Trump Is Getting Drilled, Baby, Drilled

There has always been a chasm between the actual MAGA voters and the MAGA intelligentsia that purports to speak for them, but it has rarely been as visible as it is this week. Many of the leading lights of the literate right have been pulling their hair out (with good reason!) over the Iran war, with Christopher Caldwell declaring it “the end of Trumpism” in the Spectator and Sohrab Ahmari proclaiming that “Trump was never the one” in UnHerd. At least so far, the base does not agree: A new Politico poll finds that only 12 percent of 2024 Trump voters oppose the war in Iran so far. Happy Friday.

‘Oh No, the Consequences of My Actions!’

by Andrew Egger

Twenty four hours ago, it looked like our war in Iran might be about to spiral really, really out of control. Iran had been playing havoc with global energy prices by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, but until this week damage to the region’s actual energy production infrastructure had been minimal. That changed after Israel struck a major Iranian gas field Wednesday, to which Iran responded with further strikes against energy infrastructure around the region.

One Iranian missile managed to strike an oil refinery in northern Israel, although Israeli officials said the facility had escaped significant damage. Qatar wasn’t so lucky. Iranian strikes pummeled its liquefied natural gas infrastructure. Shell-shocked QatarEnergy officials emerged yesterday to quantify the damage: an estimated 17 percent of the country’s export capacity was knocked out, an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue until $26 billion in repairs can be made.

This latest alarming development in the conflict has put President Donald Trump in an extremely strange place. He remains the prime mover of the entire war; Israel, for all its own might, likely wouldn’t keep it going if Trump pulled out and demanded it do the same. It’s on his orders that America is still busily bombing the daylights out of Iran—and spending down stockpiles of precious munitions like missile interceptors. Every day that goes by with America seemingly no closer to accomplishing its vague war aims, the administration seems to relearn the same lesson: Okay, guess we just didn’t hit them hard enough yet. Yesterday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised that yesterday’s bombardment would be the most extensive one to date.

And yet Trump is plainly growing more and more preoccupied with the war’s toll in spiking energy prices. Asked in the Oval Office yesterday whether he was considering surging more U.S. troops to the region, the president pivoted instantly to economy talk: “No, I’m not putting troops anywhere. . . . And we will do whatever is necessary to keep the price low.” As he jabbered on, he fell into the same sort of wistful tone he used to strike, five years ago, when talking about his pre-COVID economy: “Everything was going great. The economy was great. Oil prices were very low. Gasoline was dropping. . . . And I saw what was happening in Iran, and I said, ‘I hate to make this excursion, but we’re gonna have to do it.’”

Trump is right to be worried. And he’s right in particular to be completely freaked out by the possibility of more attacks from either side on the region’s energy infrastructure. Putting LNG and oil production facilities on the legitimate-targets list would mean heavy long-term damage to the energy economy. Trump knows how little buy-in the American public has for this war even on its own merits, and how little pain people will be willing to suffer on its behalf. For him, the single most important thing he needs to accomplish in this conflict is a crisp end date—preferably very soon. Pretty much his worst-case scenario would be higher energy prices for the rest of his term because the Middle East’s energy infrastructure had been reduced to rubble.

So Trump, in addition to his role as bombardier-in-chief against Iran, has taken on a strange second role as well: independent referee trying to enforce a no-more-energy-strikes-or-else policy on the entire region, friend and foe alike. Here he was on Wednesday night on Truth Social:

Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran. A relatively small section of the whole has been hit. The United States knew nothing about this particular attack,¹ and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen.² Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility. NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar³ - in which instance the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.

Trump is playing with fire here, but this sort of Mad King threat has worked for him in the past and could work again: At least for the moment, the attacks on energy seem to have stopped.

But the whole alarming affair is a good analogy for the Iran conflict writ large—indeed, for Trump’s whole floundering second term. Trump is spending his time this week fighting tooth and nail just to get back to the previous status quo—an Iran war that mostly spares globally vital energy infrastructure. Zoom back and he’s fighting to get to another, higher-order previous status quo: no war in Iran at all to drive prices up like crazy. Zoom back one more time and it’s the story of his whole second term: He’s fighting just to get back to the levels of support he had this time last year as the midterms loom and his coalition crashes down around him.