Subject: Re: Trump confesses
Everything you wrote was spot on, up to this point.

I think Trump is desperate to get a deal. The only thing he wants out of it is to open Hormuz. Nothing else matters.

I agree he's desperate to get a deal. I don't agree that all he wants is to open Hormuz. What he wants is a deal that he can pretend is a win.

At this point, there's a strong possibility that Trump neither cares nor knows what he wants to get out of a "win," which I think explains some of the negotiating weirdness. Trump likes trial balloons and taking the temperature of proposals directly with his target audience. He's not a polls guy or a data guy. He's a "let's try this and see what happens" guy, relying on his ability to pivot away from things. So he sends his negotiators to Iran, tells them to see what they can get - and when they get something, he floats it out to his base and sees what happens.

That's why the last proposal went down the way it did. The negotiating team came back with a proposal, Trump floated out to see what the reaction was, everyone in his base seemed to think it was a "loss" for him, so he shot it down.

I agree he wants the Strait to be open, but he also can't have that be the final outcome of the war unless and until his base is (in the main) willing to swallow that as a win. It's far more likely you get a sloppy interim phase where the Strait mostly opens but we're still just under a ceasefire, and hostilities could resume at any minute. That way he doesn't have to face questions about whether the outcome of his little "excursion" was good or bad or worth the cost - it still isn't over yet. All that gets resolved is the temporary status of the Strait.

And that might let him reach his only actual escape valve here: Someone Else To Blame. He can't win the war, so he needs to find someone else to lose the war other than him. And the best candidate for that is Congress. He's not going to get new money for the war without a winning game plan, and he's going to start losing some of those War Powers resolutions at some point. And that's the true endgame. That will allow the U.S. to exit the war with a terrible outcome but allow him to blame the Dumbocrats and the Coward Caucus for making it impossible for him to prosecute the war in the way that would win. He won't have failed, he will have been failed.