Fakery
The already dissolving U.S.-Iran ceasefire is a ruse, a cobbled-together sham, a fiction to keep Trump’s we’re-at-war button functional for further domestic control
The supposed U.S.–Iran ceasefire is less than 48 hours old and is already functionally dead.
Iran has announced the re-closing of the Strait of Hormuz, as of April 9. CNN and other outlets report that Tehran has cited Israel’s continued bombardment of Lebanon as a violation of the so-called agreement and the chief reason for the renewed closure.
In response, on Truth Social, Donald J. Trump declared that, if Iran does not reopen the Strait, “then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before.” The U.S. military, he wrote, was “Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest.” Karoline Leavitt simultaneously called the Hormuz closure “completely unacceptable,” according to CBS News, while also insisting the reports of its closing were “false,” openly contradicting reality, which, problematically, is not a new low for the morality-free mind that occupies the White House press secretary’s brain.
Meanwhile, the reason nobody on the planet has been able to say truthfully what is known about the supposed U.S.–Iran ceasefire is that the ceasefire is a sham. It’s fakery. It has been from the beginning. It is a product of Trump’s cynical calculus. The U.S. president cares not a whit about peace. But what he does care about are power and elections.
The reality check is that Trump read a political dashboard on April 7, 2026, and saw all but his most moronic and immoral sycophants and supporters—such as the loathsome, warmongering Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who’d happily burn alive every brown person in the Middle East if it meant he could be part of an oil-and-land grab—inching for the exits.
Trump also looked at China and Russia, which the New York Times and the Washington Post have both reported were increasingly influencing the Iran war from behind the scenes. He looked at the spiraling price of gasoline at the U.S. pump, which was increasingly tanking even his MAGA-base support. And though he knows the regime needs a war crisis to divert the destined outcome of the disastrous-looking November midterms, he unilaterally declared a two-week cessation some 90 minutes before his threatened apocalyptic attack on Iran.
There were evidently multiple versions of a possible deal flying back and forth among Tehran, Washington, and Islamabad. Press outlets had access to one or more of these documents, in fact, which has infuriated Trump, who, on April 6, CNN and NBC News report, threatened to jail American journalists at outlets that had published details.
What the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the rest of the mainstream Western press can tell Americans about the supposed plan amounts to slim pickings.
According to Iran, the teetering pause brokered by Pakistan represented a total Iranian victory, including U.S. commitments to withdraw forces from the Middle East, lift all sanctions, and allow Iran to keep both its nuclear program and its control of the Strait. This would, of course, put the United States in a worse position than before the war it initiated.
Firing back, the White House told reporters that Tehran’s version of the document was “thrown in the garbage.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth falsely declared the U.S. armed forces “achieved every military objective” set out at the start of the attacks, including the destruction of Iran’s navy, air force and weapons manufacturing infrastructure. All of this was obviously bullshit, as the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran successfully militarized in response to America’s war, is now closed again. Meanwhile, Leavitt told reporters that Iran had indicated, in some version of the deal, a willingness to give up uranium. Iran’s parliament speaker refuted that claim, according to CNBC, emphasizing that the U.S. insistence on zero enrichment would be a non-starter.
In the runup to today’s Hormuz escalation, according to CNBC and others, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf—who is (or was) expected to lead Tehran’s delegation in Islamabad—declared on April 8 that three terms of the “agreed framework” had already been broken: Israeli strikes on Lebanon continued, Iran’s supposedly decimated military shot down an Israeli drone that entered its airspace just hours after the supposed ceasefire took effect, and Washington has publicly reaffirmed its demand that Iran cease all uranium enrichment. That leaves all parties just about nowhere when it comes to a ceasefire that can stick.
In the best case, what emerges from Islamabad this weekend—if negotiations proceed—is a narrow agreement: Hormuz actually reopens under some face-saving arrangement, sanctions relief is offered piecemeal, and the uranium question gets quietly shelved for another day.
In the worst case, Israel’s ongoing destruction of Lebanon—the Lebanese Health Ministry reported at least 182 dead from Israeli strikes on April 8 alone—collapses Iran’s willingness to continue talking and reopening the Strait comes off the table fully. As Just Security analyzes that scenario this week, Iran has established “the capacity to control the Strait of Hormuz” perhaps indefinitely—which it is clearly doing right now—and overwhelming U.S. military force has not substantially changed that reality.
This is the scenario as of April 9, 2026, just past 2 p.m., Eastern time. JPMorgan analysts put oil at $150 per barrel if Hormuz stays closed. Reuters reports that Iran has separately warned of $200 per barrel if the war continues.
