A Question for Republicans

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, June 12, 2026

 

The largest factory fuel tank on a Ford Super Duty truck holds 48 gallons. In my neighborhood, the average price of a gallon of diesel over the past month has been $5.60.

 

Do the math. 

 

You see a lot of Trump bumper stickers on those big diesel trucks. And when the total at the pump hits $270 to fill up that truck, I want to ask the gentleman paying the bill:

 

“Do you feel smart?”

 

Writing in the New York Times about “The Good That Can Come from Platner’s Candidacy,” Bret Stephens puts forward the possibility that Americans could move in a salubriously amoral direction when it comes to evaluating political candidates, “on the grounds that we elect or install people in high office to achieve the results we desire, not to serve as paragons of moral rectitude.” At least, he writes, that would represent an improvement over “inconsistent standards selectively applied according to our political bias.”

 

There is something to be said for that approach. One of the problems with our politics is that politicians—especially presidents—are treated as embodiments of the nation, the people, and our values, to such an extent that members of a party feel alienated and humiliated when the other party’s leader occupies the White House.

 

Some years ago, I made a similar argument about Marco Rubio and his various evasions and exercises in political finesse: “Some people demand that a president not only share their values but act as a vessel of them, serving as a kind of moral mascot for the country or even a personification of it. Not me. I just want to know what I can use him for.”

 

I have not entirely repented of that opinion, but Donald Trump’s performance in office has shone a light on the eminently pragmatic aspects of republican virtue or its absence—it can be very difficult to get what you want out of a man with Trump’s low character, and you cannot count on getting it at all. Pragmatism, like any good or useful principle, extends only so far.

 

For the partisan, inconvenient facts necessitate a kind of rhetorical two-step.

 

There are proud Trump cultists and there are embarrassed Trump cultists, and, if you press one of the latter on Trump’s viciousness—his dishonesty, his infidelity, his venality, his susceptibility to flattery, his inconstancy—he often will retreat into comfortable pragmatism: “He isn’t running for pope”—well!—“and I like his policies.” Further pressed, “policies” mainly indicates the economic conditions coincident with Trump’s first term in office, pre-COVID, which were only to a very minor degree the result of any Trump policy.

 

Turn around and press the embarrassed Trump cultist on the pragmatic questions—like that $270 fill-up—and he often will retreat into moralism, albeit a negative kind of moralism based in the perceived deficiencies of the Democrats rather than in any of Trump’s particular moral virtues, which, it is plain, simply do not exist.

 

The “woke” phenomenon, by attaching a kind of quasi-religious energy and rhetoric to ordinary progressive clichés, was a great boon to Trump and to Trumpism, providing a spiritualized target of opportunity: the infidel, or, in the case of anti-Trump conservatives such as myself, the heretic. The Democratic embrace (in some quarters) of socialism, in name and in fact, has been similarly fortifying for Trump-era Republicans: To be against is simpler than to be for, and socialism is a simple (and proper) thing to be against.

 

And so when We the People cough up a corrupt imbecile such as Ken Paxton, whom Republicans mean to put into the Senate, or when proximity to Trump debases and degrades such infinitely plastic men as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, the rationalization is: “Well, think of the policies!” But I wonder what those beneficial policies are. The illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran that is the proximate cause of that $270 diesel bill? The obviously criminal massacres of civilians on the high seas? The gross self-dealing and corruption? The elevation of wildly unqualified yes-men such as Bill Pulte to high office? The deepening debt? The rising inflation? Steve Guest, a servile hack of the sort that gives servility and hackery a bad name, believes it is very important to appreciate the … refinishing of the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument. Failure to be impressed by this titanic achievement represents an “incurable case of TDS,” he writes, providing yet another (superfluous) example of the fact that writing about “TDS” is a nearly foolproof indicator of brain death.

 

Oh, but they like the policies! Except for the inflation, and the trade chaos, and the war, and the corruption, and the enshrinement of utter incompetence. Republicans evidently do not mind the murder at sea so much—the dead are, after all, Spanish-speaking foreigners nobody has ever heard of. It is something remarkable to have produced an administration corrupt and incompetent enough to embarrass a donkey-souled sack of ham like Dan Bongino—I hadn’t thought that could be done.

 

You can two-step around reality any way you like, but the fact is that right now Republicans are offering both Ken Paxton and $5.60 diesel. And so I repeat the question to my Republican friends:

 

“Do you feel smart?”

