DL Open Thread: Wednesday, March 11, 2026
How Trump Miscalculated On The War:
On Feb. 18, as President Trump weighed whether to launch military attacks on Iran, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told an interviewer he was not concerned that the looming war might disrupt oil supplies in the Middle East and wreak havoc in energy markets.
Even during the Israeli and U.S. strikes against Iran last June, Mr. Wright said, there had been little disruption in the markets. “Oil prices blipped up and then went back down,” he said. Some of Mr. Trump’s other advisers shared similar views in private, dismissing warnings that — the second time around — Iran might wage economic warfare by closing shipping lanes carrying roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.
The extent of that miscalculation was laid bare in recent days, as Iran threatened to fire at commercial oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which all ships must pass on their way out of the Persian Gulf. In response to the Iranian threats, commercial shipping has come to a standstill in the Gulf, oil prices have spiked, and the Trump administration has scrambled to find ways to tamp down an economic crisis that has triggered higher gasoline prices for Americans.
The episode is emblematic of how much Mr. Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond to a conflict that the government in Tehran sees as an existential threat. Iran has responded far more aggressively than it did during last June’s 12-day war, firing barrages of missiles and drones at U.S. military bases, cities in Arab nations across the Middle East, and on Israeli population centers.
After Trump administration officials gave a closed-door briefing to lawmakers on Tuesday, Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said on social media that the administration had no plan for the Strait of Hormuz and did “not know how to get it safely back open.”
Trump–‘Oil Market Oblitrator’. He could’ve/should’ve learned from, wait for it, Biden, but didn’t:
One of the most oft-repeated conservative criticisms of President Biden concerned the price of gasoline, which briefly reached a national average of over $5 per gallon, mainly thanks to disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine. Republicans blamed Biden—as if he had a big button on his desk labeled “raise gas prices” he could not help but press over and over—and howled at him for attempting to mitigate the situation by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. “He’s using the strategic reserves, which is meant for military, which is meant for war, and very important things,” Trump said in 2024. He promised he would “refill our reserves right up to the top again.”
Well, now Trump is in (what’s left of) the White House, and when it comes to the oil market, he has turned out to be even worse than the Republican caricature of Biden. While the Biden administration tried to prevent Russia’s war on Ukraine, and then dealt with the consequences for oil prices in an effective and rather clever fashion, Trump has started his own war of aggression that is if anything even more senseless than Putin’s, and having even worse effects on the global oil supply—and meanwhile, rather than keeping his promise, Trump apparently just forgot to refill the SPR when prices were low.
Wind the clock back to 2022, when supply disruptions from the Ukraine invasion were really starting to bite, and Biden went hat in hand to Saudi Arabia to beg for them to pump more oil. The Saudi leadership, enjoying some easy superprofits and possibly hoping to make Biden lose in 2024, told him to pound sand.
So Biden turned into maybe the biggest commodity trader in history. He sold off some 180 million barrels out of the SPR, at about $95 a barrel, and promised to start buying it back once the price dipped down to $67–$72. About a year later, when the target price was hit, Biden started buying, making a cool $582 million in profit for the taxpayer on the first batch of orders. In the process, gas prices went down by about 40 cents. No less than The Economist called him a “master oil trader.”
Now, the SPR can only take in about three million barrels a month, so Trump couldn’t have filled it all the way up. But that adds up to a theoretical maximum intake of 42 million barrels since he took office. Just 20 million barrels have actually been added, almost all of which were from orders Biden had placed.
Wall Street has had its head in the sand through the entirety of President Donald Trump’s second term, whistling past the graveyard as Trump’s tariffs throttled the job market and kept inflation above the Federal Reserve’s 2% benchmark.
And Trump’s war in Iran is no exception, as traders have taken his word that it “is very complete,” even as other members of his own administration say the opposite.
Oil commodities have fallen and the stock market has risen, as Wall Street believes that Trump’s Iran “excursion” is short lived. But the problem is, Trump’s word means nothing.
In fact, oil experts are sounding doomsday alarm bells, saying that choking off the Strait has caused refineries to fill, necessitating stoppages in drilling that are not easy to resume on the drop of a dime.
“While we have faced disruptions in the past, this one by far is the biggest crisis the region’s oil and gas industry has faced,” said Amin Nasser, president and CEO of the world’s largest oil company, Aramco.
Podcaster Joe Weisenthal spoke with oil market researcher Rory Johnston, who Weisenthal describes as “one of the least alarmist people in oil.” Johnston said that he is now “acutely alarmed.”
“This is the scenario you would propose as a thought experiment to understand how shocks like this would ripple through the global crude and refined products markets (spoiler: EVERYTHING BREAKS),” Johnston wrote on X.
Worse still is that Johnston said it’s not a problem that can be solved with the flip of a switch.
“This crisis will continue to get worse until normal traffic through the Strait resumes, and, at this stage, even if the conflict ended today and tankers ramped back up to 100% Hormuz flow, it would still takes months to return to anything resembling normality,” he wrote.
Johnston said that Wall Street’s underreaction to this crisis could actually make things worse, as Trump faces less pressure to end the war without a stock market decline.
Judges Are Finally Addressing Trump’s Lawlessness:
Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, courts have been reluctant to impose consequences on the administration for its myriad violations of court orders. In recent weeks, however, some judges have started to recognize their power to compel compliance with their directives. A New York Times analysis published last month shows that since August, federal judges have issued at least 35 orders requiring the administration to explain why it shouldn’t be held in contempt. Twice since February, federal judges in Minnesota actually followed through, and briefly held the administration in civil contempt. And twice more in the past two weeks, federal judges in Minnesota and New Jersey threatened the administration with criminal contempt, too.
The Trump administration has shown that it will keep violating court orders until courts force it to stop. Judges are starting to remember their responsibilities to enforce the rules by which everyone else must abide—and the full range of tools available for enforcement.
NCC Council Approves Data Center Regulations. But exempts the proposed project near Delaware City:
After months of acrimonious debate, the New Castle County Council agreed to compromise Tuesday and passed an ordinance that imposes new regulations onto the rapidly growing data center industry.
The sweeping legislation includes new rules that require data centers to maintain buffer zones around them, and to use energy-efficient backup generators, among other regulations.
But the new regulations will not apply to the most controversial data center proposal in the state – the Project Washington development proposed near Delaware City.
“It’s a good start,” said Councilman Dave Carter, who wrote the bill. “It was difficult to make some compromises, but I think we’ve got tremendous improvements in.”
After council members critiqued the original legislation last fall, Carter worked with county staff to change the bill to address those concerns, such as concessions on noise regulations. The final proposal ultimately passed with 12 councilmembers voting yes, and 1 absent.
What do you want to talk about?
Cornyn reallyreallyreally wants/needs that Trump endorsement:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/11/cornyn-filibuster-save-act-trump-00822562
Thune says it’s a non-starter. Meaning, it’s a non-starter.