You can just abandon things
Mar 31, 2026
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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