“Bomb the Shit Out of Them”: Trump’s Threat to an Ally and the Unraveling of a War He No Longer Controls
The president threatened a longtime U.S. partner from a Fox News phone interview. Congress is drafting war-powers resolutions. Iran is setting its own timetable. And on the day before it all detonated, Donald Trump was on a golf course in New Jersey.
The words came, as so much of American foreign policy now does, over a telephone line to a friendly host. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” President Donald Trump told Fox News’ Trey Yingst on Monday, according to Yingst’s on-air recounting for NBC News. The target of the threat was not an adversary. Oman is a longtime American strategic partner, a country with which the United States shares a free trade agreement, and the very state that has been trying — with Qatari mediation — to broker a workable arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz. In one sentence, delivered from what the White House would not confirm, denied, or explain, the president of the United States threatened to bomb a friend for the crime of doing diplomacy.
Later, when reporters in the Oval Office asked him to walk it back, Trump did not. “I don’t think they behaved very well,” he said of the Omanis, “but we’d handle them very easily, just like we do other things.” The threat had been made in earnest.
This is where the second Trump administration’s Iran war stands on the six-month mark: with the 60-day U.S.–Iran memorandum of understanding expired without an agreement, with maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz reduced to a trickle of three ships on a Sunday, with American gasoline averaging near four dollars a gallon, and with a president who threatens allies from a Fox News call while his own Congress prepares to constrain him by force of law. The war he sold as a matter of weeks has become a war he now says he is “in no rush” to end. That is not a strategy. It is an admission.
I. A Threat Against an Ally, Delivered by Phone
The mechanics of the moment matter. Trump made the threat during a phone interview with Yingst; no audio was released. The White House initially declined to comment. The threat surfaced not through a policy channel but through a broadcaster’s paraphrase. This is, in miniature, the entire shape of American Middle East policy in August 2026: strategic communications outsourced to Fox News, ally management conducted by ultimatum, and no discernible daylight between the president’s temper and the country’s war posture.
This is also, as Al Jazeera has now documented, the second time Trump has threatened Oman over the Strait. In May, during a cabinet meeting, he told ABC News’ Rachel Scott he would take military action against the sultanate “if necessary.” The Sultanate has done nothing to the United States. Its offense is that it has been talking to Tehran — which is, in fact, the entire purpose of a mediator. Punishing a friend for mediating a war one cannot end is not statecraft; it is the behavior of a man who has confused the presidency with a hostage negotiation in which he is the one taking hostages.
“President Trump is increasingly deranged in his one-man campaign to threaten and initiate wars all over the globe… His threat to waste even more of our dwindling weapons on Oman — a country the United States has a strong diplomatic relationship and a free trade agreement with — makes real adversaries like China and Russia rub their hands with glee.”
— Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Aug. 17, 2026 statement
Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who has led every serious congressional effort to check this war, announced Monday that he will file a War Powers Resolution prohibiting military action against Oman when the Senate returns from recess in mid-September. He wants Republican co-sponsors. He may or may not get them. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, told Axios the pattern has become so relentless that Congress “may just need to file war powers resolutions for the 192 other countries.” It reads as a joke. It is not a joke. It is a bleak, exact description of the constitutional situation.
II. Oman’s Silence, Iran’s Answer, and a New Kind of Ultimatum
Oman, characteristically, has not dignified the outburst with a public rebuke. That is how the sultanate has always operated: quietly, through channels, without theatrics. But its diplomatic answer is unmistakable, because it did not stop what it was doing. On Monday, hours before Trump’s threat aired, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei confirmed to reporters in Tehran that “an understanding has been reached regarding the map of the transit route” through the Strait — a joint Iran-Oman declaration was being drafted, as CBS News reported. The threat did not stop the negotiation. Oman is proceeding. That silence is a policy.
Iran’s response was louder and, in its own way, more telling. Rather than accept Trump’s demand that Tehran “put up the white flag of surrender” — a phrase the president used in the same Fox interview, per Al Jazeera — Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf laid out Tehran’s own conditions for reopening the Strait: an end to the U.S. naval blockade, release of frozen assets, lifting of oil sanctions, and a halt to American military operations. And via Reuters-sourced reporting, Iran conveyed a fresh ultimatum through Pakistan and Qatar: return to serious diplomacy and lift the blockade, or face an expansion of the war within “several weeks at most.”
The frame has flipped. It was Trump who spent March and April issuing 48-hour countdowns and Easter-morning threats to “civilization.” It is now Iran that is setting the war’s tempo. In an interview with Fox News on the same day, Trump was reduced to telling the network that he was “in no rush” and that the Iranians were “good poker players, but they’re dying.” A man in control of a war does not need to insist he is in no rush to end it. A man in control of a war does not accept his opponent’s ultimatum framework by responding to it.
