet, we see exactly what so many of us knew was dangerous about putting this unstable and petty and frankly stupid man back in the Oval Office.

To put it in a phrase: He and he alone created the conditions that made war possible. He and he alone created the chaos that, he then told the American people and the world, made war necessary. Imagine the mayor of a town where there were acute ethnic or racial tensions taking office and inheriting a fragile but holding truce between the antagonistic parties. He then annuls that truce, calling it weak and fraudulent. Tensions, predictably, flare up again. And the mayor sends in armed agents to disarm the minority. And while he’s doing it, he threatens to destroy their entire culture and compares himself to Jesus, while the man in charge of the military operations constantly invokes God and Jesus as being on his side.

That’s what has happened here. Trump backed out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Barack Obama and five other nations had negotiated with Iran. Was it perfect? Of course not. It was a compromise, with an enemy that hates the United States. But it capped uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent—far, far short of the level required to make nuclear arms—until 2030. Most provisions expired in 10 years (2025). Still, that’s not nothing. Experts agreed that it was working, and Iran was abiding by its terms, and it left it for a future administration to pick up the baton.

Trump, far from picking the baton up, threw it in the incinerator. The JCPOA ran to around 160 pages. The chance that Trump actually read it is zero. In fact, the agreement, minus the annexes, was only 18 pages. And still, we know to a 99.55 percent certainty that the chance Trump read even those 18 pages is zero. Those 18 pages were agreed to by Obama. That was all Trump needed to know. So he withdrew from the agreement in May 2018. He imposed stricter sanctions and announced a policy of “maximum pressure.” Oooh, tough! Amurka, baby!

But what happened? The other signatory nations tried to hold things together, but without the United States, everyone knew that was a joke. Iran very quickly increased its enrichment. By 2020, outlets were reporting that “Iran is now enriching more uranium than it did before it agreed to the landmark nuclear deal with world powers . . .

In other words: Trump made this problem. Entirely and solely. By pulling out of the JCPOA in 2018, he ensured that Iran would start breaking the terms of the deal. He’s the one who made Iran strong. Then, eight years later, he comes back to us and says, Bad Iran! They broke the terms of the deal! They’re too strong. We must invade them.

But it’s actually even worse than that. Because we didn’t invade Iran because they broke the terms of the deal. We invaded Iran because Trump, having conquered (in his mind) America, needed to conquer farther reaches.

It was only when it became clear that it wasn’t easy that Trump settled on his current rationale for the war (that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon). Because at first, the rationale was regime change. And we took out the supreme leader, and Trump probably thought well, that was that. But that just handed everything to the supreme leader’s son, who is more radical, and whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. bombs. So when it became clear even to Trump that the regime wasn’t going to change, he settled on the rationale about nuclear weapons.

But there’s a little problem with it. Namely, that Iran is today a hell of a lot closer to nuclear weapons than it was in 2015, after Obama’s deal. So Trump, who created this problem, now tells us that he may have to solve it by eliminating Persian civilization, one of the great civilizations in the history of humanity (these last 47 years, not even a blink of an eye in human history, notwithstanding).

The United States has fought a lot of dumb and unnecessary wars. And it’s fought a lot of wars that cost more lives than this one has so far. But this one has to be the most unnecessary war of all. And now here we sit, the whole world nervously watching the president of the United States, whom everyone in every capital around the globe knows to be impulsive and ignorant and concerned mainly with his vanity, wondering what he’ll do next—hoping that America’s most unnecessary war doesn’t also become its most tragic.

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Iran Is In A Position to Play the Felon

As of a moment ago, the price of oil is creeping back towards $100/barrel, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and the Felon has extended the supposed cease-fire while seemingly having no plan as to how to end the war and keep the Strait open to shipping.  The Felon - who like Hitler believes he knows more than his military commanders - was warned of the likelihood Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz but chose the totally ignore the warnings.  Indeed, yesterday the Secretary of the Navy was removed from office, likely because he was not telling the Felon and the horrible Secretary of Defense what they wanted to hear.  With the current stand off, Iran can sit back with the Strait closed and allow oil prices to increase and inflict more economic damage on America's economy while the Felon's poll numbers continue to tank - 70% now disapprove of the Felon's handling of the economy.  Unless the Felon can wait for an extended period for the Iranian economy to falter - something his polling and the approaching mid-terms will not tolerate - Iran now seemingly has the upper hand.  A column in the New York Times looks at the situation that again is all of the Felon's own creation.  Here are column excerpts:

It shouldn’t have been surprising when President Trump announced on April 12 that the United States would begin a blockade of Iranian ports to force Tehran to accept a peace deal.

