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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.

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The FBI Director Is MIA

If one looks at the Felon's appointees, including members of his cabinet, the principal qualification are one of several: large campaign donations to the Felon, adherence to extremist MAGA ideology conspiracy theories, blind personal loyalty to the Felon, a willingness to abuse their office for the Felon's retribution campaign, or a willingness to tell the Felon what he wants to hear whether it is true or not. Subject area knowledge and experience and expertise/competence in the running of the departments being overseen was nowhere on the required list of qualifications. The consequences have been individuals like Kristi Noem, a/k/a ICE Barbie, and Pam Bondi whose corruption and incompetence ultimately lead to their firings.  And then there is FBI Director Kash Patel who has generated headlines about his abuse of travel and government funds for personal benefit and his seeming problem with alcohol as reported by The Atlantic - which in the style of the Felon Patel has sued alleging defamation. Not being intimidated by threats and a likely bogus lawsuit, The Atlantic has another piece that looks at the questions and concerns swirling around Patel. Here are excerpts:

On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”

Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.

It turned out that the answer was still Patel. He had not been fired. The access problem, two people familiar with the matter said, appears to have been a technical error, and it was quickly resolved. . . . . But Patel, according to multiple current officials, as well as former officials who have stayed close to him, is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy. He has good reasons to think so—including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of excessive drinking.

Patel was among the officials expected to be fired after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ouster, on April 2. “We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel is officially out of the top job, an FBI official told me this week, and a former official told my colleague Jonathan Lemire that Patel was “rightly paranoid.” Senior members of the Trump administration are already discussing who might replace him, according to an administration official and two people close to the White House who were familiar with the conversations.

The IT-lockout episode is emblematic of Patel’s tumultuous tenure as director of the FBI: He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. . . . they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.

They said that the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences. His behavior has often alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as he won support from the White House for his eager participation in Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement against the president’s perceived political enemies.

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Some of Patel’s colleagues at the FBI worry that his personal behavior has become a threat to public safety. An FBI director is expected to be available and focused on his job—especially when the nation is at war with a state sponsor of terrorism. Current and former officials told me that they have long worried about what would happen in the event of a domestic terrorist attack while Patel is in office, and they said that their apprehension has increased significantly in the weeks since Trump launched his military campaign against Iran. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” one official said.

Patel arrived at the FBI in early 2025 as a deeply polarizing figure. He had risen from being a public defender in Miami to a congressional aide and, ultimately, a national-security official during the first Trump administration. . . . Patel vowed that “there will be no retributive actions” and that he was not aware of any plans to punish FBI staff who had been part of investigations into Trump. Democrats were not the only ones who were leery of Patel, who had a record of embracing far-fetched conspiracy theories—including the notion that the FBI and its informants had helped instigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to sabotage the MAGA movement. Several Republicans wavered on whether to back him. But a pressure campaign by the White House and its allies ultimately prevailed, and Patel was confirmed by a vote of 51 to 49.

Officials said that Patel has been an irregular presence at FBI headquarters and in field offices, and that he has compounded the agency’s existing bureaucratic bottlenecks. Several current and former officials told me that Patel is often away or unreachable, delaying time-sensitive decisions needed to advance investigations. . . . Patel has also earned a reputation for acting impulsively during high-stakes investigations. He announced triumphantly on social media, for instance, that the FBI had “detained a person of interest” in the Brown University shooting in December. That person was soon released while agents continued to hunt for the killer.

DOJ’s ethics handbook states that “an employee is prohibited from habitually using alcohol or other intoxicants to excess.” The department’s inspector general has warned that off-duty alcohol consumption can not only impair employees’ judgment; it can also make them vulnerable to exploitation or coercion by foreign adversaries.

Patel’s drinking is no secret. While on official travel to Italy in February, he was filmed chugging beer with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team following their gold-medal victory. The incident prompted the president—who does not drink and whose brother died following a long struggle with alcoholism—to call the FBI director to convey his unhappiness, according to two officials familiar with the call. But officials told me that Patel’s alcohol use goes far beyond the occasional beer. FBI officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Many of the people who spoke with me said that they have been afraid to reveal their concerns about Patel publicly or through traditional whistleblower channels, because he has been aggressive in cracking down on anyone he deems insufficiently loyal. At Patel’s direction, FBI employees are polygraphed in an effort to identify leakers.

Patel has held on to his job in part because of his commitment to using the federal government to target political or personal adversaries of the president. In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, Patel designated a list of government officials past and present that he alleged were corrupt or disloyal. . . . This has included firing people, opening internal investigations, and pressuring agents to quit when they pushed back—or were perceived to have pushed back—against Patel’s demands or questioned their legality.

Some at the FBI are concerned that Patel’s behavior has left the country more vulnerable. One former senior intelligence official told me that there is a lack of experience at FBI headquarters and that the turnover rate is high in field offices, because of both voluntary departures and Patel-ordered purges.

Days before the United States launched its war with Iran, Patel fired members of a counterintelligence squad that was devoted, in part, to Iran. The director said in testimony before Congress that the agents had been let go because their work investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents had placed them in violation of the bureau’s ethics rules. But multiple officials told me that they were concerned that the firings had been rushed and would leave the U.S. shorthanded at a crucial moment.

“Part of me is glad he’s wasting his time on bullshit, because it’s less dangerous for rule of law, for the American public,” one official told me, “but it also means we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”

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Are Trump Voters Belatedly Over It?