An Obama Alum Mourns How Effective Their Social Security Demagoguery Was

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 12, 2026

 

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has somehow managed to avoid an encounter with reputational or professional consequences for damaging his employer’s credibility, drew my attention to a provocative op-ed this morning:

 

 

The search-engine-optimized headline Times editors chose to grace the essay composed by the chairman of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, did the piece’s author no favors: “Social Security Is Going Broke,” it read. “Where Is the Outrage?”

 

“This week the Social Security trustees announced that the trust fund for retirees and survivors will be exhausted in just six years,” Furman wrote. “That’s six years before tens of millions of Americans could see their benefits cut by 22 percent.”

 

“The crisis is closer than anyone in the Clinton or Bush years ever imagined we might let it get,” Obama’s top economic mind asserted. Alas, Furman mourned, policymakers are likely to “kick” the crisis “down the road again” with temporary stopgaps, and the public is either apathetic or hostile toward meaningful reforms that could avert the program’s imminent insolvency.

 

This, Furman suggests, is a fact of life as intractable as the weather. Social Security is “the third rail of American politics,” he warned. “Touch it and you get electrocuted.”

 

How did we find ourselves in this predicament? Furman’s cursory historical review fails to uncover a culprit. Perhaps his investigation was hindered by his obvious conflict of interest. After all, the problem Furman laments has been dutifully cultivated by the political party to which he has devoted himself.

 

Democrats spent decades demagoguing the issue of Social Security reform, attacking anyone who dared notice the program’s documented shortfalls. It was a reckless and irresponsible political messaging campaign. But it was also a wildly successful one on the Democratic Party’s own terms.

 

Recall how Democrats reacted back in 2005 when George W. Bush proposed allowing workers to divert just 4 percent of their payroll taxes into personal retirement investment accounts. Furman’s former boss, the 44th president, accused Bush of attempting to “privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement.”

 

From the presidential pulpit, Obama continued to radicalize the public against sensible reforms to America’s unfunded liabilities, accusing Republicans of adding “trillions of dollars to our budget deficit while tying your benefits to the whims of Wall Street traders and the ups and downs of the stock market.” Obama didn’t quite accuse Republicans of wanting to “destroy” Social Security, but Democrats didn’t object when legacy media outlets did.

 

“Cutting benefits in half, risking Social Security on the stock market,” warned the narrator in one pro-Obama spot from the 2008 campaign. “The Bush-McCain privatization plan. Can you really afford more of the same?” Even the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus was repulsed by the Obama campaign’s mendacity. “The Obama campaign stretches the truth beyond recognition when it says that this would cut benefits in half,” she observed.

 

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s 2012 presidential campaign made a valiant effort to persuade Americans of the fiscal reality that would consume them if they failed to confront it. When it came to Social Security, the Romney-Ryan camp’s message hued closely to the statutory language. In the absence of reform, they warned, the law compels Social Security to cut benefits for current recipients.

 

“We respect you enough to level with you,” Ryan told an unruly AARP audience in the fall of 2012. America’s entitlement programs are on a trajectory toward insolvency — an ill-fated arc worsened by Obamacare. But the American people were in no mood to be reasoned with, and the Obama White House exploited their attachment to the fantasy that Social Security was on sound footing.

 

The Romney-Ryan ticket “could include increasing taxes on Social Security benefits for middle-class seniors by an average of $460 a year,” the Obama campaign warned (a prospect Furman now embraces, among other “tweaks”). But that was “not part of Romney’s tax plan,” the Center for Public Integrity noted. Nor did the Romney-Ryan ticket seek “higher taxes for seniors on Social Security, including taxing benefits for seniors who make less than $32,000 a year for the first time ever,” as Obama’s allies claimed.

 

The Obama campaign even published a video warning seniors that Republicans would steal money from the pockets of the elderly so they couldn’t afford even that $20 on “a birthday present for your grandson.” No wonder those AARP activists were hopping mad.

 

By the end of the last decade, not only had the general public been persuaded that Social Security was just fine, but the progressive left concluded that the program could and should be expanded.

 

In 2019, Elizabeth Warren’s aborted presidential campaign published a widget that allowed users to calculate how much money they’d receive from her bigger, bolder Social Security program. “We should be increasing Social Security benefits and asking the richest Americans to contribute their fair share to the program,” her campaign declared in a display of contempt for those of us who know who pays payroll taxes, from which Social Security’s funding is statutorily drawn. Bernie Sanders agreed. “It is time to expand Social Security, not cut it,” he declared. Progressive Democrats have been attempting to do just that via legislation ever since.

 

Democrats got what they wanted. If Social Security is difficult to reform today, that’s only because the public believes Democrats when they contend that it needs no reforming. And the Trump-led Republican Party has thoroughly internalized the lessons they were taught by the Obama operation in 2012.

