Very Complete Pretty Much

Trump tries to narrate victory in Iran while markets wobble, shipping chokes, clean energy takes another hit, and the Big Lie keeps shambling forward at home.

Good morning! From abroad, the verdict on Trump’s latest war project is already coming into focus, and it is not exactly “mission accomplished.” It is closer to “Operation Epic Failure,” which, to be fair, does have the ring of truth. Outside the American propaganda bubble, commentators are looking at this mess and seeing what should by now be painfully familiar: a reckless, impulsive president launching military action with shifting justifications, contradictory objectives, no credible exit strategy, and the attention span of a raccoon in a casino. One minute Trump is demanding unconditional surrender, the next he is mumbling that the war could end soon, “very complete pretty much,” which sounds like a man trying to bluff his way through a book report on a novel he never opened.

Iran, for its part, is not playing along with the fantasy script. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has made clear that negotiations with the United States are now effectively off the table after Washington claimed progress in talks and then attacked anyway. It sounds like a trust issue, as Araghchi put it, “I don’t think talking with the Americans anymore would be on our agenda,” after what he called a “very bitter experience” with the last round of negotiations. Which is a bit of a problem if your whole strategy for ending a war consists of blowing up diplomacy and then acting surprised when the other side no longer returns your calls. Trump seems desperate to narrate an ending before reality has agreed to provide one, perhaps because he can already see the markets twitching, oil surging, and the economic blowback inching closer to home. Unfortunately for him, wars do not end because he declares them over on television any more than hurricanes expand when he redraws them with a Sharpie.

There is, of course, the little complication that Trump is not the only one involved in this catastrophe. Israel has its own agenda, and Netanyahu’s has not exactly been subtle. Trump may want a quick, self-flattering off-ramp before the whole thing detonates politically, but Netanyahu has spent decades treating confrontation with Iran as one of the defining obsessions of his political life. So while Trump may already be looking for a way to slap a gold-plated “victory” sticker on this fiasco and move on, his closest partner may have no intention of letting the fire die down. That is the trouble with starting wars as a joint venture between a corrupt authoritarian and a deranged showman: everyone arrives with a different marketing speech prepared, but only the missiles are real.

The practical consequences are piling up at sea, where reality has once again refused to cooperate with macho nonsense. Trump went on Fox and told commercial ships to “show some guts” and sail through the Strait of Hormuz, because apparently he thinks global shipping works like a bar fight in a movie. Sal Mercogliano’s analysis cuts through that idiocy beautifully. Ships are not avoiding the strait because merchant mariners are timid. They are avoiding it because insurance companies enjoy boring little details like not being blown up, multiple vessels have already been struck, fuel infrastructure has been hit, and even the U.S. government’s own maritime warning is essentially screaming, “avoid this area if possible.” Trump is demanding swagger from civilians while his own administration is quietly posting hazard signs.

Because this administration can never resist compounding one disaster with another, the economic ripples are already spreading. Charter rates are exploding and oil prices are spiking. Gulf producers are rattling around with force majeure warnings, while strategic reserves are suddenly back in the conversation, and LNG markets are tightening. Fueling disruptions at Fujairah threaten a wider shipping mess. In other words, all the people who spent years pretending that fossil fuel dependence equals strength are now getting a fresh demonstration that building your civilization around combustible sludge shipped through geopolitical choke points may not, in fact, be the masterstroke they imagined. If there were ever a case for sprinting toward clean energy, this would be it. Which brings us, neatly, to the climate portion of today’s slow-motion societal breakdown.

While Trump is busy turning foreign policy into a demolition derby, he is also still sabotaging one of the few sectors actually capable of making the country more resilient. U.S. solar installations fell 14 percent in 2025, even though solar still added more new electricity to the grid than any other power source. That is the part worth lingering on: even with one hand tied behind its back by a fossil-fuel administration determined to drag the country backward, clean energy still outperformed everything else. The administration slashed programs, stalled reviews, and handed the microphone to oil-and-gas ideologues who sneer at renewables as if physics itself were some kind of liberal hoax. Batteries and other forms of energy storage, including pumped hydro, are expanding rapidly and in many cases surging to record levels because, unlike cable-news rants, they actually solve problems. They store electricity, support the grid, help households and utilities ride through outages and peak demand. They do not scream about windmills causing cancer.

