"President Donald J. Trump told reporters that Iranian leaders are “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re, they’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said in his comments earlier Wednesday. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars.… There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, [negotiations are] over.”" HCR
"Oil prices spiked over the course of the day, and Trump appeared to walk back his earlier words, saying: “I think anything that happens is going to be over very quickly, and we’ll only make it safer, including for oil. Oil is going to be very free, very easy, and it’s going to happen very fast. We have the Hormuz Strait; the boats have pulled out. I mean there’s a gusher of oil right now, we have a lot of oil.”
As Tom Nichols noted in The Atlantic, the U.S. emphatically does not have the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War,” the title of Nichols’s article reads. It goes on to say that the Iranians are calling the shots in the war and “are routinely humiliating the American president.” The so-called ceasefire was likely intended to calm oil markets, Nichols says; neither side ever stopped shooting.
Paul Krugman notes in his newsletter, cutting off trade with Spain is simply not going to happen. First of all, Trump does not have the authority to do any such thing. Second, the U.S. actually does a lot of business with Spain, and American businesses would not accept any such cuts. But even more, it is impossible because Spain is part of the European Union. As Krugman notes, this declaration is rather like Europe declaring it is going to cut off all trade with Florida. Trump’s declaration is a “non-event,” Krugman notes. It is “not something that is real.”
“In any kind of normally functioning political system,” he said, “in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.”
A German official was more succinct: “Europeans don’t take Trump seriously any longer.”
