Trump Pulls Sudden 180 on Strait of Hormuz After Iran Shows Him Up

Rather than provide steady, articulate leadership and communication during his Iran war, the commander in chief has embraced bluster and erratic flip-flopping. The latest example of this came Tuesday, when President Donald Trump adopted a stance on the Strait of Hormuz diametrically opposed to the one he had announced the day before.

On Monday, Trump decided that the United States would seize control of the strait. “We’ll become the guardian of the strait,” he told Fox News. “Now we’re gonna guard it, and we’re gonna get paid for guarding it. A lot of money. But we just want to be reimbursed.” In a Truth Social post, he said a 20 percent toll would be imposed on “all cargo shipped” through the strait.

It was a stark reversal of the administration’s previous stance; Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance had stated unequivocally that no country would impose such a toll.

Then the sun set and rose again, and Trump had yet another 180-degree change of heart.

Tuesday, Trump declared that there would be no toll after all. Instead, he said vaguely in a Truth Social post that the U.S. would pursue “Trade and Investment Deals” with Gulf states. Shortly thereafter, he confirmed this new approach during a press conference. “I don’t think anybody should be able to charge a fee for the strait,” the president said, “or for any other strait relationship in terms of other sections of the world. I don’t think anybody should be really in that position.”

What spurred Trump’s whiplash-inducing reversal of an already-reversed course?

After he proposed the toll, Trump told a reporter Tuesday, he was allegedly contacted by “kings and emirs and all of the people that we all know and we all love … and they said, ‘We’d love to do it a different way.’”

Also, after Trump initially announced the tolls, Iran asserted its control of the strait. Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi answered Trump with a message on X: “POTUS is absolutely right. Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service. Iran has always been the GUARDIAN of the Strait and will remain so FOREVER. 20% is of course too much. We will be fair.”

President Trump on Monday significantly reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah, cutting the amount of protected land that they hold by about 1.5 million acres each.

Trump slashed protections for both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante during his first term to free up two million acres for oil drilling and uranium mining. This led environmental groups and Native American tribes to sue, and former President Joe Biden reversed the measure. Now, with this most recent move, those same groups are preparing to take up legal arms against the Trump administration once again.

National lands and monuments, which often appear similar to national parks, have a different set of regulations around them as established by the Antiquities Act of 1906. Those opposed to Trump’s executive order argue that under this law, a president can only create national lands and monuments but not shrink or eliminate them. Those in favor of opening the land to oil drilling note that “any land reserved under the act must be limited to the smallest area compatible,” as argued by Supreme Chief Justice John Roberts in 2021.

“Today’s action makes it clear that Utah is the epicenter of Republican efforts to dismantle and obliterate America’s system of public lands,” Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance executive director Scott Braden said in a statement, vowing to challenge the executive order in court. “President Trump’s outrageous attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monument was taken at the urging of Utah politicians—Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis, Governor Spencer Cox, and the others—who championed this action. These two landscapes deserve to be protected for current and future generations of Utahns and Americans, not opened to exploitation.”

“You have an administration that backs you up, and then you’re back to square one again,” Pueblo of Zuni councilman and Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition co-chair Anthony Sanchez Jr. told The New York Times on Monday. “Even now, with the boundaries not reduced, we still run into that trouble.”

Bears Ears is the ancestral homeland of the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni, and contains rock art that is culturally significant.

Democrats in Congress aren’t happy that President Trump has restarted the Iran war.

Trump formally notified lawmakers last week that the war in Iran has resumed, attempting to legally claim that a new 60-day period has started that gives him the power to use military action in Iran without congressional approval. Democrats called out the Trump administration for going back on its promises that the war was over.

“We were promised the war would be over for months. And now in a matter of days, we’ve gone from a bad U.S.-Iran deal to more strikes, another blockade, and added turmoil that will only drive prices higher,” Senator Adam Schiff said on X Monday.

The California senator filed a new war powers resolution on Monday, co-sponsored by colleagues Tim Kaine, Andy Kim, Jeff Merkley, and Chris Van Hollen, in an attempt to rein in the president.

