Average gasoline prices hit $4 per gallon today as the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed. As we’ll discuss below, President Trump doesn’t really care whether it opens again. So, uh, better adjust that gas budget for the long term.
Morning Chaser is back at 10 a.m. EDT. Links below. Happy Tuesday.
Retreat By Any Other Name
by William Kristol
For what it’s worth—and keep in mind, this newsletter is free—here’s my speculation, as of early Tuesday morning, March 31, about where Donald Trump is heading on Iran.
Where he’s heading is toward the exits.
On Sunday night, on Air Force One, Trump called the current Iranian leadership “a whole different group of people” who have “been very reasonable.” The next morning, he claimed on Truth Social that “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made.”
Maybe this was just Trump being fanciful. Or it could be Trump pretending to want a deal when in fact he’s planning to escalate. And it’s true that the rest of his post was less upbeat and pacific, mostly consisting of threats of war crimes against this supposedly new and enlightened Iranian regime:
if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’ This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Still—and it might be wishful thinking on my part—these threats sound to me like bluster. And I’ll note that Trump did precede the bluster with the claim that a deal will probably be reached shortly.
In any case, despite Trump’s demand early in the morning that the Strait of Hormuz be “immediately ‘Open for Business,’” a few hours later Secretary of State Marco Rubio moved the goalposts. Speaking to al Jazeera, Rubio said that he expected the military campaign to be finished within weeks, and that
Then we’ll be confronted with this issue of the Strait of Hormuz, and it will be up to Iran to decide, or a coalition of nations from around the world and the region, with the participation of the United States, we’ll make sure that it’s open, one way or the other.
Along the same lines, Trump’s spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, vaguely told reporters yesterday that the United States was “working toward” normal operations in the strait.
That sounded to me like an administration backing off from the demand the strait be reopened.
Last night, the Wall Street Journal reported that
President Trump told aides he’s willing to end the U.S. military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed. . . . He decided that the U.S. should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks and wind down current hostilities while pressuring Tehran diplomatically to resume the free flow of trade. If that fails, Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait, the officials said.
And if that wasn’t enough of a tell, Trump seemed to all but confirm the reporting this morning when he posted that other countries were going to have to figure out how to get oil through the strait themselves. “[T]he U.S.A won’t be there to help you anymore,” he added.
All in all, it seems more likely than not that Trump plans on walking away rather than escalating. I think this would be a less bad outcome of this reckless and feckless “excursion” than introducing ground troops. But it will still be a bad outcome for the United States and the world. And I’m afraid it won’t be the last bad outcome we’ll experience from having an unbelievably irresponsible individual as our president.
What’s the best word for what Trump is doing here? Retreat? Surrender? Discuss in the comments.
Non-Slop Populism
by Andrew Egger
For politicians, strong populist tendencies and radical political commitments tend to go hand in hand. This makes sense: The people with the loudest critiques of a given status quo are often the people who want to see that status quo most aggressively changed.
But there are exceptions. Which is part of why I’ve become so interested this year in Rob Sand, Iowa’s Democratic state auditor and the party’s candidate for governor.
The last few cycles have seen Iowa go from a purple agricultural state to a solid-red one; Sand, who has been elected auditor twice, is the only Democrat there currently serving in statewide or federal office. But national Democrats are hopeful that he may be the rare candidate who can pick the Iowa lock. Early public polling is extremely sparse, but suggests a competitive contest;1 earlier this month, Sand qualified for the ballot with a state-record 24,756 signatures. The Democratic Governor’s Association sees Sand’s race as one of its strongest pickup opportunities this cycle.
Some of this has to do with the aesthetics that men-chasing Democratic consultants have lately decided their candidates need: He’s a native son! He wears ball caps and vests! He bow hunts! Last week, Politico followed Sand to a deer-hunting expo to capture anecdotes of him hobnobbing with the “camo-wearing, venison jerky-chomping, Busch Light tallboy-nursing fellow hunters,” splashing pictures of Sand’s latest trophy buck across the article.2
This sort of narrative parade is always a bit silly—Democratic men: We’re not all pencil-necked lanyard dorks and/or metrosexuals!—and it can certainly get overblown. (See: Walz, Tim.) But these aesthetics are the sauce, not the meat, of Sand’s appeal. The main course is his record working a transparency-focused job in a state government he argues has been made sloppy and lazy by years of one-party rule. He points to a law Iowa’s Republican supermajority passed in 2023 stripping away some of the powers of his office: “They don’t want accountability,” Sand told the AP at the time.
For Sand, accountability is a central theme. This week, his campaign released a policy platform on the subject, one stuffed with populist proposals: banning stock trading for state officials and requiring more muscular financial disclosures for candidates for office, requiring mandatory prison time for fraudsters convicted of stealing taxpayer money, strengthening whistleblower protections for state employees, and placing new requirements on elected officials: term limits, age limits, and cognitive and civics tests. All of it amounts to an anti-elite platform that is more procedural than ideological: A lot of people have been skating by with a lot of shabby, shoddy work for a long time. I intend to change it.
