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.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Hungary Proved That Liberalism Can Win… Péter Magyar ran against authoritarianism, not the price of eggs, reports MATT JOHNSON.
Hegseth’s War on the Press Is a War on the Pentagon’s Credibility… All the news that fits the narrative, observes PATRICK GRANFIELD.
The Anti-Prestige Prestige Show: Why The Pitt Is the Cure for What Ails TV. It’s good art and healthy business, writes ZANDY HARTIG.
FRIDAY REVIEWS: SONNY BUNCH offers both a review of Michael and an interview with Lou Diamond Phillips about his riveting new film, Keep Quiet.
Quick Hits
THE CARD NOT TAKEN: Remember the Trump “gold card”? When the president announced his buy-your-residency program for foreigners last year, he bragged that he was expecting heavy demand for the applications priced at $1 million a pop: “We anticipate the TRUMP GOLD CARD will generate well over $100 Billion Dollars very quickly,” Trump wrote in September. “This money will be used for reducing Taxes, Pro Growth Projects, and paying down our Debt.”
So far he’s only a little bit off—about five orders of magnitude. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Thursday that exactly one person has so far been approved for a “gold card” visa to date, per Bloomberg News. Hundreds more, he claimed, are still in the pipeline undergoing what he described as “an extraordinary vet.” (Coming soon, perhaps: Gold Card Premium Plus Accelerated™—all the benefits, half the fuss!)
Many observers have long doubted whether Trump’s gold-card program would attract takers, especially given that other immigration pathways, like an EB-5 investor visa, already exist for foreigners willing to splash down some cash to establish residency in the United States. These doubts seem to be proving true—and it’s looking like the money for reducing Taxes, Pro Growth Projects, and paying down our Debt will need to come from someplace else.
WHERE DO THEY FIND THESE GUYS?: Hung Cao, the new acting Navy secretary following the ouster of John Phelan, doesn’t have much (any?) experience running large organizations, handling budgets, working with defense contractors, or dealing with D.C. politics and bureaucracy. But he does have something far more coveted in today’s MAGA politics: a long history of saying truly insane things on right-wing podcasts.
“There’s a place in Monterey, California called Lover’s Point,” Cao told pastor/podcaster Sean Feucht in 2023, while running for Senate in Virginia. “The original name was Lovers of Christ Point. Now it’s become, they took out the Christ. It’s Lover’s Point. And it’s really—Monterrey is a dark place now, a lot of witchcraft, and the Wiccan community has really taken over there. . . . We can’t let that happen to Virginia.”
Cao also seems to share Pete Hegseth’s obsession with anti-woke military recruitment. “When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” Cao said during a 2024 debate. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds.” No word yet on the state of alpha-male and alpha-female retention in the Navy during Cao’s brief tenure.
TROUBLE IN CRYPTO-PARADISE: The president’s crypto ventures have long been among his most hilariously and openly corrupt—a giant “BRIBE ME” sign hung out over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. These days, even some of his biggest investors are starting to agree. Here’s Reuters:
Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun on Tuesday sued World Liberty Financial, the digital currency venture co-founded by U.S. President Donald Trump and his sons, alleging that World Liberty illegally froze his holdings of tokens issued by the company.
Sun alleged in the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California, that World Liberty secretly installed tools to prevent the sale of his tokens after they became tradeable in September 2025. The lawsuit also alleges that World Liberty threatened to “burn”—or permanently delete—his holdings, even while they were in Sun’s digital wallet.
Sun, the Hong Kong-based founder of the Tron cryptocurrency, bought $45 million of WLFI tokens—some 3 billion—and was later awarded a further 1 billion tokens after being named as an advisor to World Liberty, the lawsuit said.
One imagines it’s a hard lesson for Sun, who seems to have fallen prey to the same misimpression as so many of Trump’s business partners—the best marks are the people who think they’re in on the scam.
Cheap Shots
The Navy, through all of Trump’s gyrations, has been consistent: The mission it is executing is the blockade of Iran’s ports, not a blockade of the entire Strait of Hormuz.
“We barely use the Strait of Hormuz. Europe should be more active…”
Hello? Hello? Anybody home? THINK, MCFLY! THINK! No one needed to worry about the Strait of Hormuz until SecDrunk and the Coppertone Coward started fucking with shit on the insistence of Bibi that they should. Now it’s literally everyone’s problem, Pete, you pointless, pusillanimous piece of gutter trash in a bad suit.
"nineteen-dimensional international chess"
How to gauge the fantasy life of the American right? The number of dimensions of the chess and the number of wars Trump has settled.