Mar. 16, 2026, 7:49 PM EDT

ByNicholas Grossman

The Iran was is exposing President Donald Trump’s unfitness for national leadership. The lie-filled bluster and escalation he relied on to succeed in business and domestic politics aren’t workingand the situation is out of his control. The world is interconnected and other people get a say, including oil companies and energy markets. But Trump never understood that, and since he has no other moves, he’s kept doubling down despite no plausible path to victory, making things worse.

With Venezuela, Trump said he attacked to take oilequating his personal rapaciousness with national interest. After U.S. special operations forces ousted Venezuelan president Nicolas MaduroTrump found the rest of the Venezuelan regime more pliable, including now-interim President Delcy Rodriguez, and told U.S. energy companies to go get Venezuela’s oil.

Except those companies didn’t want it. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise. Venezuela’s oil deposits are dirty, needing considerable refinement, and drilling isn’t profitable unless oil is priced higher than it was at the time. The infrastructure is poor, and U.S. companies would have to spend billions developing it. And the security situation was volatile after the U.S. military overthrew the national leader. Oil is flammable, and platforms would be a target if an insurgency develops.

But apparently it was a surprise to the White House. Trump berated energy executivesbut that didn’t work. They won’t throw away money just because he told them to.

With the Iran war, Trump is trying to bully not only energy companies, but the entire global energy market. Except the war is disrupting supply, making prices rise no matter what he says.

Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack Iran, and hasn’t articulated a clear goalbut did issue existential threats. At various times he’s called for regime change, told Iranians to overthrow the government, and demanded “unconditional surrender.”

And this comes after Trump reneged on the Iran nuclear deal without cause in his first term. That showed Iran that the United States in general, and Trump specifically, cannot be trusted to honor any agreement, and will react to concessions by demanding more.

In response to the U.S.-Israeli attack, Iran played its biggest card, closing the Strait of Hormuz. It’s a narrow choke point at the end of the Persian Gulf, and a kink in the waterway leaves it exposed to a lot of Iran’s coastline. About 20% of the world’s oil passes through Hormuz, and it isn’t hard for Iran to stop the traffic.

Iran can’t prevent U.S. and Israeli forces from flying over the gulf, and they probably couldn’t keep the U.S. Navy out of it, but to close the strait, they don’t need to. They only have to make shipping companies afraid to sail, and insurance companies think the risk of insuring the ships is too high. With threats, a few attacks on tankers, and now possibly sea mines, Iran has.

Again, this shouldn’t have been a surprise. For example, “Closing Time: Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz” by Caitlin Talmadge appeared in the leading journal International Security in 2008.

To address this crisis of his own making, Trump tried saying the war is almost over and the U.S. already won. It made the oil price drop back down for a bit, but as U.S.-Israeli bombardment continued and market disruptions got worse, it rose again.

Trump tried telling ships to traverse the Strait of Hormuz, but most wouldn’t, and a few who did exploded, presumably at Iran’s hand.

He tried releasing oil from America’s strategic reserve, and some other countries did from theirs. But that’s a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, and had little impact.

Then he tried bombing Kharg, an island in the gulf that Iran uses for oil exports. The apparent logic is that hindering Iran’s shipping will get Iran to stop blocking everyone else’s.

That recalls one of Trump’s go-to moves in business: the bad faith lawsuit. He’d break a contract, screw someone over, and dare them to sue him. Or would initiate legal action himself. Either way, he bet that he’d have more resources and greater tolerance for a protracted legal fight, and the other party would settle even when the facts were on their side.

That won’t work with Iran.

By making the threat existential, Trump set the bar for the Iranian regime at survival, and incentivized them to use whatever leverage they have. America’s military can overwhelm Iran’s, and is doing a lot more damage to Iran than the Iranians can do back. But even without its main source of revenue, Iran can keep up a defensive war for a while. Especially since the only thing it really needs to do is keep getting some shots off, such as with relatively cheap, domestically-produced Shahed dronesor small boats laden with explosives. The U.S. probably can’t stop that by force without a large ground invasion and indefinite occupation of Iran’s gulf coastline—a massive, costly undertaking—and maybe not even then.