At a time when Americans are showing record cynicism toward pretty much all public institutions, it’s easy for politicians to channel that cynicism in empty-calorie, slopulist ways. We have no shortage of politicians willing to denounce the system and to argue that their chief virtue is that they’re outsiders who had no part in building it. Meanwhile, current officeholders are offering no shortage of pointless policy gestures designed to signal their own opposition to the status quo. It’s refreshing to see someone like Sand, who appears to have come by his critiques based on observations from inside the system of the incentives for bad behavior. But let’s see if his system-reforming org-chart populism can actually win.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Iran Hawks Are Losing Their Heads… If you’re not critical of Trump’s war in Iran, you probably haven’t been paying attention, argues MONA CHAREN.
Ex–Trump Intel Official Sounds Alarm on Iran… SAM STEIN talks with former intelligence official SUE GORDON to break down the fast-moving Iran crisis—and why the U.S. may not have the intelligence it needs for what comes next.
Ground Forces in Iran—for What? Success is impossible if there’s no goal in the first place, observes MARK HERTLING.
Morning Chaser: Join Andrew and Bill live on Substack or YouTube at 10 a.m. EDT. We’ll post the replay to the site and the Bulwark Takes feed after it concludes. See you soon!
Quick Hits
YOU CAN’T SPELL LINDSEY WITHOUT ‘DISNEY L’: It was a scene right out of one of those old commercials. Sen. Lindsay Graham, you’ve just gotten a president to launch the regime-change war in Iran you’ve hoped to see for your entire political career—what are you going to do next? I’m going to Disney World!
The South Carolina senator was photographed repeatedly at the Orlando theme park over the weekend—improbably carrying a Little Mermaid bubble wand through the “Tangled” area of the Magic Kingdom Friday,3 and brunching at Chef Mickey’s at the Contemporary Resort Sunday.4
TMZ made a lot of Graham enjoying the Most Wonderful Place On Earth™ during a partial government shutdown, although it’s not exactly the senator’s fault TSA agents still aren’t being paid—he voted to accept the Democrats’ compromise offer alongside the rest of his conference before leaving town. Still, it’s a dangerous time to be a lawmaker enjoying yourself in public—and a particularly dangerous one if you happen to be a Republican with a penchant for enjoying regime-change wars. It raises obvious questions about what sacrifices you yourself are making. And it makes you an easy target for crabby MAGA media figures still too chicken to focus their fire on Trump.
“While our country is at war, our airports are a mess, DHS is not funded, and our elections are not secure, Lindsey Graham is wandering around Disney World with a bubble wand,” fumed Daily Wire pundit Matt Walsh. “This is an image that should live in infamy.”
BAD TO WORSE: Another day, another five-alarm-fire poll for Donald Trump. A UMass Amherst survey released yesterday found the president with the rock-bottom approval of 33 percent—eleven points down from eleven months ago, five points down from last July. Fully 62 percent of respondents either somewhat or strongly disapprove of Trump’s second-term leadership.
“Americans grade Trump harshly on the most prominent issues facing the country, especially on bread-and-butter economic issues,” said UMass Amherst Professor Jesse Rhodes, who was co-director of the poll. “When it comes to public opinion, economic concerns usually dominate, and Americans’ harshly negative views of Trump’s economic leadership are a major cause of his declining poll numbers.”
Others in the MAGA coalition are drawing different lessons from the poll. “For the love of all that is holy,” Megyn Kelly said, “we need to get out of Iran and work full time on [people’s financial] worries.”
CAN’T EVEN DO CORRUPTION RIGHT: Maybe one of the reasons so many suspicious, anonymous people with apparent inside information about the Trump administration’s foreign policy decisions have been making well-timed bets on prediction markets like Kalshi is that doing corruption the old-fashioned way is just too complicated for them. The Financial Times reports that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tried to invest in American defense contractors just before the start of the Iran war—but failed:
Hegseth’s broker at Morgan Stanley contacted BlackRock in February about making a multimillion-dollar investment in the asset manager’s Defense Industrials Active ETF, the people said, shortly before the US launched military action against Tehran. . . . The investment discussed by Hegseth’s broker did not ultimately go ahead as the fund, which launched in May last year, was not yet available for Morgan Stanley clients to buy.
Hegseth and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell denied the story. BlackRock and Morgan Stanley didn’t comment.
Worry not, though. Even if Hegseth had invested in the fund, it would have backfired, per FT: “The Nasdaq-listed IDEF fund has risen 28 per cent over the past year, but has not risen on the Middle East war, falling almost 13 per cent in the past month.” As the old saying goes: God protects fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Or at least two out of three.
—Benjamin Parker
Cheap Shots
Sand, who is unopposed in the Democratic primary, doesn’t yet have a Republican opponent: GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds is retiring, and several Republicans seem competitive ahead of the primary set for June 2.
Sand has leaned into this, too; to be fair, it was a very impressive buck.
TMZ reports Graham was holding the bubble wand for a little girl while she was in the bathroom.
Our colleague Joe Perticone wanted us to be sure to mention this is the same resort where President Richard Nixon delivered his “I am not a crook” speech.
I can do what I want
What's a war crime to me
I'll do what I say
And then all will see
When I yell out "Jump"
My Army will go
Unless I revert to
Donald J. Taco
I'm not sure that Lindsey holding the bubble wand for a "little girl" is a great look...