Tony Schwartz has spent years reminding the world that he wrote much of The Art of the Deal—terrible form for a ghostwriter, but forgivable only because the book itself contains nothing especially monumental. The real art, it turns out, is not in the writing but in the announcing. And on that front, Donald Trump has displayed a talent that even his critics, and there are many, have had to acknowledge.
His periodic declarations that a breakthrough with Iran is imminent—or nearly imminent, or perhaps merely conceivable—have done something remarkable: they have kept the markets steady. In a moment when traders might otherwise be pricing in escalation, they are instead parsing presidential hints like tea leaves, treating each closing bell as a referendum on the next morning’s optimism.
It is, in its way, a masterclass in narrative management.
The quarrel with Iran has not gone according to plan, however optimistic that plan may once have been. The United States may yet expend considerable treasure, credibility, and risk merely to restore conditions that existed before the first strike. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz would be an achievement—but only because its closure created the problem in the first place. Under normal circumstances, markets would be sagging under the weight of uncertainty. This is, after all, a stalemate.
And yet they have not sagged. They have held.
Trump’s intermittent announcements have created the sense that resolution is perpetually just ahead. The market behaves as though the story is advancing toward a conclusion, even when events suggest something closer to a holding pattern.
Many Americans see Trump as a man of bluster, a salesman with a gift for exaggeration. But the sales job he has performed around this unhappy stalemate has been, from a purely tactical standpoint, extraordinary. If the goal is to maintain market confidence while pursuing an aggressive policy toward Iran, then the strategy has worked.
Whether the policy succeeds remains uncertain. But as an exercise in sustaining confidence during an increasingly uncomfortable stalemate, the performance has been impressive.
Credit, as the saying goes, where it is due.