 

“There are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty,” JD Vance said on the campaign trail in 2024. In his piece, Furman mourns the inclusion of a provision in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that “included a de facto benefit increase that came at the expense of revenues partially earmarked for Social Security,” which contributed to the dire projections now coming from the program’s trustees.

 

That was fiscally reckless, but it takes a lot of nerve to blame the GOP for responding to the political inducements the Democratic Party has expertly exploited.

 

Furman positions himself as a brave truthteller, but he’s not telling the whole story of how the nation committed itself to a fiscal crisis. He and the president he served deserve their share of the blame, but that’s not what Times readers want to hear. Thus, Furman’s piece is yet another contribution to the Democratic Party’s decades of mendacity when it comes to Social Security.

No to Todd Blanche for Attorney General

National Review Online

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

Todd Blanche has been everything President Trump wants in an attorney general, and that’s the problem.

 

The president has nominated Blanche to become the full-fledged attorney general, after a months-long audition as acting AG. Prior to this, Blanche had been the Senate-confirmed deputy AG, while the since-ousted Pam Bondi was in the top job. Unfortunately, Blanche has distinguished himself in this interim period only as an instrument of Trump’s unworthy and abusive campaign to investigate and prosecute his political opponents.

 

The brute fact is that, no matter whose name is on the DOJ letterhead, the president is running the Justice Department. He originally installed Blanche as deputy AG — thanks to Senate Republican quiescence and a strict party-line vote (52–46) back in March 2025 when Trump was at his strongest — because Blanche had served as his loyal and zealous defense lawyer during the onslaught of criminal prosecutions brought against Trump by Democratic prosecutors at the federal and state level. On Blanche’s watch, the Trump DOJ has pursued an unabashedly vindictive agenda of leveraging the government’s awesome prosecutorial powers — its public trust — against the president’s political enemies. To fight lawfare with lawfare.

 

While Blanche was in his deputy AG role, the DOJ established its Orwellian “Weaponization Working Group.” The group’s mission is twofold.

 

First, it pushes prosecutors to generate cases against Trump’s political opponents, such as James Comey (who ran the FBI during the Russiagate farce), New York Attorney General Letitia James (who brought a massive state civil fraud suit against Trump, his adult children, and his business empire), Senator Adam Schiff (the California Democrat who led the two impeachment pushes in Trump’s first term), Jerome Powell (the former Federal Reserve Board chairman with whom Trump clashed over interest rates), Lisa Cook (a Biden-appointed Fed Board member Trump has tried to oust), and sundry Obama and Biden administration officials — including former CIA director John Brennan — whom Trump blames for spying on his first administration and orchestrating his 2020 defeat.

 

Most of these efforts have been unsuccessful when challenged in court (e.g., weak indictments of Comey and James have been thrown out) but have had the desired effect of harassing their targets. The pursuit of Powell and Cook gives the lie to the notion that this is all just “turnabout is fair play” against people who abused the prosecutorial system themselves.

 

Second, the group seeks to discredit the Biden DOJ as inherently corrupt. The idea is to brand as fraudulent the Biden-era special counsel’s two indictments of Trump (notwithstanding significant proof of misconduct) and to rationalize the president’s pardons of Capitol rioters and financial fraudsters.

 

Some of the worst excesses of Trump DOJ lawfare occurred immediately after Trump rebuked then-AG Bondi publicly (in a social media rant that may have been published inadvertently) for failing to indict his enemies. The flawed Comey and James indictments followed. Later, immediately after a White House event at which the president scolded district U.S. attorneys for their timidity, the failed Powell investigation commenced. (It has since been abandoned, under congressional pressure.)

 

Bondi was still AG during these misadventures, but Blanche was front and center — the deputy attorney general runs the DOJ day to day, and all district U.S. attorneys report to him. Discouraging the president from legally dubious initiatives was one of Main Justice’s chief roles in the first term, but that has gone by the boards this time.

 

Though it’s only been two months, Blanche’s tenure as acting AG has underscored the point. He wants the top job, even though, as our Ed Whelan explains, he could keep functioning as de facto AG for the remainder of Trump’s term under statutes governing the DOJ and acting appointments. That would obviate the need for a toxic confirmation fight, during which Trump will inevitably pressure Republicans to rubber-stamp his guy while Democrats make the vote as painful as possible for the GOP with the midterms on the horizon.