III. The Timeline of a Losing Hand
IV. What This Costs You at the Pump and at the Grocery
There is a temptation, in a story dominated by presidential tantrums and grand-strategic sludge, to lose sight of the ledger. The ledger is where the ordinary American lives. And the ledger is where this war has become a slow-motion mugging.
Since the war began in late February, U.S. gasoline prices have risen more than 30 percent, per NBC News’ tracking, and now hover near a $4-a-gallon national average. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which has kept a rolling tally of household fuel costs attributable to the war, reports that the average American household had absorbed an additional $527 in fuel costs by August 4 and is on track to hit $650 by the end of summer. Cumulatively, Americans have paid the oil industry more than $70.4 billion in war-driven premiums.
National average gasoline prices are up more than 30% since the war began in late February, nearing $4/gallon. NBC News · Aug 2026
Additional fuel costs the average U.S. household had paid by early August due to the war; forecast to reach $650 by end of summer. ITEP · Aug 2026
Total additional payments by Americans to oil companies since war-driven price spikes began, per ITEP’s running tally. ITEP
Consumer prices in July, up from 2.4% pre-war, as gasoline shocks bleed into food, freight, and everyday goods. AP · Aug 12, 2026
Only three vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday Aug 16 — down from a pre-war daily average of ~110 ships. CNN · MarineTraffic
Estimated additional U.S. headline inflation in 2026 from the Iran war under a cautiously optimistic scenario, per Dallas Fed research. CEPR / Dallas Fed
And that is only the direct pump cost. As the PBS NewsHour reported, inflation had been cooling since its 2022 peak; the war reversed that. The Federal Reserve has held off the rate cuts it had planned. Fertilizer prices have moved with natural-gas benchmarks, feeding into food costs at every level of the American supply chain. Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, put it plainly to PBS: “For the first time in three years, inflation is eating up all wage gains.”
These are not abstractions. They are the reason a working parent in Ohio pays $80 to fill a tank that cost $58 last Christmas. They are the reason a restaurant in Phoenix has raised prices twice this year. They are the reason a retiree on a fixed income in Michigan is buying less produce. Every threat the president tweets, every phone-in tirade to Fox News, every ratcheted-up ultimatum against Tehran and now against Muscat, ripples through the futures markets before it ever ripples through the Pentagon — and the futures markets are where your grocery bill is written.
This is also, notably, a president who is now openly manipulating those markets by threat. A president who says he is in “no rush” to end a war he sold as decisive is telling energy traders exactly what to price in. The people who lose in that game are not sovereign wealth funds. They are American families.
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V. Bedminster on the Eve of the Deadline
On Sunday, August 16 — with the U.S.–Iran memorandum set to expire in 24 hours, with the Strait of Hormuz down to a handful of transiting ships, with Iranian and Omani diplomats finalizing a joint declaration Washington had spent months trying to prevent — the president of the United States was at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It was, by public tallies, his 128th confirmed golf outing since his second inauguration, roughly one round for every four and a half days in office. He has spent, by conservative estimates built from GAO benchmarks, tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on the security footprint of these trips.
There is nothing new about presidents taking weekends. There is nothing new about presidents playing golf. What is new — what should be shocking, and what has instead been normalized — is the pattern: the country is at war, the war is bleeding the household budget of every voter, an ally is about to be threatened by phone from Fox News, and the commander-in-chief is teeing off. He campaigned on lowering gas prices to $2 a gallon. He instead delivered a war that pushed them to $4. And he is playing through it.
“To force Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz WHICH WAS OPEN BEFORE TRUMP STARTED BOMBING IRAN??? This is pure insanity. It won’t work. It will just permanently stain America. GOP leaders should call Congress back into session this week to end this war.”
— Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), April 2026
VI. What America Looks Like from Outside
Consider how this reads from a foreign capital. The president of the United States threatens a longtime partner — one with a free trade agreement, one whose good offices Washington has relied on for decades — because that partner is doing the diplomatic work of ending a war that Washington cannot end. He does it not through a démarche, not through a formal channel, not even through his own State Department, but by phone to a cable network. His own senators call him “deranged” and “power-drunk.” His congressman from California quips that Congress may need to pass war powers resolutions for every other country on Earth. His trading partners in Asia read the Fox News writeup and reset their currency hedges.
In the meantime, as Al Jazeera notes, China and Russia are watching this with a patience that will be repaid. Every alliance frayed by an unhinged phone call is a marginal victory for the powers that want the American security architecture to look expendable. Sen. Kaine put it as plainly as a serving senator can: this behavior “makes real adversaries like China and Russia rub their hands with glee.” He is not exaggerating. He is describing the ledger.
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment Was Written For a President Who Cannot Perform the Office. It Is Time to Say So Plainly.
Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment provides that if the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — or the Vice President together with a body Congress establishes for the purpose — declare in writing that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office, the Vice President immediately assumes those powers as Acting President. If the President contests it, Congress decides by two-thirds vote of each chamber. It is the constitutional mechanism for the situation that no one wanted to imagine but that the Framers, in their wisdom, imagined anyway.
