Mission Creep

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

 

The term “Friday news dump” refers to a PR strategy of releasing embarrassing information on Friday afternoon, hoping that most people won’t see it because they’ve already logged off for the weekend.

 

Are you a politician with a scandal that’s about to be exposed? A corporation with a major production setback to announce? A government with an aimless war on its hands that’s about to turn hot again? Wait until Friday to spill the beans. Many Americans won’t notice.

 

The White House showed how it’s done last week, executing a Friday news dump so flawlessly that the information contained within didn’t get picked up by Politico until Monday afternoon. Per a letter to Congress dated July 10, America is officially at war with Iran again.

 

If you were under the impression that we’ve been at war since February 28, you’re technically incorrect. The first stage of the conflict, Operation Epic Fury, was declared over on May 6—conveniently right around the time that the 60-day window for unauthorized presidential warmaking (which isn’t really a thing) under the War Powers Act was expiring.

 

Now that the peace deal between the two sides has collapsed and hostilities have resumed in earnest, replete with the U.S. reinstating its blockade of ships using Iranian ports, the president has formally notified Congress that a conflict is again underway. But it’s not a continuation of the original war, supposedly. It’s a whole new war, which means he gets a whole new 60 days to do whatever he likes without accountability to the legislature.

 

Needless to say, abusing the War Powers Act this way could hypothetically continue forever, letting the president fight on indefinitely without congressional approval by simply declaring every 60 days or so that the current conflict is over and a new, distinct conflict has begun. By the time he leaves office, we might be bogged down in Iran War XVIII or whatever.

 

And as long as Republicans control the House and Senate, nothing will be done to stop it.

 

I’ll say this in Donald Trump’s defense, though. The “new” Iran war does seem to have a meaningfully different mission from the one that started in February. If we’re defining discrete conflicts by how distinct their goals are, he’s got a case that Iran War II should be distinguished conceptually from Iran War I.

 

Here, in the president’s own words, is the goal of the new conflict as of Monday,:

 

The Hormuz Strait is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran. We are reinstating the [sic] THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE, so named because it is only stopping Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving. All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait. The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

 

A 20 percent toll on shipping in the strait—to be collected by the United States, not Iran. Now that’s what I call “mission creep.”

 

On Tuesday morning Trump walked it back, sort of, by announcing that the tolls he’d proposed would be replaced by “Trade and Investment Deals” with the Gulf states. That makes the financial extortion he was planning to conduct in the strait less direct and overt, but his impulse to monetize the U.S. presence in Hormuz—in a war he had hoped to end less than a month ago!—is plainly still there.

 

Have you ever seen the Bugs Bunny “duck season/wabbit season” cartoons?

 

Wabbit season.

 

Until now, the best Looney Tunes analogy for the Iran war was any episode involving Yosemite Sam. A belligerent orange-y blowhard armed to the teeth and obsessed with his own toughness attempts to take down a wily enemy, only to end up repeatedly tied in knots.

 

But watching Trump adopt Iran’s own blackmail tactics yesterday reminded me of Daffy Duck being manipulated into agreeing with Bugs that Elmer Fudd should be hunting ducks, not rabbits. Only in a cartoon would someone be idiotic enough to take up his enemy’s cause, against his own interest, one might think.

 

Yet one would be wrong, it turns out.

 

Explain this to me like I’m 5 years old, then: Why did Trump entertain the idea of a 20 percent American toll even briefly? In what way would that have benefited the United States on balance?

 

“He didn’t seriously entertain the idea. He was trolling,” you might say. Not so. A White House official told Semafor yesterday that he was “very serious” about it. “This is what he’s always wanted to do, but people tried to talk him out of it,” the source explained. “To him, this was his instinctual decision always, and he’s sort of just come back around to it.”

 

When I first saw Trump’s post about the toll, I thought he might have been referring only to ships using Iranian ports. Turnabout is fair play: If Iran insists on extorting other countries’ tankers transiting the strait, the U.S. Navy will extort Iran’s. Maybe that will teach them a lesson about blackmail.

 

But that didn’t make sense. If the point of the U.S. blockade is to crush Iran’s economy until the regime begs for peace, why would we allow them to continue exporting oil under any circumstances? And in any case, it’s not true: Trump made clear to reporters on Monday that the 20 percent toll would be imposed on U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

 

He wasn’t trying to give the Iranians a taste of their own medicine. He was trying to cut in on their action.

 

Wait, though. It gets stupider.

 

In proposing the tolls, the president undercut months of messaging from his own deputies. “It’s an international waterway,” Marco Rubio told reporters on June 23 while discussing Iran’s tactics in the strait. “No country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway. That’s existing international law.” J.D. Vance underlined the same point days earlier, shortly after the peace deal was signed: “First of all, we believe international waterways should be free of tolls. And that’s been our position. That’s what you see, of course, in the 60 days of the [memorandum of understanding].”

 

Vance and Rubio were trying to maintain the taboo against Iranian hostage-taking. On Monday, in one Truth Social post, President Daffy Duck blew it up—and Iran was grateful. “POTUS is absolutely right. Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service,” the country’s foreign minister quipped on social media.

 

Amazingly, the toll Trump proposed was also far more onerous than what Iran itself has sought to charge. At one point in April, an Iranian official suggested demanding $1 per barrel of oil carried on passing tankers; the number the president floated would have extracted roughly 15 times as much. Trump’s scheme made Iran’s ongoing extortion seem reasonable, even generous, relative to what America had in mind.