As of this morning, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed with Iran vowing retaliation for a U.S. attack on an Iranian cargo vessel.  Meanwhile, the price of oil is sliding back upward and oil and gas scarcity in Asia is worsening as noted in a piece in the New York Times:

When the war in Iran started on Feb. 28, Asia expected to see serious, gradual impacts from losing access to a huge portion of the world’s oil and gas. But the conflict’s economic and social impacts have hit the region harder and faster than officials and experts expected.

Even if there is a peace deal soon, the future of this industrious region that has driven global economic growth for decades will likely include months of canceled flights, surging food prices, factory pauses, delayed shipments and empty shelves for products long considered quick and easy to buy worldwide: plastic bags, instant noodles, vaccines, syringes, lipstick, microchips and sportswear.

Collectively, according to many officials and experts, if the war’s strangling of commercial traffic through the Middle East lasts for even a few more weeks, and uncertainty lingers, shortages could push several countries into convulsions of unrest, followed by recession.

What happens in Asia will eventually spill over across the globe and will eventually hit Americans.  Indeed, one well known economist believes a global recession could occur, all because of the Felon's impetuous war of choice: 

Another week, another false all-clear. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. It appears increasingly obvious that the 20 percent of world oil supply that normally flows through it to world markets won’t be restored to normal anytime in the near future — quite possibly for many months. What will this disruption do to the world economy?

The International Monetary Fund raised the economic anxiety level last week with a projection of a global slowdown “in the shadow of war.” Yet while the IMF brings great expertise to this subject, I think that it is seriously underestimating how badly the global economy could be hit. In my view, a full-on global recession is more likely than not if the Strait remains closed for, say, another three months, which seems all too possible.

All of this is building economic pressures that the Kool-Aid drinking MAGA base cannot ignore.  A new poll shows that 63% disapprove of the Felon's performance and are in a sour mood.  Some belatedly realized they were - and continue to be - lied to, something many of us realized during the Felon 1.0 when the Felon lied over 30,000 times according to the Washington Post.  Now, as a piece at The Atlantic notes, voters who voted for the Felon in 2024 realize they were played for fools:

Tomas Montoya has sold festival foods—funnel cakes, burgers, hot dogs—across the American Southwest for years. But lately, business has been rough. Costs are up, so he’s increased his prices. Employees are begging for hours he can’t give them. In Arizona, where he lives, Montoya pays $6 a gallon to fill up his food trucks with diesel. This summer, he may have to skip the California leg of his festival route because fuel is even more expensive there.

“It’s Trump,” Montoya told us outside a popular Hispanic grocery store in Casa Grande, Arizona, much of which sits in one of the most evenly divided House districts in the country. Montoya voted for President Trump in 2024, but now, well, frustrated doesn’t begin to cover how he’s feeling. The president is bragging about the economy, even though everyone Montoya knows is hurting; he promised to stop wars, but started one in Iran. “When Trump opens his mouth, three-quarters of what he says is stories, lies,” Montoya said. He’s planning to vote in the midterm elections this fall. But he may not choose a Republican.

You can’t flip a funnel cake in this part of Arizona without spattering someone who sounds just like Montoya—anxious, and a little regretful about how they voted two Novembers ago. These days, a shocking number of the president’s supporters have turned against him. . . . Some Republican operatives in battleground states told us that they’d rather Trump not campaign too hard for their candidate; others have seen their small-dollar donations plummet.

Midterm elections are typically rough for an incumbent president’s party. But this year threatens to be brutal. Trump’s approval is lower right now than it was at this point ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats won back the House in a historic blue wave. Almost every new poll is a red flag for Republicans: Independents, young voters, and Latinos—groups that were crucial to Trump’s win in 2024—aren’t in the bag anymore. Even non-college-educated white Americans, once the president’s strongest group, have turned on him, according to a CNN polling average.

Casa Grande, a pit stop between Tucson and Phoenix where agricultural fields give way to new subdivisions, is on the northwestern edge of Arizona’s swingy Sixth Congressional District. . . . Shoppers outside the market bemoaned the rising price of everything: gas, meat, store-made chicharrones ($9.29 for a big bag). And they were ready to punish Trump’s party for it.

The mood among voters was just as grim some 60 miles southeast in Oro Valley, a northern suburb of Tucson known for its scenic mountain views—and home to many conservative voters whom Ciscomani and statewide Republicans rely on. Sitting inside of her car after a shopping spree at a dollar store, Zuriel Reyes told us she feels “shitty” about having voted for Trump in 2024, her first-ever election. . . . . and feels like the president is “putting all our lives in jeopardy with this weird war game that he’s playing.”

On Easter Sunday, Trump’s threat to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran drew ire from many onetime Trump devotees, such as Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly, who subsequently declared on her SiriusXM radio show that she was “sick of this shit.”

Earlier this week, when Trump posted the AI image of himself dressed in flowing robes, surrounded by a heavenly glow while healing a sick man, he alienated the one group of Americans that has rarely left his side: Christian conservatives.

Trump—or, more accurately, the conditions Trump has helped create—also seems to have affected GOP fundraising. Some donors are giving half the amount that they would normally contribute to Republican candidates and blaming economic instability for the decrease, one Georgia county GOP chair told us. Two Republican consultants from another battleground state told us that small-dollar donations to their candidates plummeted in early March, days after the U.S. and Israel launched strikes across Iran. In races that could be decided by very thin margins, these donations could mean the difference between sending out a final round of mailers to low-propensity voters or not.

[The Felon] the president and his party may find salvaging the broader Trump coalition difficult. In Casa Grande, Montoya told us he’d give Trump three weeks to end the war and fix the economy. In the meantime, he’s eating leftovers more often, putting fewer miles on his food trucks, and setting the air-conditioning higher than he’d like as Arizona temperatures climb. Montoya will also, he added, be researching his options for November.