Krystal Ball

It certainly seems the direction that they're leaning in right now, but he also watches the market so closely.

We know how much that drives his behavior, not just with regard to the oil prices, but with regard to the bond markets, with regard to the stock markets.

So these are two very powerful,

competing forces within the Trump presidency, which is why it's so hard to predict what's going to happen.

Yeah.

You can't.

Well, and here's the thing, too, is Trump has to be able to sell some kind of victory narrative at least to his base, right?

The rest of the population is not going to buy it.

But at least his base has to believe that this went well for us and we won and we got something out of it.

And

I don't know how you do that, given the state of affairs and what Iran is going to rightly demand.

I mean, even if you dramatically water down their 10-point proposal, you still have a clear U.S.

defeat, which countries around the world are going to recognize, which even Fox News, you know, I watched them a bit.

And at first they were very much doing the like, oh, Trump, art of the deal, and he made this threat and all the panic hands were freaking out, but look at how he was able to secure peace in the world, blah, blah, blah.

By the next morning, when you had too much reporting on what these 10, I mean, we've known about what the 10 points are more or less for quite a while now, thanks to the reporting of Ryan and Jeremy and others.

But once the mainstream press started having to talk about, well, what are these 10 points?

Even Fox News.

Right.

could no longer be like, look at this marvelous victory, because we're talking about reparations, we're talking about complete sanctions relief, and we're talking about a new status quo in the Strait of Hormuz that amounts to tens of, at the least, tens of billions of dollars of revenue into Iran's coffers.

And these other places... I mean, this is already a middle-income country that has been dramatically hurt, certainly, by our sanctions.