The Blockade of Reason: $104 a Barrel and the President Says Relax

I was watching the oil futures tick upward on a Sunday night in April when the feeling hit me like a freight train full of premium unleaded — that particular dread you get when you realize the man with the launch codes has decided to fix a closed highway by dynamiting the on-ramp.

West Texas Intermediate crude crossed $104 a barrel sometime around midnight. Brent sat at $102 and climbing. On Friday it had been $96.57. That was before the President of the United States took to Truth Social and announced, in the cadence of a man dictating his own monument inscription, that the U.S. Navy would begin "BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz."

The caps lock was his. The consequences are ours.

The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20 percent of the world's oil cargo. It has been functionally closed since American and Israeli strikes on Iran began on February 28. The Iranians, never ones to miss a revenue opportunity in wartime, started charging tolls on whatever ships dared to pass through — a kind of nautical protection racket that would make a New Jersey dockworker blush. Trump's response was to order the Navy to "seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran." The solution to extortion, apparently, is a bigger extortion.

U.S. Central Command, operating with the grim efficiency of a bureaucracy that has been asked to do something insane on a deadline, announced the blockade would commence at 10:00 a.m. EDT Monday — 5:30 p.m. in Tehran, just in time for the evening despair. They noted it would be "enforced impartially against vessels of all nations," which is the military's way of saying everyone gets to suffer equally.

This came roughly 36 hours after Vice President Vance emerged from 21 hours of negotiations in Pakistan looking like a man who had just lost a staring contest with a wall. The talks were "substantive," he said, deploying the diplomatic equivalent of calling a car crash "eventful." No agreement was reached. Vance said this was "bad news for Iran much more than it's bad news for the United States of America," a claim that will age about as well as the milk currently sitting in the back of my refrigerator.

But the true masterpiece — the moment that will be studied in future courses on the art of saying nothing with absolute confidence — came on Fox News, when Maria Bartiromo asked Trump whether oil and gas prices would be lower by the midterm elections.

"I hope so," the President said. "I mean, I think so, it could be, it could be, or the same or maybe a little bit higher, but it should be around the same."

Read that again. Lower, the same, or higher. He covered every possible outcome like a fortune teller hedging her bets at a county fair. This is a man who just ordered the blockade of one of the most critical shipping lanes on Earth and then went on television to predict that the price of gasoline — currently averaging $4.13 a gallon nationwide, up from $3.60 just last month — could go in literally any direction. The forecast calls for weather.

"I think this won't be that much longer," Trump added, speaking of the conflict with Iran. "They're wiped out, Maria, they're wiped out." This from the same administration whose own Republican senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, went on the record the same day to say the U.S. has not "won" the war yet. When your own party's senators are publicly correcting your victory laps, the finish line may be further away than it appears.

Meanwhile, Sen. Mark Warner sat on CNN and performed the thankless task of explaining arithmetic to a nation that has decided math is optional. "We know we've got $4-a-gallon gasoline," he told Dana Bash. "We know that 25 percent of the world's natural gas goes through the strait. We know that this has so devastated Asian countries right now, they're shutting down their economies one day a week." He paused, as senators do when they're trying not to scream. "How blockading the strait gets it open suddenly, I don't get that logic."

Neither do I, Senator. But logic left this particular building sometime around February, and it's not answering its phone.

The two-week ceasefire with Iran began on Thursday. Ten days remain. The administration says the sticking point is Iran's nuclear program — Trump wrote on Truth Social that "the meeting went well, most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR, was not." So the good news is that everything is fine except for the one thing that matters. This has the structural integrity of a house where every room is immaculate except the foundation is on fire.

And here we sit, on a Sunday night in April, with crude above $100 and the Navy steaming toward the mouth of the strait, while the President assures us that gas prices will be lower, or the same, or maybe a little higher, and anyway Iran is wiped out, and the war won't last much longer, and the only thing they couldn't agree on was nuclear weapons, which is really just a detail when you think about it.

Over 30 percent of Trump's own voters said late last year that the cost of living was the worst in living memory. That was before crude hit triple digits. That was before the blockade. That was before the ceasefire clock started ticking toward zero with no deal in sight and the only plan on the table being to close the strait harder than the Iranians already closed it.

There is a word for what happens when you blockade a waterway to punish an enemy who already blockaded that waterway. The word is not "strategy." The word is not "leverage." The word is something closer to what happens when two people try to lock each other out of a room that neither of them is inside.

The gas pumps don't care about Truth Social posts or Fox News interviews. They just tick upward, sixty cents in a month, and the people standing next to them — the ones who were promised relief, who voted for cheaper everything — they just watch the numbers climb and wonder when "wiped out" starts feeling like a victory.

It won't be Monday. Monday is when the blockade starts.