Late in May 2026, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that a peace agreement with Iran had been "largely negotiated" — subject to finalisation, he said, to be announced shortly. The Strait of Hormuz would be reopened. A ceasefire would be formalised. Talks on Iran's nuclear program would follow within 60 days. It sounded almost done. Then, a day later, Trump posted again to say he would not be rushing into any deal. The Hormuz blockade would stay in place until an agreement was "certified and signed." Iran's state media called Trump's announcement incomplete and inconsistent with reality. And the deal, whatever its final shape, remained unsigned.
That gap between announcement and reality — the bravado, the post, the pull-back — has become one of the more reliable rhythms of Trump's second term. He governs at maximum volume on a 24-hour news cycle, and sorting out what has actually happened from what he said was about to happen has become its own full-time occupation for the people trying to follow US foreign policy.
The conflict with Iran did not appear out of nowhere. It followed a prolonged confrontation over the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes — after Iran halted normal shipping traffic through the channel, sending global energy prices sharply upward and triggering the kind of inflationary pressure that makes economists and voters nervous at the same time. Trump initially issued 48-hour ultimatums, threatened to destroy Iran's power plants and bridges, and at one point warned on social media that an entire civilisation could be wiped out if Tehran did not move. Then he pulled back. Then a two-week ceasefire was agreed. Then the talks continued. Then Trump declared a deal was essentially done.
What Axios reported about the actual framework is this: a 60-day ceasefire extension during which the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened, Iran would be permitted to sell oil freely, the US would lift its blockade on Iranian ports, and negotiations on Iran's nuclear program — specifically on what happens to Tehran's stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium — would begin. That last part is the one that has not been agreed upon. Iran has publicly said it will not hand over its enriched uranium and has pushed to separate the nuclear question from any formal end to hostilities. Senior Iranian officials told Reuters the nuclear issue was not part of the preliminary agreement at all. So what Trump called "largely negotiated" is, by Iran's account, still substantially open.
The stakes of getting this wrong are serious. The Strait of Hormuz blockade has already pushed US inflation to some of its highest levels in years. A failure to close the deal — or an agreement that does not address Iran's nuclear capacity — leaves one of the most volatile regions in the world without a durable framework, and leaves American consumers paying for it at the pump. Trump says he won't rush. That is his prerogative. But the longer the Strait stays complicated, the longer the economic pressure holds, and the harder the domestic political situation becomes.
While the Iran situation was developing, Trump's signature domestic legislation — the One Big Beautiful Bill — passed the House in a narrow vote on May 22 and moved to the Senate. Trump called it the biggest tax cut in American history, the biggest economic development move the country had ever made, a miracle of legislation. The House Speaker called it the largest mandatory spending cut in history by almost 400%. The critics — and there were many — pointed out that it would add more than two trillion dollars to the national debt, that it would cut Medicaid in ways that would affect millions of lower-income Americans, and that, combined with Trump's sweeping tariff regime, the people most likely to feel genuine financial relief were already among the wealthiest.
The tariffs are worth pausing on. They are already the biggest tax increase as a share of GDP since 1993, which is not how most people think about tariffs, but it is what they are: a tax on imported goods that gets passed along to consumers. When you layer that on top of a spending bill that critics say delivers its biggest gains to the top 5% of earners, the argument that average Americans are coming out ahead becomes harder to sustain with a straight face.
The most unexpected critic of the bill was not a Democrat. It was Elon Musk, who had left the administration just days before and then, with remarkable speed, went public. He called the bill "a disgusting abomination" on X, writing that those who voted for it knew they had done wrong and that the legislation would increase the national deficit rather than reduce it, which, in his telling, made a mockery of everything DOGE had been trying to accomplish. Then he turned to the tariffs. He posted that Trump's tariffs would cause a recession in the second half of 2025, which is a striking thing to say publicly about the economic policy of the man you just spent months working for.
Trump said he was "disappointed" in Musk, suggested the problem was actually about EV tax credit cuts that affected Tesla, and added that he would rather Musk criticise him personally than criticise the bill. The feud ran for months before the two eventually reconciled — but the damage to the bill's optics was real. When the person who ran your efficiency drive calls your flagship legislation a disgusting abomination, it is a harder message to shake than criticism from the usual opposition. Musk was not wrong about the debt projections. He had spent months inside the administration arguing for spending cuts. The bill, as it passed the House, moved in the opposite direction on the deficit, and he said so in public.
Two other decisions added texture to this stretch of Trump's second term. The first was his administration's proposal to reserve new refugee slots exclusively for white South African Afrikaners — a policy that drew immediate criticism for its obvious racial framing and for the optics of a country that has historically prided itself on broad refugee commitments, narrowing those commitments to a single ethnic group from a single country. The administration argued it was addressing genuine persecution; critics argued it was a statement about which lives the government considered worth protecting.
The second was Trump's visit to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping, which was framed as trade diplomacy even as the tariff standoff between the two countries remained unresolved and structurally unaddressed. Meeting Xi while maintaining some of the highest tariffs on Chinese goods in modern American history is not necessarily contradictory — diplomacy and economic pressure can coexist — but it left open the question of what, concretely, the meeting was meant to produce. Both governments described the talks as constructive. Neither announced any significant policy shift.
Trump's approval rating, sitting at around 60% disapproval, reflects something straightforward: a significant majority of the American public is not satisfied with how things are going. That is not a crisis unique to him — second terms are often harder, midterm electorates are harder, and economic anxiety tends to punish whoever is in charge, regardless of who caused the conditions. But Trump came in on a very specific promise about costs going down and economic conditions improving for working Americans, and the combination of tariff-driven inflation and a bill that concentrates its benefits at the top makes that promise harder to defend.
The Iran situation could change things quickly. A real deal — one that reopens the Strait of Hormuz, eases energy prices, and gives Trump a genuine foreign policy win to campaign on — would be a meaningful shift. That is probably why he keeps announcing it as nearly done even when the other side is still disputing the terms. The announcement serves a domestic purpose regardless of whether the underlying agreement holds. Whether a durable deal materialises, and whether it addresses the nuclear question that everyone agrees is the actual issue, is still genuinely open.
What is not open is the domestic picture. The bill is real, the tariffs are real, and the economic pressure on ordinary households is real. Trump has always governed on the theory that boldness and confidence, projected convincingly enough and often enough, can outrun the consequences. That theory is about to get tested again.
References
- CNBC — Trump says Iran deal reopening Strait of Hormuz 'largely negotiated' (May 2026): https://www.cnbc.com
- Al Jazeera — US says Iran deal agreed as Tehran accuses Washington of obstruction (May 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com
- NPR — Trump: Deal with Iran is 'largely negotiated' (May 2026): https://www.npr.org
- Axios — What's inside the Iran deal Trump is close to signing (May 2026): https://www.axios.com
- PBS NewsHour — Trump says deal with Iran, including the Strait of Hormuz, is 'largely negotiated' (May 2026): https://www.pbs.org
- News on Air — Trump gives 48-hour ultimatum to Iran to open Strait of Hormuz (April 2026): https://www.newsonair.gov.in
- TIME — Musk calls Trump's bill 'disgusting abomination' (June 2025): https://time.com
- NBC News — Elon Musk calls Trump's Beautiful Bill a disgusting abomination (June 2025): https://www.nbcnews.com
- Yahoo News — Musk says Trump tariffs will cause a recession (June 2025): https://www.yahoo.com
- Wikipedia — Trump-Musk feud (2025): https://en.wikipedia.org
- Fox Business — Trump and Musk clash over 'big beautiful' bill (June 2025): https://www.foxbusiness.com