Another day, another Pentagon press conference in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fruitlessly demands Europe get more involved with reopening the Strait of Hormuz: “This should not be America’s fight alone,” Hegseth seethed. “We barely use the Strait of Hormuz. . . . [The Europeans] need the Strait of Hormuz much more than we do, and might want to start doing less talking and having fancy conferences in Europe and getting on a boat.”

Sure, he’s said some variation of this fifty times over the last month—but maybe he just wasn’t petulant enough before. Happy Friday.

Open the Strait. Shut Down Trump.

by William Kristol

On March 21, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power plants if the Strait of Hormuz was not “FULLY OPEN” within forty-eight hours. The strait did not “FULLY OPEN” within forty-eight hours, or for that matter, within the next two weeks. By April 5, Easter Sunday, the “very stable genius” who is our president had lost patience. He proclaimed that two days later, April 7, “would be “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Well, Iran did not open the strait on April 7. And more than two weeks since, after a few days in which a few ships were able to pass through the strait, it is once again closed.

But that’s okay with Donald Trump! Because he’s now apparently in favor of keeping the strait closed. Yesterday morning, Trump adjusted his persona from that of a deranged, genocidal maniac to that of an interested if somewhat befuddled commentator. “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is!” he informed us. “They just don’t know! The infighting between the ‘Hardliners,’ who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the ‘Moderates,’ who are not very moderate at all (but gaining respect!), is CRAZY!”

But not to worry. Trump reassured us that “We have total control over the Strait of Hormuz. No ship can enter or leave without the approval of the United States Navy. It is ‘Sealed up Tight,’ until such time as Iran is able to make a DEAL!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

So the Trump administration supposedly has total control and is using that control to seal the strait up tight. The president had been demanding, rather stridently, that it be opened pronto. But “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson explained in 1841. Trump is no little statesman or philosopher or divine. He is, per his defenders, playing nineteen-dimensional international chess. He’s apparently closing the strait in order to pressure Iran—at an indeterminate point in the future—to open it.¹ In any case, before Trump began his war the Strait of Hormuz was open. As of this morning, April 24, eight weeks into the war, it is closed.

Which is bad! It’s contrary to our national interest in many different ways. It’s doing a lot of damage to the global economy. And it’s reinforcing the lesson that Iran’s key chess move in this war, a pretty simple and two-dimensional one that was entirely foreseeable, has succeeded. And when this is all over, the world will remember that Iran’s gambit worked, and that Iran can make this move again in the future.

This is a very bad outcome. Even if we get lucky and end up stumbling into a not-too-terrible short-term accommodation when the strait reopens thanks to various fuzzy agreements and murky accommodations, no one is going to forget that the Iranian regime has established the principle that it can close the strait. Nor will the world fail to notice that Trump launched a war that has failed to achieve its goals (whatever they actually were), undercut our standing in the Middle East, further damaged our alliances in Europe, drawn down our military stocks in Asia, and above all exposed our commander-in-chief as an increasingly unstable, foolish, and reckless old man flailing about on the world stage.

For his part, Trump seems to have decided just to pretend that real damage isn’t being done to the global economy, and to ours, and he’s just going to move on to other matters.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Trump is still plenty active on Truth Social. But his posts and reposts late last night and early this morning are attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center, on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for allegedly organizing the investigation of his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, and on “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” for criticizing the Border Patrol and ICE. At 6:23 p.m. yesterday, Trump shared the important news, “I LOVE TRUTH SOCIAL!”

Earlier in the day, at the White House, Trump spent time claiming that the crowd he convened on the Mall on January 6th was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s in 1963. Today he’ll presumably be focused on sharpening the attacks on the media that he’s planning to deliver at Saturday evening’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The fact that Trump is bored by his war is good, insofar as it means he’s somewhat less likely to try truly reckless and irresponsible things that would unleash a chain of events that would be even more damaging to our nation and the world. A demoralized Trump is safer than a megalomaniacal one.

But the mania is still there. And as it becomes increasingly clear that his excursion into the Middle East has been disastrous in so many ways, as voters from Hungary to Virginia weigh in against him, as a midterm debacle for him looms, Trump’s desperation will merge with his megalomania to produce threats to our democracy more dangerous than ever.

It would be good if the seaways for global shipping were reopened as soon as possible. But it’s up to us to continue to work as urgently and effectively as possible to choke off the all-too-many political pathways to Trumpist authoritarianism.