Donald Trump is the Republican Jimmy Carter
Losing to Iran and stagflation? Sign me out.
Hey everyone, I wanted to give you all some readings/thoughts on the war with Iran before I torture you with birthright citizenship for a few weeks, which is scheduled for oral argument on April 1st.
Iran is winning?
I think what we are learning from this war is that sheer force isn’t always enough to get you a win. In terms of the global reaction to the war, it actually seems like Iran is winning: They are showing us that even though we can bomb the hell out of them, they can wreak economic havoc in the meantime.
Obviously oil prices have soared over the past few weeks, which has driven up gas prices here and around the world. But Iran’s big move came yesterday:
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened to attack oil and gas infrastructure in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a move that would further seriously disrupt the region’s energy infrastructure, which has already been fractured by the war, now in its 20th day.
Hours later, Iranian missiles struck a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility at Ras Laffan Industrial City in northern Qatar. Doha reported that the attack caused three fires.
Iran’s attack in Qatar has been called “armageddon” by the Financial Times, and the New York Times has a great article explaining why:
Restarting plants and reopening the Strait of Hormuz could take weeks, causing a relatively brief disruption. But repairing or rebuilding facilities could take much long longer.1
“A longer outage caused by damage is a bigger deal than a short outage caused by a shutdown,” said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, an independent research firm in Washington. “If the market is pricing in a short disruption that could be resolved in a cease-fire or the end of the war, it would be weeks for full functional facilities to come back on line.2 If it is damaged, it could be months.”
Later on in the article it says that if Iran’s attacks on infrastructure continue, we could be looking at oil hovering around $150 a barrel. 🫠
I really cannot believe I’m saying this, but Iran is probably going to win the war Trump started, because he went into it without a coherent plan or even an idea of what he hoped to achieve. To recap:
He has killed Iran’s leadership, but the regime is still in charge and now more radical than ever. They will likely never agree to any sort of “deal” with the United States and will sprint towards a nuke.
Trump is rapidly going through munitions and depleting our military, which China is watching because they plan to invade Taiwan,3 possibly as early as next year.
The United States is completely isolated from the rest of the world on this and our allies in NATO are ignoring our pleas for help.
Israel’s reputation on the world stage has never been lower (more on this later).
Gas prices are skyrocketing and the American economy is in tatters.
Iran holds all the cards. They can make this war cost a ton and continue to make Trump look foolish, and all it will cost them is the lives of their own people, which the regime doesn’t care about anyway.
Iran has successfully made the war into a weird doppelgänger of Trump’s tariffs: We are holding a gun to our own head and telling the rest of the world we’ll shoot.
This was avoidable.
I said in the last Jackal (and others) that the U.S. attacking Iran could have happened under another president not named Donald Trump. There is a consensus belief across both Parties that Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon, and deterring them probably always required some sort of force.4
But Trump went into blindly and has now sparked an energy crisis. Of course, Trump said, “No one could have predicted” that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz or go after its neighbors in the Middle East. But lots of people did, including some with astounding precision.
Here is an article from Nate Swanson in Foreign Affairs, titled, Why Iran Will Escalate,” and dated February 24, 2026, i.e., two days before the war started. Here is a quote that will make your jaw drop:
Finally, Tehran could target global oil flows and international shipping, sending energy prices up and creating a serious political liability for Trump. Iran may well encourage the Houthis to resume attacking ships transiting the Red Sea. The country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has also been preparing to selectively seize adversary ships in the Strait of Hormuz. If conflict with the United States deepens, Iran may seriously consider targeting the Gulf Arab states’ energy infrastructure directly (my emphasis).
Do you guys wanna know who Nate Swanson is? He was one of the senior Iran experts in the Trump Administration. He was kicked out in the middle of 2025, because Laura Loomer told Trump to fire him:
Trump fired one of the government’s most experienced Iran experts after a far-right activist—who once chained herself to Twitter’s headquarters because they banned her account—urged his firing for “disloyalty.”
Don’t go looking for other timelines. You are living in the dumbest one.
There aren’t enough words to describe the incompetence.
Tucker, Megyn, and Candace.
I wanted to spend a quick moment on the “rift” with the MAGAverse about the war with Iran. While the “MAGA” section of the Republican Party is fully behind Trump, certain portions of conservative media have offered some pointed criticism.
Much of the criticism has focused on Israel apparently leading us into war, and you’re seeing that from people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, but also comedians like Dave Smith, who supported Trump in 2024 as a result of “horseshoe politics.”
I think it’s something to note going forward. We are currently looking at two political parties in the U.S. that will have anti-Semitic elements within their bases. You’ll have it with the extreme, Hasan Piker-style Democrats on the Left, and you’ll have it with the extreme, Nick Fuentes-style Republicans on the Right.
A few months ago, the Manhattan Institute surveyed young Republicans and, spoiler, they do not like the Jews and are a little Hitler-curious. City Journal then spoke to them:
Moderator: What do you think of Adolf Hitler?
Ashley: I think he was a great leader, to be honest. I think what he was going for was terrible, but I think he showed very strong leadership values.
Andrew: I’m in favor of a strong executive. I think we should have a stronger executive branch. I don’t think we should be killing people or doing mass genocide, obviously, but I do think we should have a strong executive. I feel like one of the biggest problems Trump is running into right now is all these little courts, they want to throw up little blockages against everything he’s trying to do, whether it be his tariffs or deporting people. So I’m very pro-strong executive, strong leader, strong man. I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist. He was like, we have to take Germany back for Germans. And I feel like we should do that in America. We should take America back for our native population. So, I’m not an expert on Hitler by any means, but as far as nationalism is concerned, I’m all that.
As a bonus, here is what Andrew said about the Jews:
All Tucker, Megyn, and Candace are doing is reading tea leaves. In ten years, these “young Republicans” will be the base of the Party. It’s simply an economic calculation that Republicans who consume conservative media will want to hear meaner things said about Jews and Israel.
And it’s also worth noting that no one should take more blame for this than Israel itself. Its conduct in Gaza has thrown gasoline on global anti-Israel sentiment.
At least the economy is OK.
So, we have a war with Iran ongoing, and then there is the bad economic news: Inflation came in sky-high last month, with prices up 3.4% from the same time last year.
With slowing economic growth and the U.S. shedding jobs, we are quickly approaching inflation territory. You see, history doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes: Donald Trump is the Republican Jimmy Carter, which means in 2028 we will be looking for a Democratic Ronald Reagan.
I have thoughts on who that is, but I’ll save them for another Jackal. We do SCOTUS stuff and birthright citizenship soon, but there is also the annual Holy Week Jackal and a special one coming on April 1st. Talk to you all soon.
I’m leaving in the NYT’s typo! Celebrate that we found it together.
Another typo! Lots to celebrate today.
The Jackal has a hard stance: Taiwan is a country.
Of course, this comes after Trump abandoned our nuclear deal with Iran, which did see them stop building nukes. 🫠