Mr. Trump prides himself on being unpredictable. But he is a creature of habit, and blockades have quickly emerged as one of his preferred military tactics since his return to the White House. He has already used them against Venezuela and Cuba. Now his administration has expanded the Iran embargo, and started to seize Iran-linked ships on the high seas.

Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz was not the reason the United States started this war. Before the conflict, traffic passed freely through the narrow waterway. But Tehran’s effective closure of the strait since the United States and Israel attacked two months ago has emerged as the war’s most bedeviling problem and one Mr. Trump is desperate to fix. He hopes that by instituting a blockade of his own, he can choke Iran’s economy and force the country’s leaders to reopen the strait and accept Washington’s terms of surrender.

This is unlikely to work for the same reasons the United States finds itself facing strategic defeat by a weaker adversary: a mismatch of stakes and time horizons. While Iran has gained the upper hand in this conflict by extending and surviving what it considers an existential war, [The Felon] Mr. Trump wants a fast and decisive victory, something a blockade cannot deliver.

That blockades often fail to quickly change an adversary’s behavior is something Mr. Trump and his advisers should know. Earlier this year, the United States started interdicting oil shipments to Cuba in an effort to force Havana to make political and economic concessions. The island is now on the brink of humanitarian collapse, but the Cuban regime has yet to yield. The U.S. blockade of Venezuela’s oil exports was similarly ineffective . . . .

Iran may prove even more resilient. The blockade has reduced the country’s oil revenues to a fraction of their prewar levels, but it is likely to be some time before the consequences become untenable for Iran’s regime. In the near term, Tehran will continue to receive oil revenue from shipments that left its ports weeks ago, and at least 34 tankers with links to Iran appear to have slipped through the blockade. These and any future successful exports can be sold at higher prices, which may continue to rise as the war drags on.

To prevent this, the administration has said the U.S. military will pursue any ship helping Iran, anywhere in the world, a move that is of ambiguous legality under international law. To meet the legal standard, any blockade must be deemed “effective,” meaning it is carried out with enough military power to be consistently and impartially enforced; have clearly defined geographic limits; and include provisions for humanitarian relief. The expanded U.S. blockade meets none of these requirements. . . . In the end, most Iranian oil shipments that are already at sea will almost certainly make it to their destinations.

At home, Iran has other ways to mitigate the effects of the blockade. Recent estimates suggest Iran has about 90 million barrels of available oil storage capacity, enough for at least two months of production, before it must make production cuts that risk permanent damage to its oil infrastructure. Tehran also has reserves of food and other essentials, and land-based trade routes that it can fall back on if needed for imports of some commodities and even some oil exports. Iran can likely endure the U.S. blockade for months without facing economic collapse.

For [the Felon] Mr. Trump, this timeline is likely to be unacceptable. His impatience with the war is evident in his increasingly erratic Truth Social posts and near-constant assertions that the war is already over.

His sense of urgency is understandable. Not only is the war deeply unpopular in the United States, but its effects on the American and global economies are real — and likely to grow. The longer the impasse lasts, the more severe fuel and fertilizer shortages will become across East Asia and Europe, and the more Gulf state oil exporters will suffer. A prolonged blockade will also push global oil prices higher, increasing U.S. inflation and torpedoing Mr. Trump’s affordability pitch in the upcoming midterm elections.

Instead of stripping Iran of its most important source of leverage — control of the Strait of Hormuz — [the Felon's] Mr. Trump’s blockade may play into the Islamic republic’s hands. The blockade harms Iran’s economic future, but may lead to a longer, costlier war for the United States, severe and lasting damage to U.S. and global markets and further domestic political damage for Mr. Trump.

In a test of wills, Tehran has the advantage and a higher pain tolerance. With their survival on the line, Iran’s leaders can afford to be patient.