◼ President Donald Trump’s messages regarding the war against Iran flip back and forth between two settings. Sometimes we get bold declarations that the Iranians have made dramatic concessions. On April 17, Trump boasted that the Strait of Hormuz was “FULLY OPEN AND READY FOR FULL PASSAGE.” The Iranians almost always immediately insist otherwise. Two days after his declaration, the president fumed, “Iran decided to fire bullets yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz — A Total Violation of our Ceasefire Agreement!” If only someone had warned the president that the Iranian regime is not trustworthy. On April 21, Trump extended the cease-fire, but it appears to be unilateral, as the Iranians are still firing on cargo ships. When the president isn’t boasting of some unverified Iranian concession, he’s threatening to hit Iran even harder than it has been hit so far. He wrote on Truth Social: “I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat, small boats though they may be (Their naval ships are ALL, 159 of them, at the bottom of the sea!), that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz. There is to be no hesitation.” One would hope that mine-laying boats were already a target! There may not be hesitation in U.S. policy, but there isn’t much clarity, either.

◼ CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, “When do you think it’s realistic for Americans to expect the gas will go back to under $3 a gallon?” Wright answered: “I don’t know. That could happen later this year. That might not happen until next year.” Congressional Republicans might have choked on their coffee at the thought of high gas prices continuing through the midterm elections. The next morning, Trump insisted that Wright was “totally wrong” and that gas prices would decline “as soon as” the Iran war ends. As of this writing, crude oil futures are down a bit (around $93 per barrel from a high of $112) but they’re still significantly higher than the pre-war $60 per barrel. Happy talk isn’t going to make this problem any better—for drivers, consumers, companies, or the GOP.

◼ Voters in Virginia narrowly approved the Democratic Party’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional map. The new map allows voters inside the Beltway to govern much of red, rural Virginia. While running for election, Governor Abigail Spanberger promised she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.” A great many voters didn’t appreciate this deception. The “yes” vote seems to have passed entirely on the strength of Fairfax County and other Beltway communities that voted to dominate their neighbors. National Republicans who sat out this fight while their party was outspent by multiples should be embarrassed by the outcome. The Virginia Supreme Court can still rule that this whole plan is unlawful under state law. It should do so. But that would require the courage to stand against a plebiscite. The justices should consider the close division of that vote if they fear to stand on principle against the outcome.

◼ During his Senate confirmation hearing, Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve, made many of the right assurances to the upper chamber. He promised to maintain the Fed’s political independence, which is essential to keeping the dollar sound. Warsh acknowledged that Trump has publicly demanded further interest rate cuts to juice the economy, risking a resurgence of inflation, but swore that the president never asked him to slash rates in exchange for the Fed job. That may be true, but Warsh—a longtime critic of easy money—has changed his tune on interest rates regardless, claiming that AI’s productivity potential will ease inflationary pressures. Perhaps. But higher growth should also mean higher demand for loans, which will push interest rates upward. A better argument by Warsh is that the central bank has strayed from its mandate of price stability to bail out markets and address extraneous issues such as climate risk and inequality. For a lighter touch, he rightly endorses shrinking the Fed’s gargantuan balance sheet. It’s unfortunate that Warsh’s nomination is being held up by the Trump administration’s farcical criminal probe into current Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Trump ought to set his ego aside, drop the investigation into Powell, and let the Senate confirm his qualified replacement.

◼ Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned following mounting allegations of misconduct, misuse of government resources, and an extramarital affair between Chavez-DeRemer and a member of her security team. Her resignation follows the departures of former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling is expected to assume the role of acting secretary. Chavez-DeRemer, who was out on the pro-union fringe of the party when serving in the House, would have made more sense as a token Republican in a Kamala Harris cabinet and shouldn’t have been confirmed by the Senate in the first place. Sonderling can hardly fail to be an improvement.

◼ For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has represented progressive activism at its worst, retailing preposterously wide-ranging public blacklists of organizations designated as “hate groups,” collaborating hand in glove with the mainstream media and (until recently) the federal government, and raising millions of dollars toward the nominal goal of “fighting white supremacy.” Its work appears to have included funding white supremacy, too. The Department of Justice has indicted the SPLC on eleven counts of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money-laundering. For years, the SPLC has been, by its own admission, secretly funding “informants” in racist groups around the country. The indictment outlines more than $3 million allegedly disbursed to white supremacists, including an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, from 2015 to 2024. Since high-level positions in tiny extremist groups aren’t ordinarily lucrative, any amount of money handed to these individuals could have kept them in the racism racket; and some got hundreds of thousands of dollars. One organizer funded by SPLC to the tune of $270,000 helped plan the notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. This doesn’t make Charlottesville an “op,” but it is highly embarrassing to the SPLC—and maybe criminal as well.

