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Adam Mockler and I just had an excellent Substack Live. The conversation hit high-level analysis quickly as we made sense of a presidency that is producing new layers of chaos faster than anyone can track.
What started as a breakdown of Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz turned into something bigger: an accounting of what Trump is actually doing to the global order, what it incentivizes other nations to do, and why the people now speaking out against him in new MAGA media are not our friends. They’re grifters who smell Trump’s weakness.
The blockade is the headline, but the logic underneath it is the story. Trump ordered a naval blockade of a strait that was only closed because of a war he started to destroy nuclear capabilities he already claimed were obliterated. That is not a coherent strategy. That is a cascading failure. I described it as a Russian nesting doll of self-inflicted wounds: you open one, and there’s something worse inside, and then you do something worse on top of that to cover for the previous mistake.
Adam had been calling this mission creep in the early weeks of the war. He’s now calling it mission fuck-up, because the new mission is to fix the original mission’s failures.
The bigger frame here is not just about incompetence. It’s about Trump’s worldview. People keep calling Trump transactional. That is the wrong word. What Trump is doing is extraction. He is not making deals. He is squeezing. And when the most powerful nation on earth decides that might makes right and force is the primary language of international relations, it doesn’t just affect the current conflict. It rewrites the permission structure for every nation with geographic leverage over a waterway, a chokepoint, a corridor. That is the world Adam and I are watching take shape in real time.
And then there’s the Pope. The first American-born Pope spoke out against this war, called Trump’s genocide threat unacceptable, and Trump responded by calling him weak on crime, posting himself as a Christ-like figure, and then deleting it.
Adam called it the mad king theory, and he’s right. No guardrails, no one around Trump with the standing or the courage to say no, just a feedback loop of sycophants affirming his worst impulses until he posts a Jesus meme after attacking the Pope, and someone finally blinks and deletes. This is what happens when you spend a second term laser-targeting every institutional check that slowed you down in the first one.
We ended the Live talking about the right-wing grifters, who are newly condemning Trump, are not acting out of principle, but out of self-interest. They can smell Trump’s weakness and clearly see a media market for anti-Trump right-wing content. We should see their critiques clearly.
You’ll want to watch this conversation in full. It was a great one.
Watch above and read key takeaways below.
A Blockade Built On Failure
The Strait of Hormuz blockade is not a strategy. It is the latest entry in a chain of self-defeating decisions, each one designed to fix the damage caused by the one before it.
I opened the live by laying out the core absurdity: Trump has ordered a blockade of a strait that was closed only because of a war he started to destroy nuclear capabilities he already claimed were obliterated. The blockade is specifically targeting Iranian ports and the toll revenue Iran has been collecting, not all traffic through the strait. But the fundamental problem remains: the thing he is now trying to fix is a thing he created.
Adam had been calling this mission creep in the early weeks of the war, warning it would expand in size, scope, and scale. He’s now calling it mission fuck-up. A month and a half in, the new mission is to fix the original mission. That reframing is exactly right.
Adam made the point that Iran has no incentive to negotiate or engage in long-term diplomacy when the United States continues to bomb them every time talks stall. That is why Vance walked out of Islamabad with nothing. The blockade does not change that calculus. It hardens it.
Adam also raised the escalatory risk directly: if the U.S. is interdicting ships in international waters, that includes Chinese ships that have been transiting with Iranian clearance. Direct naval contact with Chinese vessels is not a theoretical risk. It is a real one. That is a level of escalation no one in this administration appears to have war-gamed.
I described it as a Russian nesting doll of self-inflicted wounds: every layer you open reveals something worse, and the response to each failure is a bigger gamble on top of it. That pattern is not going to stop until someone with actual authority forces a different approach, and there is no one in this administration positioned to do that.
Trump Isn’t Transactional. He’s Extractive.
The word people keep reaching for when they describe Trump’s foreign policy approach is transactional. It is the wrong word, and the distinction matters enormously for understanding what is actually happening to the global order.
I made the point directly on the live: this is not transaction, it is extraction. A transaction implies a deal where both parties get something. What Trump is doing is squeezing. He is taking. The difference is not semantic. It describes a fundamentally different relationship to power and to other nations.
Adam raised the question that follows directly from that: if the most powerful nation on earth operates on a might makes right basis, what stops every other nation with geographic leverage from doing the same? Why can’t Malaysia toll the Strait of Malacca? Why can’t Turkey toll the Bosphorus? Why can’t Denmark toll the Baltic Sea? Adam’s friend put it plainly: the UK could put missiles in Gibraltar and demand payment for Mediterranean passage. That is the world Trump is incentivizing into existence.
I pointed out that there was always a reason the post-World War II rules-based order existed. It was not perfect. The U.S. fell short of its own proclaimed ideals repeatedly. But there was at least a framework, a stated commitment to something beyond raw force. Trump has stripped that away entirely. And in doing so, he has handed China and Russia the validation they have been seeking for years: that the U.S. is unstable, hypocritical, and not committed to any principle beyond its own short-term advantage.
I cited a recent Gallup International poll showing that the world now favors Chinese leadership over U.S. leadership. That is a staggering data point given what Chinese-style hybrid authoritarian capitalism actually means for the countries it reaches. The fact that the world is looking at that model as more stable than what the U.S. is offering right now tells you exactly how much damage has been done.
I framed this with a Superman analogy: Superman is the most powerful entity on earth and chooses to be restrained, chooses to be kind, chooses to be good. That is what American power was supposed to represent at its best: the choice not to use leverage to its maximum. Trump has abandoned that choice. And he has taught Iran, and every nation watching, that the lesson of this moment is that short-circuiting the global economy is a viable option if you have the geographic leverage to do it.
