Donald Trump may have started his war with Iran with the aim of regime change. But it has quickly became a battle over control of the global oil futures market. Iran may have few, if any, conventional weapons it can use to block, retaliate against or bloody the United States. But it has the ability to menace, if not close, the Strait of Hormuz. And that means the ability to trigger a global energy and economic crisis that may force the United States or at least its president — synonymous for the moment — to relent. What’s both fascinated and confused me is the response of global oil markets to the crisis, which seems based on at least a short-term willingness to credit Trump’s public comments as having some strong relationship to reality, which of course is absurd.

Let me give you at least a few examples of this.

Every president wants favorable press coverage. Most feel a surprising level of grievance when they don’t get it. Donald Trump is singular in using the powers of his office to force news organizations to bend to his will. But when is it beyond friendly or fawning coverage, or always giving the president the benefit of the doubt? At the gym a couple days ago I watched the soon-to-be-gobbled-up CNN doing a news segment on gas prices with an energy industry analyst. They’re not the only ones talking about gas prices. But the tone of the segment seemed out of sync with a lot of other press coverage. It occurred to me that what Trump wants, distinctly if not uniquely, is a kind of spell preservation as much as good coverage or fawning per se. He governs the country by a kind of manic coaxing which is at war with short-term memory and thrives on the ability to keep as many people fixated on the super dramatic crisis of the moment without remembering that it was preceded by an endless litany of other crises with similar branding.