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Monday, April 13, 2026

Playing the Trump card vs. Tehran

by Miranda Devine

A promising new stage in our six-week Iran “excursion” began Sunday with President Trump’s announcement that the US Navy, together with allies, will immediately begin to blockade “any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.”

In wrestling terms, it’s a classic “swerve” move by the president, flipping the tables on his opponent.

Iran thought it had the world over an (oil) barrel. Turns out it signed its own economic death warrant.

The blockade is an inspired tactic pushed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and former Green Beret-turned-UN Ambassador Mike Waltz as the logical next step after the Chinese and Russians last week vetoed a UN Security Council resolution led by the Gulf States for international cooperation to reopen the Hormuz Strait.

With half the US Navy positioned just outside the narrow strait, everything is in place to stop the ships Tehran needs to serve its biggest customer, China, which buys about 90% of Iran’s oil.

And the blockade is just the beginning of the maximum economic pain Trump and his advisers are preparing to inflict on Iran, in what can be called “Operation Economic Epic Fury.”

As an ebullient Trump told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday morning of the naval blockade: “It’s called all in, and all out. We think that numerous countries are going to be helping us with this also, but we’re putting on a complete blockade.

“We’re not going to let Iran make money on selling oil to people that they like, and not people that they don’t like or whatever it is. It’s going to be all or none,” he said. “I predict they come back and give us everything we want.”

‘Bad news for Iran’

Trump’s other master stroke was sending the administration’s biggest peacenik, Vice President JD Vance, to lead talks with Iran in Islamabad, alongside special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, so he could see for himself how deluded the Iranians are about the cards they hold, and so the Iranians could see that there are no cracks in the administration’s resolve.

After 21 hours of talks with the Iranian delegation, while Trump fittingly attended a UFC cage fight with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Miami on Saturday night, Vance emerged to tell the world that there was no deal to end the war.

“The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America … The simple question is: Do we see a fundamental commitment of will for the Iranians not to develop a nuclear weapon — not just now, not just two years from now, but for the long term? We haven’t seen that yet. We hope that we will,” he said.

Trump, whom Vance said he called as many as a dozen times during the negotiations, told Bartiromo a few hours later that the Iranians “came in like they had the cards, but they don’t have the cards.

“Toward the end, it got very friendly, and we got just about every point we needed — except for the fact that they refuse to give up their nuclear ambition. And frankly, to me, that was the most important point by far,” he said. “They’re not going to have nuclear weapons. I’ve been saying that for 30 years.”

Trump also said the US claims that two American Navy destroyers went through Hormuz Saturday and swept for mines.

The US is establishing dominance over what Iran thought was its “Trump” card, all without firing a shot.

While most of the media have (again) written off Trump for his inflammatory Truth Social posts and unorthodox approach, his attack on Iran is part of his central governing identity: Trump the protector.

The Islamic terrorist regime has threatened and attacked the US for decades. Trump is the first president who is not afraid of them.

How US forces will clear minds in the Strait of Hormuz — Trump announced Sunday that the US will “begin destroying the mines the Iranians laid in the Straits” and warned that any Iranian ship that fires at the US will be “BLOWN TO HELL.”Don Pearsall / New York Post

Paying the gas price

Of course the Democrats are against him. All their party does now is threaten our safety and security, whether it’s with lax law enforcement, bail reform, decarceration, open borders, or kicking the can down the road on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Their media whisperers, who have been big Iran hawks for years, are now against the war because they hate Trump so much.

As the New York Times’ Tom Friedman told CNN last week, he very much wants “to see Iran defeated militarily because this regime is a terrible regime for its people and the region.”

But “the problem is I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings.”

Iran has been aggressively enriching uranium and ramping up its ability to produce weapons-grade material for a nuclear device, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and US and Israeli intelligence.

Giving them truckloads of cash, as the Obama geniuses did, hasn’t deterred their Allah-ordained appetite for global nuclear Armageddon. So what would the naysayers prefer?

“You want to see a stock market go down? Let a couple of nuclear bombs be dropped on us,” Trump told Bartiromo when she pressed him on the effects of the war on the price of gas and the domestic economy before the midterms.

Trump said oil prices will go down “eventually,” but not in the short term.

“It might not happen initially, but it’s gonna go down when this is all over,” he said.

In any case, he said the decline in the stock market and uptick in gas prices haven’t been as bad as expected, in a sign that he is more focused on safeguarding America’s security than short-term political advantage.