 

The president made it clear that Blanche would have to earn the AG nomination. He has dutifully produced. First, there was a new indictment of Comey on the nonsensical charge that he threatened to murder the president by posting a photograph of seashells on a beach, arranged to say, “86 47.” Then, perhaps more outrageously, Blanche purported to “settle” the president’s bogus $10 billion civil lawsuit against his own Internal Revenue Service (over an unlawful leak of Trump’s private tax information that occurred on Trump’s own watch in 2019); Blanche did so by purporting to immunize Trump from future audits for past conduct (which Blanche, who has no role at IRS, appears to lack authority to do) and by establishing an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — underwritten by nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money — to pay “damages” to Capitol rioters and other “victims” of Biden DOJ overreach. The fund provoked even the habitually somnolent Republican-controlled Congress, causing Blanche to rescind it.

 

Professional ethics rules demand that Blanche, as the government’s lawyer, represent the public interest. In these indecorous episodes, he has instead prioritized his continuing duty of fealty to Donald Trump, his former private client. A lawyer in that conflicted position is supposed to recuse himself. A lawyer who wants to be AG in the Trump administration, by contrast, serves Trump.

 

Yet, Blanche himself is not the ultimate issue. Certainly, he is competent to do the job. His sympathizers contend that no stellar attorney general in the mold of a Michael Mukasey or Bill Barr would be asked to serve, or would serve, as AG to Trump in his second-term incarnation. Hence, we’re better off with Blanche, who has a strong prosecutorial background and has, reportedly, fought off at least some of the lawfare gambits. The DOJ, the thinking goes, will operate in a marginally less appalling fashion under Blanche than it might under a wholly unqualified lackey (see, e.g., Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as acting national intelligence director).

 

But the Blanche nomination is less about the nominee than it is about the Justice Department. Congress has a constitutional obligation to rein in executive abuses of power — as it did in pushing back against the “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund. The arsenal the Framers provided to the Senate for this purpose includes the power to refuse to confirm the president’s appointees until the president ceases and desists in abusing his authority.

 

The Senate is, moreover, duty-bound to do what it can to ensure that the Justice Department, created by Congress, fulfills its constitutional and statutory obligation to enforce the law evenhandedly, without fear, favor, or political bias.

 

It can’t fulfill this duty and also lend its imprimatur to Blanche’s dubious handiwork as Trump’s ideal AG.

Karmelo Anthony’s Race Doesn’t Matter

By Rich Lowry

Friday, June 12, 2026

 

The system failed Karmelo Anthony — he stabbed someone to death and is going to jail for it.

 

If this doesn’t strike you as an injustice, you haven’t been paying attention to the voices defending the 19-year-old who was just sentenced to 35 years in prison for murdering another teenager at a high school track meet in Texas two years ago.

 

The case has garnered national attention entirely for its racial angle. Anthony is black, and his victim, Austin Metcalf, was white. But there is no evidence that race played a role in the incident, and if both young men had been white or both black, no one would try to pile political or social meaning on top of a senseless crime.

 

Both Anthony and Metcalf were football players who competed in track and attended different high schools. At the meet, Anthony went inside the tent set up for Metcalf’s school. Athletes don’t ordinarily go into the tents of competing schools, and Metcalf and others asked him to leave. He refused and told Metcalf, threateningly, “Touch me and see what happens.”

 

Metcalf shoved him, and Anthony responded by plunging a knife into Metcalf’s chest, killing him nearly instantly.

 

At the trial, Anthony’s defense tried to make a self-defense case. But Metcalf obviously didn’t represent a threat to Anthony’s life. If Anthony had answered the shove with a shove of his own — or, better yet, simply left the tent when asked — the scuffle would have been quickly broken up, and Metcalf would be alive today and Anthony a free man.

 

Rather than simply admit that a black kid killed a white kid for no reason, Anthony’s defenders have reached for any reason to try to absolve him.

 

The rabble-rousing Democratic congresswoman from Texas, Jasmine Crockett, has said that the knife was small so can’t really be considered a deadly weapon — never mind that the knife did, indeed, kill Metcalf.

 

She’s said that Anthony stabbed Metcalf only once, which is irrelevant since it took only one thrust of the knife to kill him.

 

And she’s said that Anthony was justified in stabbing Metcalf because Metcalf was a large football player, but Anthony, too, was a football player, although not as big.

 

We’ve heard again and again that an all-white jury convicted Anthony, when in fact there were minorities on the jury, just not blacks. This complaint amounts to saying that it’s unfair that Anthony was denied the possibility that a black juror might dismiss the facts of the case and deadlock the jury for racial reasons. (Some of Anthony’s advocates say that in future such cases prospective black jurors should be less honest about their biases so they don’t get struck during jury selection.)

 

The celebrity rapper Cardi B has opined that black kids now need to be told not to argue with white kids because it’s too dangerous. This, though, fails to account for the fact that Anthony, not Metcalf, did the stabbing. Besides, if the incident had merely been an argument, it would have been of no consequence. It was Anthony’s use of deadly force that instantly transformed it into something life-changing.

