Among the most recurring themes in Donald Trump’s abundant literary production on his social network, Truth, attacks on the press stand out. Rare is the day when the President of the United States does not take on this medium or that journalist. Not always are these barbs as brutal, however, as the one he launched this Tuesday at Elliot Kaufman, an “IDIOT,” he wrote, from the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, a medium owned by his friend Rupert Murdoch, whom he accused (again, in capital letters) of “having lost his way.” The reason? Publishing an opinion piece titled Iranians Take Trump for a Fool. In it, Kaufman writes: “On two occasions [Trump] has announced the opening of the Strait of Hormuz and on two occasions he has ceded the strategic advantage of the United States in return. Despite everything, the strait remains closed, while the regime demands more.”
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Trump published his post about four hours after announcing, also on Truth, that he was extending, without specifying for how long, the two-week deadline he had given Iran to agree to a deal convenient to US interests. The Journal article was from Monday. That means that, however offensive it might have been to the president — in whose attack he resorted to the arguments he usually gives to sell a success in the war that few share (the enemy Navy and Air Force are destroyed, their nuclear program, “obliterated”…) — its author did not even take into consideration the US president’s latest unfulfilled threat.
He justified his decision to postpone an ultimatum — which, as is customary, he himself gave and he himself withdrew — by his desire to give Iran time to respond to US demands. This time, the ceasefire will last as long as it takes to “conclude negotiations, one way or another.”
After announcing it, he spent the rest of the day, which began with the promise that Vice President J. D. Vance would be in Islamabad (Pakistan) negotiating with the Iranians, trying to sell on Truth that what had clearly happened had not happened: that the United States had given in without, apparently, anything in return.
For the Iranians, as White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt later confirmed, an unusual weapon was enough: a silence caused by differences of opinion within the regime. Leavitt also said that it will be Trump, and only Trump, who dictates the end of the ceasefire extension, and that the White House does not consider Wednesday’s Iranian attack on two container ships in the Strait of Hormuz to be a violation of that ceasefire, given that these vessels are not American or Israeli.
The president had been issuing formidable threats for days if there was no agreement, which included the commission of war crimes such as the blowing up of all bridges in Iran, including those for civilian use. And he did so after weeks entrenched in a narrative that could be defined as Schrödinger’s war (like the cat). According to that argument, Trump has won it and at the same time cannot find a way to end it. Meanwhile, the internal crisis caused by a conflict in which he got involved alone with Israel and with a string of objectives in which one has ended up prevailing: ending the enemy’s nuclear program and the regime’s aspiration to have the atomic bomb.
For his critics, Tuesday was another Taco Tuesday, an irony that mixes the association in the United States of that day of the week with the consumption of the popular Mexican snack with the acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out” (TACO is its acronym in English). It was certainly another demonstration that his diplomacy of intimidation is not working as well as in the past with Iran, while US allies have refused to join a military adventure of which Washington had not previously made them participants. The temptation to play with the title of Trump’s first and most famous book, The Art of the Deal (in which he laid the foundations of his alleged legend as a negotiator), and turn it into The Art of the Delay, was also too powerful.
The erratic management of the war and Trump’s comings and goings, who rushed too much last Friday to declare a crisis of his own making resolved, are affecting his popularity among Americans, which is hitting negative records in all polls. The latest, from NBC, indicates that his approval has fallen to its lowest level since he returned to the White House 458 days ago.
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63% condemn his management for multiple reasons, but, above all, for two: the state of the economy and the Iran war. These are also related issues; the instability in the Middle East and the standoff between Washington and Tehran, which keeps the Strait of Hormuz doubly closed, a bottleneck through which a fifth of the world’s hydrocarbons pass, has a direct effect on the pockets of his compatriots.
With the price of West Texas crude around 93 dollars this Wednesday, gasoline (costing over four dollars a gallon) has been one of the main concerns for Americans, so dependent on car transport, for weeks. Meanwhile, United Airlines, the airline with the largest fleet in the country, has announced that it plans to pass on the rise in kerosene prices to its users with an increase of between 15 and 20% in its ticket fares.
The urgency of oil
Energy Secretary Chris Wright was not in a position last Sunday to guarantee that gasoline prices would fall before the end of the year, and that honesty earned him a reprimand from Trump, who was more optimistic or reluctant to accept reality, depending on how you look at it. It was also enough for Wright’s name to rise in the Polymarket prediction market section that accepts bets on who will be the next Cabinet member to leave, following the successive oustings of Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and the resignation of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, hounded by scandal.
Some Washington media have also published these days, citing anonymous sources, that the White House is looking for a replacement for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He is the visible face of the Iran war, which he has approached with unprecedented belligerence and aggression, and has insisted on presenting it as a “holy war.”
Gasoline times are pressing with the November legislative elections on the horizon. Republicans are playing for control of Congress at the polls, and Trump, for the effectiveness of the rest of his second term, which is encouraging some timidly critical voices among his own in the Capitol. These join the much more deafening chorus of MAGA (Make America Great Again) personalities opposed to Trump since the beginning of the war. Broadcaster Tucker Carlson, the most famous of the lot, went further than anyone else in his podcast this Tuesday: “I will be mortified for a long time by the fact that I contributed to Trump’s election. I misled people,” he said, and, rare for him, asked for “forgiveness.”
Given his cynical track record, it cannot be ruled out that Carlson will change his mind before the next presidential elections, and in 2028 will again support the Trumpist candidate. It could be Vice President Vance, chosen by his boss to lead negotiations to end a war he firmly opposed in the past. It is a common exercise in intellectual contortionism among Trump’s allies. And in his case, also a cruel paradox: his chances of being the Republican aspirant to the White House will depend on the success or failure of those talks in Islamabad, which, Trump told the New York Post this Wednesday, could resume next Friday.
No one in Washington is sure of that. Nor, given what has been seen, that this new deadline will be met.
