News Vérité

Sounding a lot like his boss, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Fox this morning that the Strait of Hormuz is open. He evidently must have forgotten about the attacks by Iran on shipping in the Strait this week, or that we have been firing back to stop the attacks. He also said gasoline prices will be coming down in a day, or two, or a week, which seems a bit optimistic. All this echoes what President Trump has been saying when asked about oil prices and when the Strait of Hormuz will be open to traffic, which he counters by saying it is now open. This is the same Treasury Secretary who just presided over a G20 finance minister summit that proved chaotic. That didn’t stop him from declaring at its conclusion that all 20 ministers, minus China’s, agree with the U.S. approach to trade and tariffs. That’s worth a good guffaw. His comment about the Strait being open follows his prediction at the summit that the passageway will soon be obsolete: “In two years, the Strait of Hormuz will be a worthless piece of water. The oil will be going on pipelines across the land.”  By that time,

President Trump’s takeover of Venezuela was more than just an effort to bring a “bad man” to justice; it also contained huge economic stakes — in the name of oil. Under a plan announced Friday by Trump, the Pentagon would become the investor and controller of 17 Venezuelan oil fields containing 65 billion barrels of crude oil. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth negotiated the deal with interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez by creating a private business partnership at no cost to U.S. taxpayers, the president announced. Venezuela is granting the U.S. a 100-year concession to the oil fields. Rodríguez’s government said the agreement could draw about $100 billion in private investment while generating more than $209 billion in tax revenue for Venezuela. The private company envisioned in the deal will be led by controversial Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump no doubt had his eyes on Iranian oil when he joined Israel in a war on the Islamic Republic, initially announced as a battle for regime change, but which now has come down to reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait was open before the war but has become Iran’s

Donald Trump has never sounded like a professor, and that, according to the linguists and political scientists who have spent years dissecting his speech, is precisely the point. When he takes questions from reporters or dictates a post to his social media accounts, his language rarely resembles the polished, subordinate-clause-heavy rhetoric of a typical American politician. Instead, researchers who study his speech patterns describe something closer to the sentence structure of a fourth-to-sixth-grade reader: short, blunt, and repetitive. And yet this same style has proven remarkably durable, carrying his message to rally crowds, cable news audiences, and tens of millions of social media followers alike. The paradox is worth taking seriously. Simplicity of syntax is not the same thing as simplicity of thought, and readability scores are a measure of sentence construction, not intelligence — a distinction linguists are careful to draw. Grade-level estimates for Trump’s speech also vary depending on the sample analyzed and the method used, and no single number should be treated as a settled fact. What is less disputed is that his communication follows recognizable, repeatable patterns — patterns that reward closer analysis precisely because they work.