 

If you didn’t know anything about the case, you’d believe, listening to the pro-Anthony commentary, that he was the one killed. His advocate, the progressive minister Dominique Alexander, says the case shows that black lives don’t matter; this charge at least makes some intuitive sense when a black man has been shot by a cop, but to apply it to a case where a black kid stabbed a white kid is mind-bogglingly perverse.

 

It’d be much better if such cases were simply considered on their merits. There is no reason to make an open-and-shut murder case into a race-based morality play and to consider the perpetrator and victim racial symbols rather than actual people whose conduct should be judged by neutral standards.

 

Karmelo Anthony committed a shocking crime, and his race can’t mitigate it or free him of responsibility.

All That for This?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 12, 2026

 

It’s unwise to invest too much emotional and intellectual energy in the selectively leaked terms of the deal that will supposedly end the conflict between the United States and Iran. It’s even more foolish to give undue credence to those leaks when they’re coming exclusively from the Iranian side of this equation.

 

But the president sure seemed excited about the deal’s prospects on Thursday afternoon. “We ended the war with Iran today,” Trump declared after abruptly calling off a new round of strikes on Iran that he’d previewed earlier that morning (having already called off ongoing strikes on Iranian targets mid-sortie on Wednesday night at, the president stressed, Iran’s request). The terms to which Iran consented were apparently so acceptable to Trump that he publicly mused about sending his vice president to Europe for a signing ceremony next week.

 

So, what’s in the deal? According to Iran’s Mehr news agency, just about everything they could ever want:

 

 

Some of these concessions conflict with the president’s stated goals at the outset of this war, like an American commitment “not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs.” The administration made countless promises to the oppressed Iranian people that America would support their aspirations to overthrow their tyrannical leaders. In this deal, those promises would be broken.

 

Giving up on seeking limits to Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for its terrorist proxy network would ensure that this deal bears a striking resemblance to Barack Obama’s JCPOA, but Trump’s deal would be even weaker. The Memorandum of Understanding commits both parties only to reembark on an endless series of talks over the status of Iran’s program, all while it uses up-front sanctions relief to reconstitute its force projection capabilities both inside Iran’s borders and throughout the Middle East.

 

Baking Israel’s defensive operations against Hezbollah into this accord at Iran’s request further sacrifices leverage that Trump might have used to compel Iran to be more pliant in these talks. In his administration’s very public arguments with itself over this deal and the degree to which Israel represents an obstacle to it, Trump seemed to have ruled out squeezing the Iranians on all fronts — including southern Lebanon. The terms of this arrangement appear to confirm that Trump did provide Iran with this unreciprocated concession.

 

It’s prudent to be skeptical of the Islamic Republic’s conception of what the deal entails. Western media outlets have, however, disputed Iran’s version of events only at the margins.

 

The “sticking point” that was resolved to Trump’s satisfaction when he called off Thursday’s strikes, according to CNN, was over how “future negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program will unfold and the sequencing of financial relief for Iran.” Axios reports that sanctions relief and the release of frozen Iranian assets will be tied to Iran’s observed adherence to the deal and progress in its implementation. The Strait of Hormuz, for example, would have to be fully open before Iran gets its sweeteners.

 

We’ve been burned before. No deal should be considered final until both parties have put pen to paper. What we’re looking at here, however, are not the terms of a cease-fire that leave the United States in a stronger position than it occupied at the start of the war. It’s an agreement to return to the pre-war status quo — endless talks over a nuclear program that is largely in tatters. What would we be talking about but the scale of the bribe necessary to get Iran to drop its nuclear ambitions?

 

Meanwhile, Trump’s signature will codify a new reality: that a hostile power can, through even the modest application of force, choke off a contested waterway, lay claim to international waters, and force the world’s most powerful naval power to back down. China is all but certain to test this proposition with far more resources and competence than the Iranians.

 

Maybe Trump will be the American president China tests. Perhaps that will be his successor’s lot. Either way, Trump’s legacy will loom over the future geopolitical crises this deal will render inevitable.

A Way Out of Iran

By Philip Klein

Friday, June 12, 2026

 

Not since Sonny Corleone has anybody been as hot for a deal as President Trump is to strike an agreement with the Iranians. Over the past several months, by Trump’s telling, we have been days away from signing an amazing deal with the Iranians, only for nothing to ever come to fruition.

