SOH: President Trump Flips the Script – Again!

The chattering class has once again been shocked by President Trump’s out-of-the box actions. For years, we’ve been led to believe in the oft-repeated international consensus among “experts” that Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz and has a stranglehold on the world’s hydrocarbon-powered economy.

In one fell swoop during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on her Sunday Morning Futures show, the president flipped script in declaring that the U.S. was going to blockade Iranian oil exports through the SOH (implying that the US would be replacing Iran as the presumptive gatekeeper). The blockade aims to counter Iran’s control over the strait and its reported tolls on commercial vessels, with the president vowing to interdict any ship that pays Iran and to destroy mines laid by Iranian forces.

This is hardly the first time that President Trump has flipped the script on a prickly issue and confounded his critics. In fact, flipping the script is an oft-repeated action that goes to the core philosophy of his America First agenda – a reevaluation of every conventional assumption that has guided and shaped U.S. foreign and domestic policies and the international order (frequently at the direct expense of the U.S. and its citizens/taxpayers).

Let’s take a look at ten of those “script flips” that are resetting policies in favor of those that actually benefit the United States of America, starting with the Strait of Hormuz blockade.

1. The Strait of Hormuz — America becomes the blockader

For generations, Iran’s greatest threat was closing the Strait. The Western posture was purely defensive: deter Iran, keep shipping lanes open, beg Tehran not to act. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps imposed a de facto “toll booth” regime in the Strait of Hormuz, requiring vessels to submit documentation, obtain clearance codes, and accept escorted passage.

President Trump inverted the entire dynamic. His announcement of a U.S. blockade of the strait scuttles hopes that the war would end in the coming days in a manner that would preserve the current Iranian regime. Without access to Iranian oil, Asian refiners have redirected demand toward U.S. Gulf Coast barrels to fill the shortfall from the Middle East. The surge not only caps price spikes but also cements American producers as the flexible swing supplier to Asia. And the Iranian regime cannot survive because they cannot sustain years of oil revenue denial while Gulf rivals reroute around it or seek other sources.

America wins bigly, according to X influencer Avi Avidan: “The United States stands as the unambiguous winner across all horizons. Export revenues boom in the first year as shale producers respond to sustained high prices. Over five and ten years, America solidifies its role as the reliable Atlantic basin supplier to Asian demand. Strategic leverage deepens without proportional domestic pain.” That’s flipping the script in America’s favor!

From an America First view: Iran’s most feared card has been taken off the table — not by defending against its closure, but by the U.S. seizing control of the waterway itself.

2. Greenland — threatening an ally to reshape NATO’s Arctic posture

The conventional wisdom since 1949 was that NATO allies’ sovereignty was untouchable. After nearly a week in which analysts and policymakers, for the first time since NATO’s founding, were seriously weighing the possibility that the United States might destroy the alliance by aggressively pursuing Greenland, President Trump had created leverage.

Rather than simply requesting more Arctic basing rights (which Denmark had always offered), President Trump’s threat of annexation forced a negotiation that produced a future deal to include “increased military presence in Greenland from Denmark and other NATO allies and increased access and basing for the United States.” And NATO’s weak to nonexistent support during Operation Epic Thunder provides the president with additional leverage in Greenland.

From an America First view: maximum Arctic strategic position, secured through leverage rather than diplomacy.

3. Reciprocal tariffs — ending 80 years of free-trade orthodoxy

Post-WWII America built a global order around ever-freer trade, accepting trade deficits as the “cost” of global leadership. President Trump declared this an emergency. On April 2, 2025 — “Liberation Day” — he declared a national emergency to address what he described as a “large and persistent US trade deficit” and invoked IEEPA to impose a 10% minimum reciprocal tariff on nearly all other countries, with higher rates for 57 countries. The result was dozens of nations rushing to negotiate bilateral deals.

From an America First view: for the first time in generations, trading partners are competing for American market access rather than the reverse.

4. Ukraine minerals deal — replacing charity with commerce

The bipartisan tradition was that America supports allies under attack as a moral and strategic obligation, with no expectation of repayment. Trump destroyed that premise. President Trump explicitly stated that the balance sheet was a higher priority for him than the previous long-standing U.S. policy of supporting Ukraine’s efforts to resist Russian domination.

The signed agreement reflects the Trump administration’s transactional approach to mineral diplomacy and may serve as a template for similar deals, such as the emerging U.S.–Democratic Republic of the Congo cooperation framework.

From an America First view: foreign assistance now builds American strategic mineral independence rather than simply draining the treasury.

5. DOGE — treating government as a failing startup

Every previous reform effort — Grace Commission, Reinventing Government, sequestration — produced marginal results against the entrenched bureaucracy. President Trump brought in Silicon Valley to tackle the problem. In the first 10 months after he took office, DOGE reduced federal employment by about 271,000 jobs — about 9% of all federal workers — described as “the biggest in peacetime, ever decline in federal workers over a 10-month period.” USAID was effectively dismantled as a standalone agency.