 

And again the Iranians were grateful. “20% is of course too much. We will be fair,” the foreign minister went on to say in his tweet. Imagine a world in which a commercial crew sees a warship pull up alongside and feels relieved that it’s the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, not the U.S. Navy.

 

Protection without protection.

 

But wait. We haven’t reached the stupidest part.

 

The stupidest part is that Trump’s argument last month for striking a weak peace deal with Iran was that the alternative was worse. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” he warned at the G7 summit, alluding to the knock-on effects of letting oil prices continue to rise as global reserves dwindled. “Rather than possibly going into a depression,” he went on to say, he made a difficult bargain that would hopefully reopen the strait and bring down the cost of living.

 

And it worked. Inflation declined in June, per the latest numbers released on Tuesday morning. So … why the hell would he turn around Monday and propose a massive new U.S.-imposed tax on oil in the strait that would have ended up being passed on to global consumers, driving gas prices up again?

 

On top of everything else, Trump went out of his way yet again to show America’s allies that their friendship won’t spare them from a shakedown.

 

“One of the president’s goals in this conflict should be to deepen the Islamic Republic’s international isolation,” Noah Rothman wrote yesterday at National Review, mystified as to why Trump would deepen America’s instead by proposing the toll. The only thing worse than showing the Gulf states that they might find postliberal Iran easier to deal with than a postliberal United States was showing them that and getting nothing in return, which is what the president did when he said he was willing to take 20 percent of their oil revenue before quickly backing off.

 

Right, I know—he now says he got “Trade and Investment Deals” in lieu of tolling. We’ll see. That smells like something cooked up to let him save face as he retreats from the toll idea, but even if it’s true, I wouldn’t count the money just yet. Our Gulf allies aren’t likely to go on submitting forever to a protection racket that’s stopped actually protecting them.

 

Meanwhile, it almost goes without saying that the president likely didn’t consider the unintended big-picture consequences of imposing a U.S. toll regime.

 

Trump is a guy who reportedly thought Iran would “be another Venezuela” and who shrugged off repeated warnings before the war about a potential crisis in Hormuz, which makes it a cinch that he floated his “Guardian of the Strait” nonsense without weighing some of the obvious complications mentioned by Jonathan Last. Would the U.S. Navy’s presence in the Persian Gulf be permanent? Would America really fire on passing tankers that refused to pay? What would the White House do when China inevitably decided that it, too, should extort commercial vessels in international waters?

 

Daffy Duck at least had the excuse that he was maneuvered into his lamebrained idea about “duck season” by a clever opponent. The Iranians didn’t maneuver Trump into mimicking their plan to toll the strait, though. He came up with it all on his own.

 

To call all of this stupid, as I have, is true but doesn’t capture the problem. It’s not that it reflects poor strategy as much as it reflects no strategy. There’s simply no strategic thought behind the tolling scheme at all, and the muted response to it abroad suggests that friends and foes of the United States grasped that instantly. “The rest of the world understands that America is no longer a country to be taken seriously,” Last deduced from their silence. There was no point in anyone raising hell diplomatically about the latest inane proposal from a senescent mobster so devoid of strategic benefit to the U.S. that it would have to be rescinded immediately. And was.

 

Losing the plot.

 

Semafor’s source is correct about why Trump floated the toll idea, I suspect: “To him, this was his instinctual decision always, and he’s sort of just come back around to it.”

 

It was a matter of instinct, the same way extorting Europe over Greenland remains a matter of instinct despite that dispute having supposedly been settled months ago. The urge to shake down weaklings comes to the president as naturally as the urge to eat or drink does, so much so that he reliably sounds aggrieved whenever some norm or law prevents him from indulging.

 

We don’t need to stray beyond the current conflict to find examples. In March, for instance, he complained to the Financial Times that Americans were too squeamish about plunder. "To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran,” he observed, “but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.”

 

A month later, presaging yesterday’s cockamamie toll proposal, he told ABC News that he’d consider a partnership with Iran to squeeze oil commerce in the strait. “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it—also securing it from lots of other people. It’s a beautiful thing,” he claimed. There was no indication that he was joking.

 

There’s a childlike quality to his rapaciousness. He sees something valuable, he wants it, and he really can’t be made to understand why he shouldn’t have it. He might be convinced that he can’t have it, but that he shouldn’t have it? When it’s within his means to take it? Does not compute.

 

So it makes sense that, as the war in Iran drifts further from its original purpose, the president might supply a new rationale for the conflict that satisfies his own sense of when military force is justified. We’re not going to seize Iran’s uranium; we’re not going to oust the Khomeinists from power; we’re not going to cripple their missile capabilities; we’re not even going to force them to let go of the strait.

 

But what if we used the crisis as an opportunity to extort billions of dollars from our own allies? That would convince Americans that the war was worth it after all, no?

 

It would certainly convince Trump.

 

The tolling scheme was nothing more or less, I think, than his attempt to improvise a casus belli at a moment when the White House has otherwise lost the plot in Iran. He can’t get out without losing face, he can’t keep going without risking economic calamity, and he’s been bored with the whole endeavor for months. All he can think to do in his frustration is fall back on what he knows and loves—that is, extortion. Character is destiny, as usual.