The optimists—some serious Iranian participants among them—will argue that both sides have genuine incentives to reach a “real” agreement in Islamabad. That’s probably true. But the “narrow deal” in which Hormuz opens, some sanctions lift, and uranium gets shelved—that’s a victory condition for Iran, not for the United States. Iran would emerge under those circumstances with international recognition of its right to collect tolls on a global waterway, its nuclear program damaged but intact, its new supreme leader having survived a direct American military campaign. The deal that optimists are hoping for is the deal Iran’s National Security Council already announced as its total victory. That is obviously not the outcome Trump will allow.
Oh, and there is another threat on the table as well. On April 5, two days before Trump’s obscene “civilization-ending” deadline, Ali Akbar Velayati—a former Iranian foreign minister and senior adviser to new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei—posted a direct warning, according to Al Jazeera and Fox News: the “unified command of the Resistance front views Bab al-Mandeb as it does Hormuz.”
The reason that matters? Bab al-Mandeb is the narrow passage between Yemen and the Horn of Africa through which about 12 percent of global trade and 4.1 million barrels of oil per day move. If Iran and/or its allies close both straits simultaneously, analysts told Al Jazeera, a quarter of the world’s oil and gas supply would be cut off. The Saudi East-West Pipeline, already operating at maximum capacity to compensate for the loss of Hormuz, would become useless if the Red Sea were impassable.
Iran is not bluffing. They’ve re-closed the Strait, and the Iran-backed Houthis have already demonstrated they can disrupt the Bab al-Mandeb at will—as evidenced during the Gaza war.
With all of these pieces in play, and despite Trump’s thorough cockup of everything the Iran war was intended to produce from a military perspective, what the president really wanted, he’s already achieved. That is, the Trump regime has established a major, activatable, somewhat tunable military-emergency narrative. Trump has constructed a war button, and he can press it to suit his determinations, intentions, and goals. And all three of those things rhyme with “November.”
The obvious objection is that nothing about the past 36 hours looks super deliberate, logical, or planned. Under a specific lens, one that is ground in a normal world where normal people do relatively normal things, Trump set a deadline he couldn’t enforce, threatened a civilization he couldn’t actually erase, and grabbed the first exit available because the alternative—watching Iran close Bab al-Mandeb while China publicly humiliated him at the UN Security Council and Russia fed his enemy satellite data to fight back—was simply worse than retreat.
That objection doesn’t survive the fuller record, however. Whether the ceasefire was conceived as a strategy or seized upon in a panic, the political outcome for Trump is functionally the same: a war Trump can resume, a threat he can escalate, an emergency he can conjure when needed. Chaos and strategy are not mutually exclusive in the hands of Donald J. Trump; they are the same instrument. Sometimes, even the dumbest kid in class walks out with a passing grade. The universe is clearly grading the U.S. president on a curve.
And so, the sloppy sham of a now mostly irrelevant ceasefire, one in which people in Lebanon continued to be blown to bits by Israel and one in which U.S. killing machines are idling on Middle Eastern runways for further sorties—all of this keeps the Iran war on Trump’s side of the board while giving him a knob to dial up and down the heat. Trump wants that dial on his control panel because it represents leverage: conflicts at his command, wag-the-dog on remote.
The midterms are roughly seven months away, and Trump’s countdown to the moment when a nice, hot war—and the kind of ginned-up domestic threat that a nice, hot war can create—gets extended each time Trump kicks the Middle East apocalypse a little farther down the road. His goal is to keep kicking that can through to November. He’s added two weeks this week. And he can keep dicking around with warplanes, declaring ceasefires, and repeating his atrocities until the regime is fully in the window its needs to press the buzzer and stop the U.S. midterm clock—because “wartime emergency.”
Minus a legitimate legislative branch, which is now absent virtually any evident democratic intentions on its Republican side, and despite the 8 million (or so) protesters who took to U.S. streets to say “no kings” in March, and despite the usual Democrats making the usual noise about impossible avenues to Amendment 25 and/or impeachment, as long as Tehran’s nuclear question is unresolved and Iran still controls the Strait, the next escalation is a given. It’s a when, not an if.
Donald J. Trump is running a kind of calculus. The president is dancing the razor between America’s demented obsession with gas prices—our only real national religion and political party—and his own demented obsession with being both savior and dictator and making sure the regime stays in power through to the end of the midterms, 2026. A protracted, back-and-forth, and malleable war with Iran is precisely the recipe for declaring domestic emergencies—and domestic control. It’s Trump’s recipe for a kingdom on a silver fucking platter.