From an America First view: the administrative state’s growth was interrupted at a scale no prior administration had approached (or even considered).

6. DEI reversal — flipping civil rights enforcement against DEI itself

For over six decades, the federal government enforced DEI as an extension of civil rights law. President Trump inverted this entirely: his executive order dismantled DEI policies across federal agencies, citing them as “illegal and immoral” practices that prioritize identity over merit, requiring the Office of Management and Budget to immediately suspend DEI officers and mandating that federal employment evaluations exclude DEI-related goals. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division — which once enforced racial preferences — was redirected against them.

From an America First view: merit-based standards were restored in federal employment and the legal foundation for private-sector DEI was significantly undercut (follow-through is needed to defeat the bureaucratic resistance).

7. Monroe Doctrine revival — the hemisphere as an American sphere

Post-WWII America renounced spheres of influence and embraced multilateralism. President Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy openly reversed this. The 2025 NSS marks a stunning departure from previous such strategies, launching a massive reversal of U.S. foreign policy of eighty years.

Combined with the capture of Maduro in Venezuela, pressure on Panama over canal fees, the Greenland gambit, and tariff threats against Canada, the president made Western Hemisphere dominance — explicitly invoking the 1823 Monroe Doctrine — the cornerstone of U.S. grand strategy.

From an America First view: China and Russia face renewed U.S. pushback in America’s own backyard, reasserting a regional primacy that had quietly eroded for decades starting when Jimmy Carter gave away the Panama Canal.

8. Gaza “Riviera” — solving the unsolvable with a developer’s mindset

The two-state solution had been the unbroken consensus of U.S. foreign policy for six decades — through Republican and Democratic administrations alike, including President Trump’s own first term. In this term, he did not insist on a two-state outcome for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, breaking with a policy sustained by successive Republican and Democratic administrations.

Instead, the president proposed the U.S. “take over” and “own” Gaza after relocating its residents, turning it into what he called the “Riviera of the Middle East,” with the U.S. “slowly and carefully beginning construction of what would become one of the greatest development projects anywhere in the world.” The shock broke the diplomatic paralysis: Arab nations scrambled to propose their own $53 billion reconstruction counter-plan, and all parties were forced off decades-old entrenched positions.

From an America First view, the gambit also destroyed Hamas’s political utility — a governing authority with no territory to govern loses its entire strategic identity.

9. NATO spending — making America’s departure credible enough to matter

Decades of U.S. presidents had pleaded with NATO allies to hit the 2% GDP defense spending target. By 2024, most still hadn’t. The polite approach produced polite non-compliance. President Trump made the threat of American abandonment credible — conditioning Article 5 protection on results, combining it with the Greenland crisis to demonstrate willingness to act against allies.

The effect was seismic. At the 2025 Hague Summit, NATO allies agreed to a new 5% of GDP spending commitment — a “quantum leap” in collective security — with NATO Secretary General Rutte crediting President Trump directly for the outcome. For context, in 2025 all allies met or exceeded the pre-summit target of investing at least 2% of GDP in defense, compared to only three allies in 2014.

From an America First view, the U.S. is now getting genuinely shared defense burden — something 75 years of reassurance diplomacy never achieved. And NATO’s failure to provide requested capabilities during Operation Epic Fury undermines future U.S. support for NATO – possibly catastrophically for the organization!

10. FCPA pause — turning “clean hands” law into a competitive liability

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act had been treated as untouchable moral bedrock since 1977 — America’s global anti-bribery standard. President Trump reframed it entirely as a self-inflicted wound. The White House argued that “overexpansive and unpredictable FCPA enforcement against American citizens and businesses” arising from “routine business practices in other nations” both “wastes prosecutorial resources” and “actively harms American competitiveness and, therefore, national security.” The president said “many, many deals are unable to be made because nobody wants to do business, because they don’t want to feel like every time they pick up the phone, they’re going to jail.”

New guidelines refocused enforcement on cartels, transnational criminal organizations, and national security threats — effectively giving American companies operating in competitive emerging markets a freer hand that their foreign rivals had always enjoyed.

From an America First view, U.S. firms can now compete on the same terms as Chinese, European, and Gulf-state companies that face no comparable domestic restrictions. Leveling the playing field is a big deal for President Trump (and us Americans)!

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The common thread across all ten of these major policy inflections: President Trump identified situations where America was playing defense, recast the U.S. as the aggressor or the dealmaker on its own terms, and used leverage — economic, military, or simply rhetorical — that predecessors had been unwilling to deploy. He is a problem-solver, and this is why the political class vehemently opposes him at every turn. He exposes their fecklessness, incompetence, and corruption by showing what an outsider can accomplish for the Republic in short order.

Just because “it always used to be” doesn’t mean that “it always will be.” President Trump is showing the way to reset obsolete policies to America’s advantage.

Lastly, a side benefit from the president’s script-flipping is that his opposition has been frequently caught flat-footed with their motivations for reflexive resistance to virtually any of his policies exposed (often for ridicule). We will examine that resistance in detail in a future post.

The end.