Status Quo vs. Revisionist Powers: America Was Already Winning
Adam brought a framework to the conversation that reframes what Trump has done to America’s place in the global order: the difference between status quo countries and revisionist countries.
Adam laid out the theory directly. Status quo countries are satisfied with the existing international order because it benefits them. They support the current distribution of power, borders, and trade. Revisionist countries are dissatisfied and want to alter or overturn the system. The United States should be, without question, a status quo country. We built the order. We were at the top of it.
Adam walked through what that order actually delivered: free trade with most of the world, NATO backing, EU partnership, the ability to call out border violations like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because we had established that borders matter. That was a world order that was broadly good for the United States and broadly bad for authoritarian regimes that wanted to operate without accountability.
Trump made a catastrophic error. He looked at that order and decided the U.S. was a revisionist power that needed to shake things up. But as Adam put it plainly: you can’t go up from the top. You can only go lower. Every shake of the foundation only weakens what was already working in our favor.
Adam used the analogy of a perfectly built mansion with a great foundation. Why would you try to shake that around? The answer is that you wouldn’t, unless you fundamentally misread your own position in the structure. Trump misread it completely. And the people around him either didn’t know enough to correct him or didn’t have the standing to try.
I connected this to the global perception shift. The world now has to start planning for both a Republican United States and a Democratic United States as if they are two different countries, because the swings between them are now that dramatic. The globe is looking at the U.S. as bipolar. That instability is itself a form of weakness, independent of any specific policy. China and Russia have been making that argument for years. Trump proved it for them.
The Mad King & The Pope
Trump’s feud with Pope Leo XIV is a window into a presidency that has fully lost its guardrails.
Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born Pope, spoke out against the Iran War and called Trump’s threat to end the whole civilization of Iran unacceptable. Trump’s response was to call him weak on crime. Adam noted on the live that he genuinely did not know what that meant applied to a Pope, and that, in a dark way, it was almost funny. The Pope, the known street crime-fighting vigilante, is not doing his job.
Adam called it the mad king theory, and the post that followed made the case for him. Within hours of attacking the Pope, Trump posted an image of himself depicted as a Christ-like figure, using divine power to heal a man while soldiers and eagles looked on. Then he deleted it.
I made the point about the feedback loop that enables this: Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants, careerists, and grifters who affirm everything he says and validate his worst impulses because they know that pushing back means being pushed out. No one around Trump has the standing or the courage to say, Mr. President, this is not a good idea. That is what happens when you spend a second term systematically removing everyone who ever said no to you in the first.
Adam connected the Jesus post to the mad king pattern directly: threatening to wipe out a civilization, mocking Mueller, and posting Jesus memes. These are not isolated incidents. They are a sequence that shows a man with no reality check, no walls around him, operating in a closed loop of affirmation.
I made the point that all of this behavior tracks with what we saw in the first term: every time Trump started acting erratically, something was coming. A report dropping, a legal development, some external pressure. The difference now is that he is like that all the time, because he is in a constant state of fear. The midterms are coming. His poll numbers, per a recent survey I cited, are as low as 33%. The MAGA empire is fracturing. This is all desperation.
The Right-Wing Grift Machine Has No Principles
Megyn Kelly is speaking out. Alex Jones is speaking out. Tucker Carlson is speaking out. Candace Owens is speaking out. None of this is a moral awakening. It is a market pivot amid Trump’s weakness.
Adam said it directly, and I agreed: these people are not on our side. I noted that they are media grifters who have identified an audience opening and are moving to fill it. The emotional response of feeling like they’re finally getting it needs to be immediately followed by the rational response of remembering what they spent the last decade doing.
Adam laid out the Tucker Carlson case specifically: Tucker spent years lying about election fraud on air while texting privately that he did not believe it. Today, his ideology largely aligns with Vladimir Putin. The reason he is taking anti-war positions on Iran is not because he has woken up to something. It is because being pro-Putin and being anti-this-war happen to point in the same direction right now. That alignment will not hold. It never does with Tucker.
I added the context that Tucker was pushing great replacement theory on Fox News not long ago, and that his anti-Israel positions, which happen to be correct in this context, have historically been rooted in antisemitic views. For the first time, his various ideological threads have converged to put him on the right side of a specific issue. That does not make him right. It makes him accidentally correct once, for the wrong reasons.
Adam made the Candace Owens case: she filed a complaint about being racially profiled as a young person. She knows exactly what racism looks like in America from lived experience. Her claim to fame became saying that systemic racism is a lie and the left is lying to you about it. That is not a sincere political evolution. That is a person who found out what paid better and took the money.
I pointed out that Candace Owens started with an anti-Trump blog in 2016. I was starting my media company that same year. The difference is that I made a choice about what I stood for. She made a different choice. I also noted that the financial incentives in the right-wing ecosystem for Black conservatives specifically are enormous. Private donors, institutional money, the whole infrastructure floods in the moment you decide to back Trump.
Bottom Line
The blockade is a failure built on a failure built on a lie. The global order that benefited the United States for decades is being dismantled by a president who does not understand that he was already at the top of the order he inherited. Iran is more entrenched. China is gaining ground in the global perception battle. And the voices now speaking out from the right are not allies. They are people who watched the market shift and adjusted their product accordingly.
Adam and I are out here doing this because we believe independent media is where the real work gets done. There are no billionaires funding the pro-democracy coalition. No institutional money is propping up the people speaking truth on this side.
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