What to Follow Right Now: The Costs of the Performance

The White House can still stage the show. It is having a much harder time containing the fallout.

Mary’s roundup this morning nailed the central problem: in Trumpworld, branding tends to arrive before judgment. By this afternoon, the most revealing question is not what they are calling the war, but where the damage is starting to escape the script.

The clearest place to look is Hormuz. France and Italy are now in talks with Iran to help secure passage through the strait, which is a fairly blunt signal that Europe is focused less on joining Trump’s adventure than on limiting the economic blowback from it. When allies start treating your military escalation as a supply-chain emergency, that tells you plenty about how much confidence they have in the people running it.

The military toll is getting harder to package, too. All six crew members aboard the KC-135 that crashed in western Iraq were killed, bringing the U.S. death toll in Operation Epic Fury to 13. At the same time, the Financial Times reports that the Pentagon has already burned through “years” of some critical munitions and is preparing a supplemental funding request that could reach roughly $50 billion. The war is becoming expensive in the two ways that matter most: lives and replacement costs.

There is also the familiar move toward narrower visibility. The Pentagon has blocked photographers from Pete Hegseth’s recent Iran-war briefings, while the Social Security watchdog is investigating allegations that a former DOGE employee misused sensitive agency data. Those are separate stories, but they rhyme. When the governing style is impulse up front and cleanup later, the next instinct is usually to reduce who gets to see what.

So that is the terrain this afternoon: the shipping choke point, the casualty count, the rate at which the arsenal is being emptied, and the tightening grip on public visibility. The administration can still sell the spectacle. What it cannot so easily control is the accumulating evidence that the spectacle is getting very costly.