larry johnson shows us how the amazing president bigly is either demented or a really good comedian as he claims distinctly separate outcomes in a fashion that ignores the sweep of time;
In my previous piece — The Walls Have Doors Now — I argued that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s promised “measures like have never been seen in the history of the economic isolation of a country” would push against an open frontier: an Iran with land bridges to Pakistan, military and intelligence lifelines to Russia and China, and, most consequentially, an oil trade that has walked out of the dollar entirely, settling in Chinese yuan through China’s CIPS clearing network beyond the reach of U.S. financial plumbing. That argument stands. But there is a simpler problem sitting on top of it, and it lives inside the administration’s own words.
Trump is making three victory claims at once. Iran, he says, is “being very badly defeated.” The Strait of Hormuz, he says, is effectively American — “we own it,” the US has “total control,” the waterway is open and the mines cleared. And the naval blockade, he says, is total and biting, strangling Tehran’s economy. Set those three claims down next to a fourth fact — that his own Treasury is scrambling to invent a financial weapon “like have never been seen,” and that he is again threatening “a harsh new attack” if the strait doesn’t reopen “soon” — and they cancel each other out. You do not need an unprecedented new sanctions campaign to defeat a country you have already defeated. You do not need to threaten fresh bombing to open a strait you already own. The escalation is the confession. Each new demand for pressure is an admission that the last claim of victory wasn’t real.
The victory language has been relentless. “After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated,” Trump told a police-academy audience in New York on August 14, “pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” Days earlier he had told reporters the US had “total control” of the waterway: “We own it, and at some point, maybe they’ll do something, and then they get blown away.” On August 18 he posted an image labeling the strait “New US Territory.” On August 19 he insisted the strait was open and the mines cleared — while, in the same breath, confirming that the naval blockade “remains in effect.”............more............