 

Noah detailed the latest claims from Iran about what is in the current deal — a totally implausible set of provisions of which Noah was rightly skeptical. Trump has already called the terms “fake” and is back to saying that the Iranians are not dealing in good faith, warning, “They better get their act together, and FAST!” Even in claiming a deal is close, the administration has been leaking terms that are completely incompatible relative to what’s coming out in Iran’s state-controlled media. To note just one among many, administration officials are telling reporters that the deal includes the dismantlement of the Iranian nuclear program, while Iran’s media has said that the current agreement includes nothing on the nuclear issue.

 

This all comes after a wild day on Thursday, when within hours, Trump went from announcing plans for the U.S. to hit Iran hard and to imminently taking over Iran’s Kharg Island oil hub, to calling off the attacks and saying the war was over and there would be a signing ceremony on a deal within days.

 

While a lot of the criticism has been about Trump being played by Iranians, in reality, I think Trump isn’t getting played by Iranians per se (whom he isn’t directly negotiating with) but by the mediators. Politico reports that yesterday, after Trump was gearing up for more attacks on Iran, senior officials from Pakistan, the UAE, and Qatar called up Trump to assure him that a deal was close and to persuade him not to attack. Telling Trump that a deal is close feeds into what he wants to believe — that the joint Israeli-U.S. operation coupled with threats against Iran have forced them to submit to his demands. So I think officials from Pakistan et al. are simply lying to Trump about what Iranians are willing to agree to, while perhaps telling Iranians that Trump is more flexible on certain matters.

 

A number of critics of Trump have come to assume that he will agree to any deal just to be able to declare the war over, so that oil prices can go down ahead of the midterms. But so far, that has not been the case. If Trump were willing to sign onto anything, he would have struck a deal already. At the same time, he is clearly eager to get the war over with and plainly isn’t interested in a resumption of war on the scale that it would take to either (a) eliminate Iran’s ability to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz or (b) topple the regime. This is why we have been in a holding pattern — Trump won’t agree to just any deal, the Iranians won’t agree to a deal that respects Trump’s red lines, and Trump won’t go back to full-scale war.

 

As far as I can tell, the original plan was to bomb Iran for a few weeks and walk away with a better government, a good deal, and/or a heavily degraded Iran. But Iran’s harassment of ships trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz made it impossible to walk away with that as the status quo.

 

It should be abundantly clear that the current regime in Iran cannot be trusted and will never agree to a deal that would meet the criteria Trump himself has established. So if he isn’t willing or ready to go all the way militarily, to me the least bad option would be for Trump to announce that negotiations are over, as are major military operations, but that he will maintain the embargo against Iran until traffic is freely flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.

 

This obviously wouldn’t be a perfect outcome. It would not immediately relieve oil prices or resolve Republican worries in November. It also could linger for quite a while. But the U.S. could withstand the economic disruption from the Strait of Hormuz longer than Iran could endure an economic embargo. Given how depleted the Iranian navy is, sustaining an embargo would take a lot less effort than a resumption of full-scale military action. Even if an extended blockade doesn’t lead to a complete economic collapse, as some have speculated it might, it would certainly make it a lot harder for Iran to rebuild its conventional military and its ballistic program and to restart its nuclear efforts. It would help lock in place the gains made by the bombardment of Iran. Meanwhile, Trump would no longer look desperate for a deal, which ultimately Iran needs a lot more than we do.

A Man in a Hurry

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

I find it interesting that the president has reportedly grown skeptical of his heir apparent, asking confidants whether J.D. Vance “has what it takes” to win the presidency.

 

If anything, his confidence in Vance should be surging. More than once over the last year, the vice president has demonstrated better instincts than his boss.

 

Not always. Late in the New York Times’ lengthy scoop this week on how the White House handled the release of the Epstein files, there’s a passage about Cabinet officers debating an allegation made by one of Epstein’s victims involving Donald Trump and, er, nipples. Quote: “The vice president said he thought the president would be OK with releasing the nipple-related documents, arguing that Trump had been accused of worse.”

 

Flood the zone with nipples does not scream “political savvy.”

 

But on the threshold question of whether to suppress the files, Vance was correct. Trump seemed to believe that his supporters would drop the matter if he ordered them to drop it but “the vice president appeared panicked … about the way the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition,” the Times alleged. Grassroots pressure would mount and force Congress to order the files released, the VP believed. Better that the White House put out everything and get credit for transparency than “let the story drag on for months as information dripped out, each new revelation renewing the cycle of suspicion and fury.”

 

J.D. Vance has few political talents, but it takes keen insight into the populist id to pander one’s way from Never Trump pundit to Republican presidential front-runner in less than a decade. When he told his colleagues in the West Wing that right-wingers wouldn’t let the Epstein matter drop, they should have listened.