Calls to invoke it are not new to this presidency, and they are not fringe. In April, after Trump posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight” over the Strait of Hormuz, Rep. Ro Khanna said that “every member of Congress and senator must be calling for Trump’s removal today, based on the 25th Amendment.” Sen. Chris Murphy called the posts “the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual.” Sen. Bernie Sanders concurred. Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey said flatly, “I certainly think the president should be removed… he’s unfit for office. I think, the 25th Amendment, and if not, then impeachment.” Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan wrote directly to all sixteen members of the Trump Cabinet urging invocation. Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of Judiciary, formally wrote to the President’s physician demanding accountability for the assessment of Trump’s cognitive fitness.
The Constitutional Argument
The threat delivered Monday to Oman is not one gaffe among many. It is a coherent pattern: a president who threatens allies by phone; who negotiates by ultimatum then walks away from his own deadlines; who commits the country to a war he now says he is “in no rush” to end; who golfs on the eve of the expiration of a peace framework he personally signed; who publicly manipulates energy markets against his own citizens’ interests. Whatever else this is, it is not the coherent exercise of executive power. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment does not require a coma. It requires an inability to discharge the office. The record supports that conclusion on its face.
The Honest Barrier
The honest barrier is political, not constitutional. Section 4 requires Vice President JD Vance and a majority of a Cabinet Trump himself hand-picked to declare him unfit. They will not. Congressional Republicans, who hold the House majority and could establish the “other body” the amendment contemplates, will not either. This is the practical wall every serious 25th Amendment conversation has hit for the past decade.
Why the Barrier Does Not Retire the Case
But the practical wall does not extinguish the moral and constitutional argument — it clarifies it. The point of naming a 25th Amendment case is not merely to force a vote no one intends to take. It is to place the record where history and the voters can see it clearly: a president who threatens allies from a Fox News phone call is a president whose Cabinet has an affirmative constitutional duty to consider its options and has chosen not to. When that Cabinet, and the party that shields it, faces the voters in November — and again in 2028 — they will do so with that abdication on the record. That is not a small thing. It is the mechanism by which democracies remember. And it is, at the moment, all we have.
Editorial Conclusion
A president who threatens to bomb a longtime American ally by phone, over the objections of his own senators, on the day his own peace framework expired, after golfing through the weekend that preceded it, is not conducting foreign policy. He is disintegrating in public, with the country’s economy and standing tethered to the disintegration.
Iran is now setting the timetable of this war. Oman is now setting the terms of the Strait. Congress is now considering — again — whether the constitutional order can be preserved through statute alone. And the American household is paying, at the pump and at the grocery, for a war the president promised would end quickly, then said he was “in no rush” to end at all.
The stakes are no longer partisan. They are constitutional. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment exists for the situation in which the person holding the office can no longer discharge it. That case is now on the public record. The Cabinet’s refusal to consider it is itself a decision. Every senator who is silent now is a senator who chose silence with the record in front of them. That will be remembered.
Sources & References
- NBC News — Trump threatens to bomb Oman if it ‘gets in the way’ of Strait of Hormuz talks with Iran
- Washington Post — Trump threatens to bomb Oman if it ‘gets in the way’
- Al Jazeera — Trump calls on Iran to surrender, threatens Oman over Strait of Hormuz
- Al Jazeera — Why has Trump threatened to bomb Oman – for a second time?
- CNN Live — August 17, 2026 — Deadline to reach US-Iran deal expires, Trump threatens Oman
- CBS News — Trump won’t extend Iran ceasefire, threatens to ‘bomb’ Oman if it ‘gets in the way’
- Axios — Congressional Democrats plan Oman war powers push after Trump threatens bombing
- Sen. Tim Kaine — Kaine Will Challenge Trump’s Deranged Threat to “Bomb the Shit” Out of Oman
- Middle East Eye — US lawmakers call to remove Trump after ‘civilization will die’ threat against Iran
- Rep. Shri Thanedar — Congressman Thanedar Calls on Cabinet to Remove Trump from Office
- House Judiciary Democrats — Raskin letter to the President’s physician regarding 25th Amendment
- TIME — What to Know About the 25th Amendment as Lawmakers Call for Trump’s Removal
- NBC News (Data) — Tracking U.S. gas prices during the Iran war
- PBS NewsHour — Iran war hits home as gasoline prices fuel significant U.S. inflation jump
- ITEP — Iran War Fuel Costs Tracker
- CBS News — In 8 weeks, the Iran war has dented the U.S. economy
- CEPR / Dallas Fed — Quantifying the impact of the Iran war on US inflation
- Trump Golf Tracker — Confirmed golf outings, second term — 128 days as of Aug 16, 2026
- AP via Washington Times — Inflation cooled last month as gas prices fell, though costs remain elevated
- Fox News — Iran fails to strike deal with US as deadline passes and Trump calls for ‘white flag of surrender’
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