Trump Imposes 20% Hormuz Strait Toll as Senate Stalls War Funding

On Monday, Donald Trump announced that the United States would henceforth be known as "THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT" and would, "as a matter of FAIRNESS," be reimbursed "at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped" through it. Iranian vessels would not pass at all: the naval blockade suspended under last month's memorandum of understanding was back on. In a single post, the president had put a fee on roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and gas — a charge on foreign trade that no Congress voted, that maritime law does not recognise, and that no American agency has any obvious way to collect.

The toll is the tell of Trump's week. Everything he could do on his own signature, he did, and did fast: reimpose the blockade, order a third round of strikes inside Iran, fire the last three members of the federal elections commission, and tie a fifth of the states' counterterrorism money to voter-citizenship checks. The one thing he cannot do alone — pay for the war he has just restarted — now sits in a Senate that chose this week to stop working.

Begin with the fee, because almost nobody outside the White House believes in it. The International Maritime Organization said its position was unchanged: it "stands firmly against charging fees for passage through straits used for international navigation." Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign-policy chief, said freedom of navigation had to be respected. The sharpest objection came from David Goldwyn, a former US energy diplomat who now runs Goldwyn Global Strategies. Twenty percent, he said, is "quite an extortionate level," and in any case "it's unclear that the US can deliver safe passage in the first place. If the US was able to safely escort ships and guarantee no threat from Iran, we would have seen that happen in the past few weeks." His verdict — "this is really just bluster" — is almost certainly right on the mechanics. A guardian who cannot guarantee passage cannot bill for it. Shippers pay insurers, not proclamations, and the insurers can see the same water everyone else can.

But bluster aimed at whom? Not at Tehran, which is running a toll booth of its own on the same channel: Iran declared the strait closed after hitting a Cyprus-flagged container ship, and CENTCOM spent the weekend denying Iranian claims that three American service members and a HIMARS battery had been destroyed in Kuwait. Both governments now claim the right to charge the world for a waterway neither controls.

And whatever the president says he is doing, he is simultaneously doing the opposite. On Friday he posted that "1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of more to immediately follow," should Tehran act on a plot to assassinate him — a plot the Wall Street Journal reported Israel had warned him about, and which he then told the New York Post did not exist, saying there was no new Iranian plan, only a long-standing wish. The same day he wrote that Iran "has asked us to continue 'talks.' We have agreed to do so, but the United States has stated to them, in no uncertain terms, that the Cease Fire is OVER!" Qatari mediators were in Tehran that afternoon; another round is expected within days, probably back in Switzerland, where the memorandum was signed in the first place. A man threatening a thousand missiles and taxing the sea while keeping the negotiating channel warm is not executing a strategy. He is bidding.

Which is why the fee makes far more sense read as a message to Washington than to Iran: a war that pays for itself, costs the Treasury nothing, and asks Congress for nothing. That is a fantasy, and it is being sold precisely because the real bill is so unwelcome.

The real bill arrived as an $87.6 billion supplemental, $67 billion of it for the Pentagon: $21 billion to refill munitions stocks the campaign has drained, $17.3 billion for operations, $12.1 billion for classified programmes — with $11.1 billion of farm aid, $1.4 billion for Ebola in Central Africa and $500 million for building work in Washington bolted onto the side, riders that have already drawn objections from both parties. Operation Epic Fury has run to somewhere between $34 billion and $42 billion so far, enough that the Pentagon's own artificial-intelligence directives are going unfunded, because the operations-and-maintenance dollars that would buy the software are being spent on the war instead.

And the war is being fought at the ragged edge of what the force can sustain. The USS Abraham Lincoln has now been at sea for 210 consecutive days, probably a record for a modern American carrier, with barely a port call. Poor B-52 availability — the fleet is being worked hard, and one has crashed — has delayed the AGM-181A nuclear cruise missile's initial capability by four months, the Government Accountability Office found. On 12 July, US Central Command sent three 24-foot Saronic Corsairs against a docked Ghadir-class midget submarine at Bandar Abbas: the first time American forces have used kamikaze sea drones in combat, and a glimpse of what a navy reaches for when its magazines are the thing it is short of. Iranian authorities say two nights of strikes on Bandar Abbas and Sirik killed at least 14 people and wounded 78, hitting water-storage sites and leaving more than 20,000 civilians short of water in temperatures above 45C; Khuzestan's deputy governor reported two more dead in Abadan. Brent settled near $76, up about 5% on the week, and the International Energy Agency warned the escalation would derail the recovery in global oil supply. Republican senators, who can read a gas-price chart as well as anyone, are not enjoying the summer.