Much of the time when Trump was in the private sector and messed up, his rich dad bailed him out or he’d declare bankruptcy. Instead of holding equity or debt, Trump would have the business pay him a salary and bonusesso that money was gone when the company went under, and his partners and contractors would take most of the losses.

When Trump stiffed lenders, there was usually someone else he could get to give him money. That’s how the Trump Organization ended up with a lot of Russian financing — by that point, just about everyone else wouldn’t touch him.

Now he’s done that to America. After a year of Trump denigratingthreatening, and tariffing U.S. alliesno one is willing to help rescue the U.S. from a mess of its own making, no matter how much he browbeats them.

Trump started something that quickly spiraled and seems out of ideas. There’s no one to sue, no rules to manipulate, just the hard realities of resource shortages and war.

And there’s a good chance Iran can tolerate being bombed more than the U.S. can tolerate a rapidly rising oil price and the economic damage it causes.

Mar. 16, 2026, 7:04 PM EDT

A federal judge in Boston dealt a blow to the Trump administration’s yearlong effort to change American vaccine policy on Monday, temporarily blocking many of the administration’s moves from going forward.

In a 45-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy largely sided with six medical organizations that last year sued the Department of Health and Human Services and its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., over the department’s changes to its vaccine recommendations, including a January memo that reduced the number of universally recommended vaccinations from 17 to 11. The lawsuit claimed the HHS changes violated federal law.

Murphy on Monday called the January edict “arbitrary and capricious because it abandoned the agency’s longstanding practice of getting recommendations from [the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] before changing the immunization schedules without sufficient explanation.” The advisory committee, known as ACIP, is a panel operating under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which makes recommendations about how vaccines should be used in the U.S., based on the latest research.

“The CDC cannot simply bypass ACIP in altering the immunization schedules,” Murphy wrote.

At the time it issued the memo in January, HHS defended its process by arguing it was fulfilling the orders of President Donald Trump, who weeks earlier had directed HHS to align America’s vaccine recommendations with the best practices from peer countries.

Murphy also temporarily blocked the appointments of many of Kennedy’s handpicked members of ACIP, saying the appointees “appear distinctly unqualified.”

Last summer, Kennedy abruptly dismissed all 17 sitting members of the committee and began replacing them with his own picks, many of whom have expressed vaccine-skeptical views.

Murphy temporarily blocked 13 of Kennedy’s newly appointed ACIP members from participating in future committee meetings. However, his ruling did not apply to the two newest members of ACIP, whose appointments were announced last month.

In a statement, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told MS NOW, “HHS looks forward to this judge’s decision being overturned just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing.”

Will McDuffie is a reporter for MS NOW.

Mar. 16, 2026, 6:27 PM EDT

Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chair appointed by President Donald Trump, has threatened to take away TV licenses over news coverage he doesn’t like. Legally, he can’t do that.

But in the age of Trump, a threat can sometimes be as effective as the law — which is probably why Carr keeps jawboning media owners and reporters with statements unlikely to hold up under legal challenge.

In a presidency known for flouting norms, this is yet another way the Trump administration exercises power.

The most recent incident occurred on Saturday. Reacting to Iran conflict coverage, Carr warned broadcasters that airing “hoaxes and news distortions” could lead to the loss of their federally granted licenses. Broadcasters are at risk, Carr posted on X, if they don’t “correct course before their license renewals come up.”

Carr wasn’t overly specific, but he didn’t have to be. As FCC chair, Carr has issued several warnings that echo his patron’s complaints about the three legacy broadcast TV networks: ABC, CBS and NBC. (The FCC grants licenses to individual broadcast stations, not national broadcast networks; cable networks such as MS NOW or BLN and streaming services including Netflix aren’t licensed at all.)

Indeed, Carr’s Saturday post quoted Trump’s own social media complaint that some news reports about the military action he initiated against Iran were “intentionally misleading.” Trump endorsed Carr’s threats Sunday in another Truth Social rantthis one suggesting that media outlets that report inaccurately during wartime should be tried for treason — a crime punishable by death.

