I’ve written a few posts now about a simple fact that is so apparent in news coverage that it is almost hiding in plain sight: the entire discussion of President Trump’s war with Iran right now is not how close he may be to achieving whatever his war aims might be. It’s the impact of the conflict on global energy prices and how this may impact the cost of gas in the U.S. and thus Trump’s electoral fortunes in November. We now have two closely reported articles which make clear that this wasn’t even a contingency that the White House planned for.

This passage is from a new CNN article which comes after a similar one in the Times ….

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.

Sometimes I write a post where I don’t know the topic well enough to discuss it expertly but I understand it enough to point to the outlines of the debate and where to find more information. This is one of those posts. Here, I want to discuss drones and missiles deployed by Iran and the expensive, high-tech weapons the U.S. and its allies use to shoot them down. This applies right now in the Persian Gulf where Iran is using a strategy of “asymmetric attrition.” But it would apply in even more complicated and hard-to-address ways if and when the U.S. got into a major conflict with, say, China over Taiwan. It’s that basic challenge of asymmetric warfare for a Great Power like the United States: the U.S. relies on often quite effective but very expensive and hard to replace weaponry. Iran’s clunky but effective drones cost in the low five-figures to produce, while U.S. missile defense tech can costs millions for a single shot.

A short time ago I got email from a TPM reader with a version of this question: Josh, are you sure there’s going to be a November election? Because everything I’m seeing tells me they don’t think there are any consequences, even political consequences, coming from any of this. It wasn’t a challenge so much as a question: are you sure? I have no way to predict the future. But yes, I am as confident there’s going to be a November election as I’ve ever been. I’m not trying to get in an argument about that. This is my opinion. You might have another.

A couple months ago, I said that we were starting to see a pattern. As Trump grew less popular and less powerful at home, he would need to compensate to maintain his psychic equilibrium. He’d lean more and more into the presidency’s prerogative powers that are untrammeled and unrestrained regardless of what’s going on at home or how much support he has. He’ll be increasingly aggressive and violent in those realms of power as he becomes more constrained and limited in others. In Trump’s world, there is dominating and there is being dominated. For him, the latter is a psychic death. So leaning hard into these prerogative powers where a president is, in effect, all powerful amounts to a kind of grand and bloody self-care.

It’s the perhaps tired refrain of foreign policy and defense professionals that wars are easy to start (if you’re still, mostly, the preeminent global military power) but much harder to finish. They are unpredictable. They quickly spread in directions you don’t anticipate. As the still preeminent global military power, you tend to be on the line for other sorts of instability that your war of choice creates. And yet Donald Trump has mainly been able to engage in what we might call impulsive unilateralism without generating too many problems for himself in the short run. He decapitated the Venezuelan regime through what amounted to a dramatic raid and is now, improbably, running the country as a kind of American presidential subsidiary through the mechanisms of the Chavista regime itself. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani in 2020. He launched a massive but brief bombing raid against Iranian nuclear facilities last year. In each case the U.S. was mostly able to end things quickly and on its own terms.

We’re used to Americans, at least as judged by polls, going into wars generally supportive and then trailing off quickly as the complications and fatalities mount. Some of that is a rally-’round-the-flag effect. In some cases there’s been a precipitating event which the public wants vengeance for. Here we are seeing none of that. The public was very skeptical going in. And the attack itself seems to have done nothing to change that. A new CNN poll has the familiar 59% of Americans disapprove of the attacks and expect things to get worse. What is most interesting to me, however, is not so much public opposition but the disconnect between elite and popular opinion.

News came today that Warner Bros Discovery decided that Paramount-Skydance’s bid ($111 billion) to acquire the company was superior to that from Netflix ($82.7 billion). WBD told Netflix it had four days to up its offer. Little more than an hour later Netflix said it didn’t need four days. It was bowing out. The deal was no longer economic at the price Paramount was offering. An additional fact is that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos was at the White House while these things were happening, apparently trying to see whether Netflix had the thing any major company needs for a merger in 2026: the personal approval of Donald Trump. Apparently they didn’t have it. That’s the autocracy playbook. And at the federal level, that’s the game we’re playing right now.

The Post has an article today, an exclusive they say, about a draft executive order purportedly being circulated between the White House and various conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists in its broader circle. The proposed order claims that China has been found to be interfering in U.S. elections — specifically rigged the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor — and that as a result of that the president, as commander-in-chief, can and must directly take control of U.S. elections for the midterms and the 2028 presidential elections.

Two points merit saying on this. The first is that these are the rehashed, insane theories that were literally and figuratively laughed out of court in 2020. These are all absurd. Everybody knows they are absurd and false. The legal theory is what demands our attention. The authors of the order believe that if something is an emergency the president can invoke a kind of hidden dictator clause in the Constitution which allows him to assert powers which the Constitution explicitly forbids to him. This is not so. They secondarily believe in what we might call a “because” or “therefore” logic or clause. So because we have found that Threat X exists, the president can do whatever he wants to combat that threat. And as commander-in-chief, he can do anything he wants. This is also not so.