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◼ New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared that his administration would open five subsidized municipal grocery stores, one for each borough. He has now unveiled details of his plan. Four stores will operate out of existing buildings, but the fifth will be built from scratch on city-owned property in Manhattan’s East Harlem for an astonishing $30 million. Meanwhile, would-be customers in Harlem will have to wait, as those who expect a socialist cornucopia always do. Their new store won’t be ready until 2029. That would be a problem if they lived in a “food desert,” but there are a number of grocery stores within a block or two of the proposed new store. Unlike their new competitor, they will have to pay rent and property taxes and make a profit. How affordable will Mamdani Mart be for them or the employees who rely on them?

◼ The Supreme Court has sprung another leak. The New York Times published internal memos from a 2016 case in which the Court stayed the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which aimed to remake the energy industry on the basis of a flimsy thread in the Clean Air Act. To critics, this was a premature judicial intervention that birthed the Court’s “shadow docket.” But the Court had issued early stay orders before, some of them for the liberal side of hot-button issues such as abortion. And the justices got this one right: In 2022, in a fully argued case, the Court rightly found that Congress hadn’t given the EPA the authority Obama claimed. The memos show that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito understood that Obama was trying to create a fait accompli that would change the industry before the courts could weigh in, rendering judicial review, as Alito put it, “a postscript.” Roberts was particularly offended that EPA officials were bragging to the press that the rule could be baked “into the system” and that they felt they had successfully done this in a prior case. No leaker has been identified. The principle of cui bono suggests it’s someone on the Court’s liberal side. The unfinished internal draft in the leak indicates that it came from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s chambers.

◼ The State Department under Marco Rubio is pushing a free-market initiative at the United Nations, encouraging developing countries to rely on “trade over aid.” Good for him. Rubio is correct that prosperity comes from allowing mutually beneficial arrangements, not from merely transferring money from one set of hands to another. Yet “trade over aid” is rich advice coming from this administration, which has imposed the steepest trade barriers in nearly a century. Trump should apply his own State Department’s guidance. Cutting taxes on trade raises living standards, and not only abroad.

◼ As sour as Americans are about our economy, they should be profoundly grateful they don’t have China’s instead. China’s most recent GDP figures came in better than expected, on track for 5.3 percent economic growth. Zoom out, however, and China’s GDP has barely budged in the four years since the pandemic. The Chinese economy had been 78 percent of the size of the United States’ in 2021; that share fell to 64 percent in 2024. Consumer spending is weak, property values are falling, net exports are down, and private sector investment has stalled out. This should mark the end of the so-called Beijing Consensus, coined in 2004 as an alternative to the free-market prescriptions for growth that have enabled billions to escape global poverty. Instead of stable rules and unconstrained decision-making, it promised state-driven prosperity. In practice, all that meant was centralized control over Chinese society’s wealth and opportunity. In its 21st-century contest against China, the United States has one great advantage: Our model works, and theirs doesn’t.

◼ In the United Kingdom, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is dead—killed by conscience and by the stubborn refusal of a handful of peers to mistake fashionable sentiment for serious legislation. After grinding through more than 1,200 amendments in the House of Lords, the bill simply ran out of parliamentary time. Good. Two interventions deserve particular recognition. Theresa May, the former prime minister, was magnificent. She branded the bill what it actually is: a license to kill. Arlene Foster, the former Democratic Unionist Party leader and first minister of Northern Ireland, described the death of her own mother, who received compassionate palliative care and was not hounded by bureaucratic machinery designed to make dying convenient. Foster exposed the bill’s deepest cruelty: that it gives legitimacy to a dying person’s fear of becoming a burden. “We should be asking how to help them live better,” she said, her voice breaking. She is right. The arguments that filled the bill’s 1,200 amendments didn’t come from nowhere. They came from a civilization that, however imperfect, still knows the difference between a good death and a managed killing.

◼ Under a new U.K. law, which will receive royal assent shortly, no one born after January 1, 2009, will ever be legally permitted to buy cigarettes, cigars, and other tobacco products. The law, designed to protect “the children,” will still be protecting those children when they are in their 50s, 60s and beyond. The new law also includes provisions (though no lifetime bans) designed to curb vaping, a continuation of the perverse campaign against a much safer alternative to smoking. The new law will give additional support to the already flourishing free market in cigarettes. Unfortunately, this will now be a black market.