Trump-Ayatollah Inc.
Plus: Ohio's THC seltzer ban, Bernie Sanders' silly chat with Claude, and more...
Who will control the Strait of Hormuz if President Donald Trump's negotiations with Iran pan out? "It'll be jointly controlled," the president told CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins on Monday.
Collins followed up by asking who would jointly control the strait.
"Maybe me?" Trump responded. "Maybe me. Me and the ayatollah, whoever the ayatollah is."
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A joint U.S.-Iranian venture to control a vital Persian Gulf waterway doesn't feel particularly sustainable. Then again, it's unclear if any of Trump's Iranian plans are grounded in reality.
After threatening Saturday night to soon bomb all of Iran's power plants, Trump (thankfully) pulled back Monday, saying he was having "good and productive" conversations with Iranians.
There's "no dialogue" happening, Iran's foreign ministry responded.
(But, hey, the stock market started bouncing back in the space between these two comments, so…there's that.)
2/ No negotiations have been held with the US, and fakenews is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped.
— محمدباقر قالیباف | MB Ghalibaf (@mb_ghalibaf) March 23, 2026
Postmodern goalposts. The administration's aim in Iran appears to have shifted from total regime change and permanent destruction of Iran's nuclear capabilities to the much more modest goal of "undoing some of the damage we've already done."
"Reopening the strait — a critical conduit for global energy supplies — has emerged as perhaps the paramount objective of a war that security officials now believe is unlikely to achieve goals that briefly seemed possible at the outset," The Washington Post reported on Sunday.
The goal of the war is now to open a waterway that was totally open before we started the war.
It's farcical, but deeply unfunny. We've got "4,500 U.S. sailors and Marines" now "heading to the Middle East, including an infantry battalion landing team backed by helicopters, F-35 fighter jets and armored landing vehicles," per the Post's reporting.
We don't know how many Iranian civilians have been killed so far in U.S. and Israeli airstrikes.
And the Trump administration appears to be learning the hard way a lesson that apparently every new Republican administration must find out for itself: Regime change in the Middle East won't come easily.
True, the U.S. quickly killed Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and some of his closest associates at the start of this senseless adventure. But "Israeli officials said that surviving clerics and leaders of Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have consolidated their grip on the country," according to the Post.
Meanwhile, other parts of the world are growing impatient with our war. "We think that it is time to go to the negotiation table and to end the hostilities," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said yesterday. "The situation is critical for the energy supplies worldwide. We all feel the knock-on effects on gas and oil prices, our businesses and our societies."
Scenes from Cincinnati: Ohio just banned intoxicating hemp products and THC- or CBD-infused beverages, a move that ensnared the immensely popular THC seltzers that craft brewers in the state had begun selling after Ohioans legalized recreational marijuana sales. For a glorious bit of time, you could buy these beverages at breweries and bottle shops alongside beer and wine and other alcoholic beverages. Enter Ohio Republicans and—no more!
"Ohio lawmakers had a THC-infused beverage provision in the bill that would have allowed five milligram THC beverages until the end of December [2026], but Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine line-item vetoed that provision when he signed the bill into law in December," notes the Ohio Capital Journal.
Cincinnati breweries Urban Artifact and Fifty West Brewing Company challenged this line-item veto in court, seeking an emergency injunction. The Ohio Supreme Court rejected it.
Fifty West founder Bobby Slattery sent CityBeat a video of him driving the company's popular THC-infused Sunflower seltzer across state lines to Kentucky, where THC seltzers are still legal. Sunflower "was the fastest growing thing we've seen since probably opening Fifty West," Slattery says in the video.
QUICK HITS
• At least 11,000 children who are U.S. citizens had their parents arrested and detained by immigration officials during the first seven months of Trump's second term, per a new ProPublica analysis. "Trump is deporting about four times as many moms of U.S. citizen children per day as Biden did."
• Techdirt dissects Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I–Vt.) monumentally silly interview with the AI chatbot Claude. "The whole video is framed as 'even the AI agrees this is a crisis,'" notes Mike Masnick. "But what it actually shows is that the AI will agree with whatever framing you give it — and if it doesn't agree enthusiastically enough, you just push harder and it caves. Rather than some sort of revelation about AI policy, it's a freaking reminder not to treat AI chatbot outputs as evidence of anything." (Emphasis his.)
• "Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating," Trump said yesterday. He also voted by mail this week.
• No big deal, just a U.S. congressman posting "this is a battle of good vs evil" above an image of him and his colleagues in Crusades armor.