“Any assertion by the Trump Administration that he gets 60 more days to act without Congress has no foundation in law,” Schiff said in a statement, asking for a “new vote to end this war.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor Monday that “Trump’s rinse and repeat approach to the Iran war isn’t a strategy, it’s a recipe for utter disaster.

“We keep moving backward. Gas prices stay high, casualties increase, costs increase. It’s incredible what a fiasco this war is,” Schumer added.

Senator Chris Murphy pointed out that the war’s resumption hurts the economy, saying, “Gas prices are spiking again.”

“The bottom line? Trump has no moves to make. His spiraling incompetence has boxed America in. It’s only going to get worse,” Murphy said in an X post.

Last month, Iran and the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding, seemingly ending the conflict while long-term negotiations continued. Those negotiations have collapsed, and Iran has resumed attacking American and oil industry targets in the Persian Gulf, while the U.S. military is once again bombing targets within Iran. Iran has resumed its tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, while Trump claims that the U.S. naval blockade of Iran is back on. By trying to reset the clock, Trump is acknowledging, consciously or not, that he’s also resetting a quagmire.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is notorious for professing ignorance when asked potentially difficult questions about the news of the day. He fell back on this strategy in a Tuesday morning press conference, this time in response to the fatal ICE shooting in Biddeford, Maine, the day prior.

On Monday, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old father, was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, marking the eleventh fatal ICE shooting of Donald Trump’s current term. Sebastian Guerrero was reportedly authorized to work in the U.S. and had not been the target of an immigration operation.

The agents involved in the high-profile incident were reportedly not wearing body cameras, which, as Benjamin Weiss of Courthouse News pointed out to Johnson, cuts against assurances that Department of Homeland Security officials have made to Congress about expanding agents’ use of body cameras.

“Does there need to be accountability on DHS from Congress here?” Weiss asked.

“Uh,” Johnson replied, “I don’t know anything about this event, OK? I was a little busy yesterday, so I’m going to reserve judgment. I know that there was a tragic shooting, and I’m not going to comment because I don’t know.” (Notably, Weiss had prefaced his question with relevant facts, but anyway … )

Preemptively defending himself against accusations of, yet again, turning a blind eye to an inconvenient news item, Johnson told reporters, “You guys can mock me for not knowing that. I worked about 22 hours the last few days, and I did not get the briefing on that. I will this morning.”

Last year, the Trump administration publicly lied about the content and status of a multimillion-dollar stockpile of contraceptives that was allocated for foreign aid but slated to be destroyed amid Elon Musk’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Newly disclosed records show that the government’s internal discussions about the stockpile were as chaotic as its external statements were dishonest.

Last summer, the administration announced plans to destroy about $10 million worth of contraceptives stored in a Belgian warehouse. The products, already paid for by U.S. taxpayers, were allocated toward women and girls in Africa. By the fall, the administration falsely told the press that the contraceptives were abortifacients, or substances used to induce an abortion—and that they had been destroyed. In reality, they were largely ruined due to being stored improperly (despite their storage costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to the USAID Office of Inspector General).

New reporting published Tuesday by The Washington Post shows that falsehoods surrounding the stockpile were pervading internally as well as externally—adding to a mountain of evidence of the incompetence, willful or not, of Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.”

In one email, an official at the U.S. Embassy to Belgium informed someone at the State Department that “there is no one here that knows definitively what is in the warehouse.”

In an August 8 email, a State Department official emailed a colleague a list of purported “Current Viable Abortifacients” at the warehouse, but nothing he listed is considered an abortifacient by the Food and Drug Administration. “Everything else has practically been destroyed,” the official wrote—and by “has practically been destroyed,” he apparently meant “had spoiled due to improper storage.”

After The New York Times reported that none of the products in the stockpile were abortifacients—in fact, USAID could not legally purchase such substances—State Department official Brendan Hanrahan sent out an email asking if anything in the stockpile could be used to “induce an abortion if taken by a woman once she is already pregnant.” This prompted a “series of emails among diplomats” seeking more information, including one in which the aforementioned embassy official revealed the staff’s complete ignorance of the stockpile’s contents.

These revelations had to be wrenched from the government by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which sued the government over its failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act Request about the wasted contraceptives.