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.