They have a more immediate problem. On Saturday night Lindsey Graham died at 71 of an aortic dissection, hours after returning from his tenth visit to Ukraine. Graham was not merely a vote; he was the Senate's most reliable hawk and the bridge between Trump and the Republicans most likely to fund a war. Days before his death he had stood in Kyiv with Richard Blumenthal to announce that the White House would finally accept their Russia sanctions bill, which would let Trump tariff the countries still buying Putin's oil. He spent his last working days touring a SkyFall drone plant in Ukraine, inspecting Vampire bombers and Shahed interceptors, saying it would be a "huge mistake" for the United States not to build drones with the Ukrainians, and pressing for Kyiv to be licensed to manufacture its own Patriot interceptors — a right Washington has so far extended only to Japan, and which Trump has now pledged to grant. That bill has just lost its author.

Daniel Fried, who ran European affairs at the State Department, reads the Patriot offer as evidence of something larger: "the narrative of inevitable Russian victory over Ukraine has been proven false," he says, conclusively enough to have convinced this administration that Ukraine can defend itself. He is probably right about the conviction. But notice which half of the policy is moving. A manufacturing licence is something a president can grant by himself, in an afternoon, and Trump has. The sanctions bill — the half that requires Congress — is the half that just lost the only Republican with the standing to carry it.

Governor Henry McMaster will name a caretaker to hold the seat until January, and Trump has endorsed Graham's sister, Darline Graham Nordone, for the job. Filing for the special primary opens on 21 July; Ralph Norman has already asked Trump for an endorsement and been told to wait a week; Nancy Mace marked the senator's death by quoting The Godfather Part III on X. "Grotesque," said Mike Lawler, which it was.

Meanwhile Mitch McConnell has not voted since 11 June. He has been in hospital since the 14th, said on Sunday that he would not be back on the floor "quite yet," and chairs the defence appropriations subcommittee, which is therefore not marking up anything. Republicans hold 53 seats and cannot reliably assemble them; the Appropriations Committee has a one-seat margin; government funding runs out on 30 September, five weeks before the midterms. John Thune is now trying to move a war supplemental, a defence bill, a surveillance extension and a crypto bill through a chamber that is short two of its most senior members and terrified of a shutdown it would be blamed for. Some Republicans just want a continuing resolution to carry them past election day and hope nobody notices.

This is why the domestic half of the week looks the way it does. The SAVE America Act — photo ID to vote, documentary proof of citizenship to register — cannot get through this Senate, so the administration is pursuing it by other means. On Thursday Trump fired Thomas Hicks, Benjamin Hovland and Christy McCormick, the last three commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission, leaving the only federal agency devoted to running elections without a quorum four months before the midterms; the White House cited the Slaughter decision on presidential removal power, and neglected to mention that replacements require Senate confirmation it is unlikely to get. The day before, FEMA announced it would withhold 20% of the states' homeland-security grants — over $1 billion — unless they run every registered voter through the federal SAVE citizenship database within 120 days, conduct 5% manual audits and abandon barcode ballots. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended it as common sense. And on Saturday the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law at midnight without the president's signature: it had passed 85-5 and 358-32, margins that made a veto pointless, so Trump simply refused to touch it in protest at the Senate's failure on SAVE. Chuck Schumer noted that Trump had called the housing crisis "a big yawn." The most bipartisan bill of the year became law by the president declining to acknowledge it.

Congress made policy the same way on the other side of the world. On 9 July the fifteen-day window to block the sale of General Electric's F110 engines for Turkey's KAAN fighter quietly expired. Dina Titus and eight other Democrats had filed a resolution to stop it; neither chamber brought it to the floor. The engines will be sold because nobody voted.

The enforcement state, by contrast, has no procedural difficulties at all. ICE agents shot dead Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national, at a Houston traffic stop after mistaking him for a deportation target; there was no body-camera footage, and Mexico is taking legal action. Another person was killed in a shooting involving ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday morning. Fifteen Minneapolis protesters have been charged with conspiracy for organising blockades against Operation Metro Surge. Where the government needs only a decision, it acts; where it needs a vote, it stalls.

Which brings the week to its real question, and it is not whether Iran capitulates. Watch whether a single shipowner ever pays the 20%; if none does, the guardianship was always a press release. The negotiators, meanwhile, will be back at a table within days, and the bargain on offer is roughly the one Tehran has already floated: reopen the strait, lift the blockade. Taking it would concede that the guardian needs the tenant's permission, which is precisely why the toll and the thousand missiles had to be announced first. Above all, watch 30 September. A president who has spent a week learning that he can bomb, blockade, tax the world's shipping and dissolve an election agency without asking anyone will then be told that the money for all of it has to come from a Senate he cannot currently muster: 53 seats on paper, one of them empty, another in a hospital bed. That is the bill no proclamation covers, and it falls due five weeks before America votes.