Carr’s fist-shaking at broadcasters generates headlines and alarm, but it’s notable that his threats have resulted in exactly zero license-revocation hearings to date. Carr, an experienced telecommunications lawyer, surely knows that taking away any station’s license would involve a yearslong legal battle — one that he’d be highly likely to lose once the FCC’s decision were subject to independent judicial review.

That’s because broadcasters have broad free-speech protections that prohibit the government from penalizing them for what they put on the air. “The FCC can issue threats all day long, but it is powerless to carry them out,” Anna Gomezthe FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, posted Sunday on X. “Such threats violate the First Amendment and will go nowhere.”

In its nearly 100-year history, the FCC has rarely gone after a license. Typically, the commission acts only in instances in which a station owner has been convicted of a felony or has repeatedly lied to the agency, according to Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a veteran media attorney. Not once has the FCC sought its highest penalty for a station that, as Carr put it, “distorts” the news.

Contrary to what Trump and Carr suggest, the agency can’t penalize a broadcaster for merely reporting inaccurately or holding an opinion the president and FCC chair dislike. To meet the FCC’s own standard of distortion, the agency must find that a station deliberately tried to trick viewers or listeners by, say, re-enacting a drug bust and presenting it as the real thing or using “file” footage as if it were part of a breaking news story. The FCC has cited stations only eight times over the past 50 years, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s.

Still, Carr’s devotion to Trump’s media bashing produces results. After late-night host Jimmy Kimmel commented on the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September, enraging conservatives, Carr threatened ABC’s station licenses. Here, too, the threat was legally dubious, but ABC’s parent, The Walt Disney Company, took Kimmel’s show off the air for a few days after local affiliates said they would preempt the show themselves.

The backdrop to all this is another action Carr took shortly after taking office. In January 2025, Carr revived a previously dismissed complaint alleging news distortion by CBS News over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris in 2024 — one that was already the subject of a lawsuit filed by Trump. The investigation effectively tied up the FCC’s approval of an $8 billion proposed merger between Skydance Media and CBS’ parent company, Paramount. To remove the regulatory roadblock, Paramount settled Trump’s lawsuit by paying him $16 million and making other commitments, such as installing an ombudsman to review CBS News’ reporting. Once the suit was settled, the FCC approved the Skydance-Paramount merger.

Even the prospect of regulatory trouble can lead to preemptive and conciliatory action. In December 2024, Disney agreed to pay $16 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit against Disney-owned ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos, a move widely read as a decision not to challenge the power of the incoming president and risk an uncertain fate at an FCC headed by a key Trump ally.

Carr has also publicly accused Comcastthe parent company of NBC News and former parent of MS NOW — both a frequent target of Trump bashing — of news distortion in reporting its outlets did about Kilmar Abrego Garciathe Maryland immigrant wrongfully deported last year by the Trump administration.

Carr’s weaponization of news distortion prompted a bipartisan group of former FCC officials to petition the agency last year to repeal the policy. So far, the agency hasn’t acted on the petition.

The FCC licenses hundreds of radio stations, including those that broadcast conservative talk radio programs, most of them routinely supportive of the Trump administration. There’s no record of Carr second-guessing anything these stations have broadcast. Nor has he questioned the reporting of local TV stations owned by Sinclair Inc. and Nexstar Media Group, the two companies that temporarily declined to air Kimmel’s late-night program after Carr’s criticism. Nexstar is seeking the FCC’s approval to buy a rival station owner, Tegna Inc., for $6.2 billionin a major consolidation of the business.

If Carr thought he had the law on his side, presumably he’d initiate proceedings and face whatever challenges arise in court. But he has a shortcut to his and the president’s preferred outcome: He’s put the bully in the bully pulpit.

Paul Farhi is a former media reporter for The Washington Post, where he was a staff writer for more than 35 years. He writes about the media industry for The Atlantic, The Daily Beast and Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets.