Trump May Not Care About Hormuz, Oil Prices, or the Midterms |
Recent polling confirms what Democratic strategists have been watching for months: the party now holds a lead of between three and ten points on the generic congressional ballot, a significant swing from Republican advantage at the start of Trump’s second term. The conventional diagnosis is familiar — an unpopular war, a chokepoint in crisis, gasoline prices more than 30 percent higher than in February — and it produces a predictable set of prescriptions: reopen the Strait of Hormuz, calm markets, deliver visible relief at the pump before November. That logic assumes the administration wants to solve the problem. The more unsettling possibility, examined here, is that it does not, and that losing the midterms may be instrumentally useful to a longer project of reshaping the rules of American governance.
The Timing Problem Is Worse Than It Looks
The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since February 28, when the United States and Israel struck Iran and assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The IEA has described the resulting disruption as the largest oil supply shock in the history of the global market, surpassing the 1970s. What is less understood is that the problem is no longer merely physical. Even during brief official announcements that the strait had “reopened,” actual traffic remained near collapse — sometimes as few as three vessels per day against a peacetime baseline of 120 to 140. Baker Hughes has built its financial guidance around the assumption that the strait will not be fully operational until the second half of 2026, a view shared by nearly 80 percent of oil and gas executives surveyed by the Dallas Federal Reserve.
Demining, insurance recalibration, and the restoration of commercial confidence are sequential processes measured in months. A diplomatic agreement signed tomorrow would not produce a meaningful drop in pump prices before November. The lag is structural. Any adviser telling the president he can move the electoral needle on energy prices is working from a premise the industry has already rejected.
Competing Counsel and the Hawkish........