'Desperate' Trump caught in a 'geopolitical trap' of his own creation

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 9, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

President Donald Trump is growing increasingly desperate, one international relations expert cautioned, and it's only growing worse as he remains stuck in a "geopolitical trap."

Speaking to Greg Sargent at The New Republic, author and University of Illinois Professor Nicholas Grossman explained that the world is inching closer to "a very serious crisis" in the oil markets "because of reserves running down and the ships not leaving the [Strait of Hormuz] in time to replenish that.”

Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to claim that the strait is open and that there are no tolls. In an all-caps Truth Social post, he promised that all was well and that Iran made it clear to the U.S. that everything was open. Last week, when Trump claimed that there is a "deal" and that negotiations are yielding positive results, Iran responded with its own message to the contrary.

"The Strait of Hormuz is ‘open’ — but it’s mined, half-empty, and subject to tolls both sides say they might charge," an Associated Press report in Fortune said on Monday. After Trump's comments on Truth Social, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the first time in decades, Iran is selling oil using the U.S. dollar.

Grossman explained that Trump's challenge is that the things he says don't match "the facts on the ground."

"And this is the type of big-scale supply-demand, hard physical reality that he can bulls—— his way through for some time, kind of delay for a time, but cannot totally manage to hoodwink people when there are ongoing economic problems, when costs are rising, when we saw recently inflation numbers, in large part due to the war, getting back to levels that we haven’t seen in a few years," Grossman said.

These are the kinds of things that people notice, he told Sargent.

"And he really seems desperate about it — where usually he’s able to either bully people into saying that it’s going well, or turn it into a domestic political he-said-she-said back and forth, or just somehow bulls—— his way through it, change the subject. And this one is just stubbornly not doing it because the reality of it is too big," he said.

Congress is working toward funding the war as well as Trump's other demands, but continuing to sell the Iran war to the public is another matter.

"That’s not going to work at all. People can see the economic effects, and those are likely to get worse rather than better as the effects really reverberate out. And they never supported the war in the first place," Grossman also said.

Sargent said Trump has created a kind of "triple wammy" with the cost of the war, his request for even more money and his approval. The host began the show by citing a devastating segment in which a Fox News anchor pointed to a new poll showing that Trump has a lower approval rating than former President Joe Biden ever did at any point in his presidency.

The pandemic caused a global economic crisis, but Americans appeared to understand why the economy was in rough shape. That isn't the case during the second Trump term, where voters link economic issues to Trump's tariffs and the Iran war, polls show. It's all a trap of his own making, the men discussed.

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