 

That’s not the most important subject on which the vice president has been right and the president has been conspicuously wrong, though. I’m persuaded by Jonathan Last’s theory that Trump is down on Vance because the VP’s skepticism of the Iran war has proven … justified.

 

You’d think it would be the opposite. If the conflict had gone well for the United States, the president might reasonably have concluded that his VP is too blinded by dovishness to see threats clearly and to use America’s armed forces to neutralize them. As it is, with what was supposed to be a six-week war heating up again in its fourth month, Vance is the one who appears clear-eyed while Trump looks like a schmuck.

 

And the president will never forgive him for it.

 

The U.S. military bombed Iran again yesterday, the second day of airstrikes after a long ceasefire in which the fire never quite ceased. Targets included air-defense systems along the Strait of Hormuz and surveillance radar systems used to help guide Iranian missiles and drones, raising the awkward question of why those assets still existed at this stage of the conflict. Reports are also swirling today about a precision strike on a water facility that allegedly left 20,000 residents without anything to drink, a potential war crime.

 

There’s more to come, Trump vowed on Thursday morning. “The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT,” he wrote on Truth Social. “At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets.”

 

Why, after two months of bending over backward to preserve a pseudo-ceasefire, is he now extending the war?

 

Paradoxically, because he’s in a hurry to end it.

 

Escalating to de-escalate.

 

Trump isn’t trying to extend the war. On the contrary, Axios and the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that he sent a communiqué to the Iranians reassuring them that he wasn’t seeking to restart wider hostilities with these new strikes. The U.S. would target military assets exclusively, hoping to avoid inflicting casualties. (How the strike on the water facility fits into that is unclear.)

 

What he’s trying to do is break the stalemate in negotiations. “The military pressure would only increase until Iran ceded to the president’s terms” is how a Journal reporter summarized Trump’s message to Iran. You’ve heard the term “escalate to de-escalate” to describe Russia’s habit of threatening a nuclear attack when conventional warfare drags on in hopes of intimidating its enemies into suing for peace? Well, these new strikes are a modest American version of that.

 

Trump is trying to escalate just enough to weaken Iran’s resistance to making concessions without escalating so much that the regime feels obliged to resume the conflict in earnest. But why now, after he spent two months waiting patiently for the Iranians to come to terms?

 

The answer to that starts with the incident that caused the U.S. to resume bombing this week, which could have and probably should have been much worse than it was.

 

On Monday an Iranian drone struck an Apache helicopter patrolling over the strait and downed it. The two American crewmen aboard survived but ended up in the water for two hours. Although the drone made a direct hit, the incident is better understood as a near miss: The explosives in the vessel that hit the Apache failed to detonate and the U.S. Navy fortunately reached the stranded crewmen before the Iranians did.

 

They could have easily died or been captured. If you think peace negotiations are sticky for the White House now, imagine what they’d look like with a new hostage crisis involving captive Americans thrown into the mix.

 

“We told the Iranians that if the pilots were killed we would have been in a whole different place today,” one U.S. official informed Axios. Indeed, the president had told aides previously that the only thing that might compel him to end peace talks and return to all-out war would be Iran killing more Americans. Each day that the conflict wears on raises the odds that the White House won’t be so lucky the next time a U.S. aircraft is struck. The president needs a deal before another incident makes that impossible.

 

And he’s closer to that deal than we might expect, if Axios’ traditionally Trump-friendly sources are to be believed.

 

“Trump may well have concluded an initial agreement with Iran late last month if he accepted the terms his envoys had negotiated,” the outlet claimed. The president sought two revisions, one restricting the regime’s ability to collect “tolls” from ships passing through the strait and the other requiring it to “down-blend” (or dilute) its enriched uranium within 60 days. The Iranians said they’d get back to him shortly—but did not. Instead they chattered about how they wanted some of their frozen financial assets returned to them before they complied with other parts of the deal, a Trump red line.

 

If it’s true that there are only a few sticking points left to resolve—never mind that “no tolls in the strait” sounds like an awfully big one—a new round of limited U.S. strikes might be the president’s attempt to weaken what’s left of the enemy’s already weakened resistance to compromise. The message isn’t “no deal,” it’s “hurry up and let’s get this done.”

 

Meanwhile, the costs of the war are about to take an ugly turn.

 

“Industry models show the collapse of crude inventories within a matter of weeks could push the cost of oil up by 50 percent or more—sending the price of gas at the pump soaring past $5 per gallon,” the Washington Post reported on Thursday. A day earlier, new inflation numbers confirmed that the cost of living is now outpacing wage gains, a political problem that’s probably unfixable before the midterms (especially with Trump’s knack for idiotic sound bites) but will certainly be unfixable if the standoff in the strait persists for much longer.