If that were not enough cheerful news from the climate front, a new report highlighted by Just Have a Think has arrived to remind us that the planet may be heating even faster than many models assumed. Not just warming, mind you. Accelerating. Researchers tied to the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, Exeter, and the Climate Crisis Advisory Group are warning that Earth’s energy imbalance has surged far faster than expected, meaning the planet is absorbing much more heat than it is shedding back into space. That is the sort of sentence that should send governments into a full-body panic. Naturally, most governments appear to be responding by adjusting their ties, creating acid rain in the Middle East, and pretending not to hear the alarm.

One of the most grotesquely revealing parts of that analysis is the suggestion that humanity has been running a giant accidental geoengineering experiment for decades. Dirty sulphur pollution from shipping and heavy industry helped reflect sunlight and temporarily masked some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases. Then cleaner fuel rules cut those sulphur emissions, the filthy little atmospheric parasol began to disappear, and more solar energy stayed trapped in the system. So yes, civilization managed to create a crisis so absurd that one form of pollution was partially hiding the damage caused by another. It is the kind of achievement only a fossil-fueled economic order could produce: poisoning the atmosphere while accidentally using part of the poison as sunscreen. The deeper message is that the old comfort blanket is disintegrating. The status quo is not moderate, cautious, or responsible. It is a decision to keep gambling the future on the hope that physics will show more mercy than politics ever has.

As no American morning roundup would be complete without proof that the republic is still being operated by vandals and carnival barkers even on the domestic side, we turn now to Arizona, where the FBI has subpoenaed records from the Republican-led 2021 “audit” of Maricopa County ballots, that glorious clown show funded by Trump allies, run by election fantasists, and still incapable of proving the thing it was created to prove. After years of recounts, lawsuits, conspiracy spirals, and performative outrage, they are apparently still rummaging through the wreckage of 2020 hoping reality will finally crack under pressure. It won’t. That “audit” already helped confirm Biden’s win. So what this looks like now is not some sober search for truth, but the federal government being dragged into a failed propaganda exercise to keep the Big Lie twitching long enough to contaminate the next election too.

Today, because there is no such thing as too much political psychodrama for one nation to endure, voters in Georgia’s 14th District are heading to the polls to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene. Which is not so much a special election as a contest to determine which flavor of grievance-addled MAGA performance art gets to inherit her old seat. Trump has endorsed one candidate. Others are scrambling to prove they are just as loyal, just as furious, and just as willing to transform public service into a never-ending livestream of indignation, conspiracy, and chest-beating nonsense. Greene’s own break with Trump over the Epstein files has now become part of the backdrop, meaning even in one of the reddest corners of Georgia, the succession fight still revolves around Trump, Epstein fallout, and who gets to wear the largest decorative boot on their neck while pledging total obedience. Democrats are trying to exploit the Republican scrum, but the broader spectacle remains depressingly familiar: a deep-red district holding a loyalty pageant while the country catches fire.

So that is where we are this Tuesday morning. Abroad, Trump is discovering that wars are not branding exercises and that other governments do not cease to exist when he starts improvising. At sea, global commerce is reacting like global commerce tends to react when missiles start flying near chokepoints. At home, he is still kneecapping clean energy while the climate accelerates, still feeding election lies long after they have been disproven, and still exerting such a gravitational pull over American politics that even a race to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene cannot escape his chaos field. The whole picture is one of a system staggering under the weight of militarism, corruption, fossil-fuel stupidity, electoral derangement, and a political culture that keeps mistaking arson for strength.

That is where we leave it this morning: a country and a planet being yanked around by war, lies, fossil-fuel stupidity, and the sort of political malpractice that somehow still gets dressed up as leadership. If I seem a little off my game today, blame the Coquille Crud, which Marz is assuring me can be cured by a brisk romp. I am not convinced this is peer-reviewed medicine, but at the moment it does have the advantage of coming from a very confident dog.