“The gas hasn’t gone up as much as I thought,” he said. “But regardless, even if it did … You can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”

Trump said he told his economic advisers before he launched Operation Epic Fury: “’I’m sorry, fellas, we’re in great shape. We have to go and take a little journey down to Iran, and we have to stop them from having a nuclear weapon.’ They all said, ‘We agree.’ ”

‘Madness in method’

Trump’s closest advisers note he has a high tolerance for risk, which makes for a white-knuckle ride for the rest of us.

His expletive-laden midnight Truth Social posts promising to annihilate a “whole civilization” send the Trump-deranged into paroxysms of rage.

But there is a method to his madness, or as one of the few sensible CNN hosts, Michael Smerconish, put it, “the madness is his method.”

Leaks from inside the Situation Room in the lead-up to the Iran attack show a consultative and serious commander-in-chief, taking legal advice, listening to all his advisers, clear-eyed about Israel’s rosy forecasts of regime change, and then making the tough decision to launch Operation Epic Fury.

There is strategic intent in the president’s actions, along with a gut instinct for psychological conquest that more often than not serves him well, and a sort of genius social intelligence that schoolyard bullies possess of quickly identifying the vulnerability in an opponent.

He is quite happy to play a character and be thought of badly, as long as the US comes out on top in the end.

And he has some wickedly smart advisers sitting around the cabinet table to help him.

This next stage of forcing Iran’s new leaders to see sense in their own self-interest will apply maximum pressure in every dimension to solve a problem that has bedeviled seven presidents.

Godspeed.

https://nypost.com/2026/04/13/opinion/playing-the-trump-card-vs-tehran/

What If the FDA Were Eliminated?

Reform efforts, however, have been met with frustration. The entire machinery is set up to resist the influence of a politically hostile takeover. For example, Moderna, the company tasked with the development of mRNA shots for Covid, has been given the green light to further develop the technology for a flu shot, among other grave disappointments.

The operations of the FDA have been pulled in two different directions. On the one hand, the efforts are directed toward better efficacy and safety testing, obviously in light of the disastrous experiment with mRNA shots rolled out to inoculate the population. The resulting injury and death is a scandal for the ages. On the other hand, pharmaceutical companies hoped for speedier approvals and less red tape, consistent with Republican demands for decades.

It’s the same with food. The HHS has prioritized healthier real food instead of decades of subsidies for highly processed, nutrient-barren junk food designed to use up surplus grains that have been subsidized since the early 1970s. Americans meanwhile assume – thanks to the FDA and the Department of Agriculture – that anything for sale for people or animals has surely passed some kind of safety and health standards, which is far from true.

A worthy thought experiment: how would drug approvals and food safety be managed in the absence of such government agencies? The thesis: the free and competitive marketplace would likely be far more strict and exacting than these government agencies. Private solutions would emerge as the standard bearers of approvals, in a way similar to how the private Underwriters Laboratory (founded 1894) codifies the safety of appliances, the Better Business Bureau (founded 1912) polices fraud in business, and actuaries in many sectors assess and price risk.

Anyone in a free market can sell anything. Doing so profitably over the long term and earning consumer trust is an entirely different matter. Markets have their own way of regulating safety, efficacy, and quality, often in ways that are more strict than government agencies have traditionally permissioned.

Let’s look at the history.

Vaccines and drugs were the first two consumer products in American history to be regulated by government agencies. The Biologics Control Act of 1902 regulated the production and sale of biological products, specifically vaccines, serums, antitoxins, and similar items. It required annual licensing of manufacturers, facility inspections, supervision by a scientist, and proper labeling (including expiration dates).

This Congressional action came directly in response to the wave of vaccine injuries and death in 1901. A diphtheria antitoxin in St. Louis killed 13 children, while a contaminated smallpox vaccine in Camden, New Jersey, killed 9 more. Crucially, these tragedies gained public attention through media amplification whereas most vaccine injury remains a private and unpublicized matter. The public was outraged in part because it confirmed widespread suspicion of these products born of long experience.

The industry was clearly in deep trouble. It lobbied for the 1902 law to shore up confidence in a manner consistent with its efforts before and since.

As historian Terry S. Coleman points out, “the 1902 Act was an initiative of the large biologics manufacturers,” with the help of the American Medical Association and led by Parke-Davis, which was acquired in 1970 by Warner-Lambert and again by Pfizer In 2000. “It is impossible to disentangle the desire for strict regulations to boost public confidence in biologics,” he writes, “from the desire for such regulations to eliminate competitors.”