 

To make matters worse, the only reason gas isn’t already more expensive is because China has slashed demand. If that changes, so will the pain at the pump for Americans. An oil industry source who’s been in touch with the administration told the Post starkly that “the standoff cannot go on for another 30-45 days without the political calculations changing” due to surging prices and that “the White House knows and understands the severity of the potential situation.”

 

The president is out of time. The cost-of-living problem is deepening into a crisis. He needs a deal and he’s counting on “escalate to de-escalate” to deliver one.

 

The schmuck factor.

 

All of those are pragmatic reasons for new attacks. But I wouldn’t underestimate what we might call “the schmuck factor” as another influence in Trump’s calculations.

 

He’s a wee bit insecure about being seen as weak, you may have noticed at some point over the last decade. As the war has worn on without him being able to bludgeon Iran into submission, that insecurity has flared. This morning he phoned into Fox News to complain about a Wall Street Journal editorial accusing him of not hitting the Iranians hard enough. In the last few weeks he’s posted the same screed three times, verbatim, on Truth Social accusing the press of minimizing the devastation he’s visited on Iran.

 

But it’s not the media that’s made him look like a schmuck in how he’s handled the war. It’s his own behavior: He has claimed no fewer than 38 times since the conflict began that a deal with the regime is right around the corner. This afternoon, as I was writing this column, he did it again when he announced that he was canceling the “VERY HARD” strikes that were planned for this evening because, supposedly, there’s been some movement on talks by the Iranian leadership.

 

The 39^th time’s the charm, I guess.

 

He’s shown a surprising tolerance for letting Iran “tap him along” with endless negotiations for most of the war, which should tell us something about how desperate he is to get a deal and get out. But something changed over the past week, I suspect, when he began taking flak from some of his own supporters for his schmuckery.

 

Hawkish allies like Mark Levin were horrified when Trump reacted to Iran’s recent missile attack on Israel not by warning the Iranians to stand down but by warning the Israelis not to retaliate. It’s one thing to show restraint in the name of preserving negotiations; it’s another to functionally align yourself with the enemy to do so.

 

Remarkably, the president almost did it again with the downed Apache. He downplayed the incident in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday morning, saying that it “wasn’t a big deal” and noting that the crewmen weren’t seriously injured. (Iranian officials had claimed that the helicopter wasn’t deliberately targeted.) Only after an intervention by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Dan Caine did he become convinced that deterrence required an American response.

 

As with the Epstein files, Trump seems to have believed that loyal supporters like Levin would subordinate their policy interests to his political needs. And as with the Epstein files, he found out otherwise the hard way.

 

But it isn’t just staunch hawks who’ve tired of the schmuckiness. Trump’s embarrassing penchant for promising that a deal is imminent and then failing to deliver has become a source of mockery even on Fox News. Prime time host Laura Ingraham also zeroed in this week on the obvious contradiction between the last few days of U.S. strikes and the president’s endless boasting about how much damage has been done to Iran. How are the Iranians still able to launch attacks on U.S. aircraft, she wondered, if their military has been “completely defeated”?

 

That, as much as anything else, might explain the resumption of limited U.S. attacks on Iran over the last few days. Trump’s credibility on the war and reputation for “strength” are eroding even in otherwise friendly quarters of the right. He may have reasoned that if he could gain a bit of negotiating leverage with the regime and regain the confidence of Republicans that he’s still in control of events (which he isn’t), a new round of attacks would be a twofer for him.

 

He looked a bit less schmucky afterward than he has for most of the past two months. Or at least he did until he called off tonight’s promised airstrikes for a 39^th stab at a peace deal.

 

The irony of the last 48 hours for Iran hawks is that this week’s show of presidential strength might presage a bigger show of weakness. Axios claims Trump was willing to make a major concession in the last round of talks, agreeing to let the Iranians down-blend their uranium on their own soil, under United Nations supervision, rather than insist that it be done abroad. If he’s desperate enough to agree to that, I wonder if he’s also quietly desperate enough to make other key concessions to nail down a deal to end a war that’s paralyzed his presidency—like, say, to release some of those frozen billions up front after all.

 

If he is, he may have calculated that a show of military force beforehand would make it easier to do so. The more it appears to the American public that he’s negotiating from a position of strength, fresh off pummeling Iranian positions around the strait, the harder it’ll be for critics of any peace agreement that follows to persuasively characterize its terms as weak.

 

In other words, this week’s attacks could make a bad deal more likely. But for a man in a hurry to get out of this war, a bad deal is better than none at all.