Mar. 25, 2026, 4:41 PM EDT

This is an adapted excerpt from the March 24 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

Donald Trump’s war on Iran is in its fourth week. Gas prices are up $1 a gallon in much of the country. Stocks continue to fall on fears of global supply shortages.

The death toll is growing. Thirteen American service members have lost their livesand more than 1,200 Iranians have been killed, along with upward of 1,000 people in Lebanonmore than 150 in the surrounding Gulf states and 17 Israelis. That’s not accounting for the millions who are displaced and the thousands who have been injured, including hundreds of U.S. troops.

But according to the president who launched the war, it’s all over.

“We’ve won this. This war has been won,” he told reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office. “The only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”

However, during those same remarks, Trump was all over the place — talking about an epic victory, ongoing peace negotiations and personal gifts.

It was all completely counter to his posture over the weekend, when he threatened to “obliterate” Iranian civilian power plants — essentially teasing a war crime — if Iran did not stop blocking oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuzsomething Iran was not doing before Trump attacked them.

But now, he has supposedly pressed pause on that bombing plan for five days because, he said, the negotiations are going well.

When he first announced that in a social media post Monday, it sent oil prices down 10% and boosted stocks.

However, those markets reversed themselves Tuesday after the Iranians said they have not engaged in any serious high-level negotiations with the Americans, and they claimed Trump was making things up to help oil prices. The Israelis said the same thing. (That’s not to say you should take Iran’s word for it, or Israel’s, but you shouldn’t take the White House’s word, either.)

It is becoming increasingly clear that Trump expected a fast and easy win. He had no plan B, and now he is flailing to find some kind of fallback position.

On Monday, sources from the administration told Politico that they have their eyes on a future U.S.-backed leader of Iran: Mohammad ⁠Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament.

“He’s a hot option,” one unnamed U.S. source — who seems to really wants a deal — told Blue Light News. “He’s one of the highest. … But we got to test them, and we can’t rush into it.”

But on Tuesday, that “hot option” trolled Trump for what he called a “jawboning campaign” to stabilize oil prices. In a social media postGhalibaf wrote: “[L]et’s see if they can turn that into ‘actual fuel’ at the pump — or maybe even print gas molecules!”

Call it the fog of Trumpian war: a million contradictory messages flying around, constantly wildly pinging bits of news that don’t make sense together.

Right now, we have reports that Trump’s negotiators, including his envoy Steve Witkoff and Vice President JD Vance, are traveling to Pakistan for informal talks with an Iranian official.

At the same time, unnamed U.S. officials have told The New York Times that the Saudi crown prince is pushing Trump to continue the war until Iran’s government collapses — something the Saudis publicly deny.

In fact, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Saudi officials are holding talks in Riyadh with their Arab counterparts to find a diplomatic off-ramp from the war.

On Tuesday evening, U.S. officials said the Pentagon was poised to deploy 3,000 troops of the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East. That is in addition to two Marine expeditionary units on their way to the region and the 50,000 U.S. troops already stationed there.

Also on Tuesday, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq are claiming that U.S. strikes there killed 30 of their members.

But, according to Trump, the peace talks are going great, right?

All eyes everywhere have been on the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran responded to the U.S. attack by striking oil tankers and shutting down 20% of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas. It is now essentially running a toll operation in the strait.

Some countries, such as China, Japan and India, are negotiating deals with Iran to get its oil out. Which is to say, Iran is shipping more oil and making more money than it was under the U.S. sanctions in place before Trump attacked it.

It’s clear the president sees what’s happening, so now he is trying to share control of the strait with Iran. Trump told reporters the strait would be “jointly controlled” by “maybe” him and “the next ayatollah.”

The administration really thought this was going to be another Venezuela. They told themselves that, and they were egged on to believe it by the staunchest advocates of the war, such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sen. Lindsey GrahamR-S.C.

But in Iran, a decapitation strike did not lead to mass uprisings. It did not lead to regime change. It led to the situation in which Iran’s regime is intact, even if militarily degraded, and they now have explicit control of the Strait of Hormuz — a huge pressure point.

It really looks like the U.S. is backed into a corner: It can sue for peace because of the oil tanker situation, but they do not have much leverage, or it can escalate the war. That may be why we’re seeing all these contradictory developments.

Trump issued an ultimatum he had to walk back from because he said there were deep peace negotiations, which then later proved to be completely fabricated.

Now, more U.S. troops are set to be deployed for a possible ground invasion in the Middle East, despite reports that the U.S. has supposedly sent a 15-point plan to Iran through Pakistan to end the war.

It almost looks as if Trump is trying to wave the peace card to keep a lid on oil futures and financial marketsjust long enough to have ground troops in position — and just in time for the markets to close for the weekend on Friday, when Trump’s “pause” on bombing Iranian power plants is set to end.

That could be the plan Trump now settles on, weeks into a deadly war where there was obviously, very clearly, no real plan at all.

Allison Detzel contributed.

Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).