Thus did the creation of the agency formed by the Congressional action (the Hygienic Laboratory, part of the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, under the Treasury Department, and later to become the National Institutes of Health) served to create a private cartel of drug and vaccine manufacturers, crowding out private solutions and disabling the normal market-based rule of caveat emptor or buyer beware.

This is exactly what the biggest players in the industry intended. It was a brilliant strategy. Pretend to be deeply vexed by a government crackdown while pulling the strings behind the scenes of a new agency that the public trusts more than the industry. This was not only the birth of a new path toward public management of this one industry; it was the origin of the regulatory state itself insofar as it intervenes directly in the consumer marketplace.

Four years later, the meatpacking industry was in big trouble from the popular book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906). The expose caused a collapse in the sales of the processing and canning industry as the public reverted back to trusting only local food and onsite processing from farmers. A powerful industry needed to do something.

The meatpacking industry took a cue from the vaccine industry and pushed for regulation. The result was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It targeted adulterated or misbranded foods and drugs in interstate commerce. All evidence suggests that meatpacking became less safe as a result. The industry faced higher compliance costs that squeezed out smaller competitors and less stringent safety standards, while gaining public confidence.

These two acts of Congress became the foundation of what became the Food and Drug Administration, which is tasked with investigating and approving products for their safety and effectiveness. Crucially, industry has been the controlling force from the beginning, the very reason the agency exists. The point was not to protect the public but to protect the largest firms within their respective industries.

The route by which this happened is rather circuitous. The industries went to government and pleaded to be regulated, thus shoring up market position in two directions: increasing costs for upstart firms and disabling public incredulity toward the safety and efficacy of their products.

Today, people talk about industry capture of agencies but this is probably not the right term. The agencies were formed out of the pleas of industry. This is not just true for food and drugs but also for banking, transportation, industry structure, and communications technology, as Gabriel Kolko has demonstrated in his sweeping study of the Progressive Era.

It’s true that these historical facts are hardly understood at all, even by economic historians. This is why we need the entire history of the modern regulatory state rewritten and reconceptualized without romantic delusions about good government actors seeking the well-being of the public.

This historical and present reality poses a serious dilemma for reformers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who have pledged to eliminate the corrupt relationship between industry and government and rid the agencies of conflicts of interest. The agencies themselves were founded in conflicts of interest. An attempt to gut them would turn them into something they have never been.

Now to the original question: what would regulate these industries if the FDA were not around at all? In electronics and business quality, we find the answer. These two industries face strict control emerging organically from consumer demand alone.

Institutions like Underwriters Laboratory and the Better Business Bureau are titans in these sectors with no assistance from government. User ratings emerging in the digital era have a vast impact on sales success, as any Amazon seller can tell you. And in industries like sports, household construction, and driving skill, private insurers exercise a dominant influence through financial carrots and sticks, as directed by actuaries assessing risks.

The very existence of the FDA has crowded out such elaborate and complex systems in the case of food and drugs, which is precisely why their safety and efficacy is the subject of such huge public controversy.

In fact, if you look at the Covid shots alone, consider that no company operating within a market framework could ever have gotten away with such widespread distribution of such ineffective, unsafe, and largely unnecessary products, which were mislabeled as vaccines from the beginning. Not only would a private rating agency decline to approve them, the imposition of normal liability standards would have made insuring the manufacturers and distributors completely unaffordable.

The vaccine industry even from its inception has relied on disabling market forces via a range of interventions: zero-priced distribution, wartime inoculation of soldiers, legalized and court-imposed mandates, exclusions of refuseniks from education and professional life, subsidies, patent sharing with agencies, liability indemnifications, and finally invoking emergency needs to bypass normal standards of safety.

Given all of this, we have no idea what the status of these products would be in a normal market environment. Maybe the industry would not even be financially viable, which is precisely why the industry has built such a powerful lobbying machine. Indeed this was the industry claim when it won its liability shield in 1986: it said it would otherwise face complete bankruptcy.

It’s the same with food. What began with the meatpackers has extended to every other food source. The New Deal imposed a central-planning apparatus to keep prices high via output controls and even mandates to plow up crops to take them off the market. Wartime price controls and rationing redirected production energies away from whole foods toward industrialized substitutes. And the huge push of the 1970s for maximum output started the trend away from local and small farmers toward land consolidation and overproduction of grains. This is also the period when mass use of chemical herbicides and fertilizers came into common use.

All the while, the public was blindsided because government agencies continually assured us that all was well. These products are safe and nutritious. Absent such impositions, regulations, subsidies, and indemnifications, the sectors of food and drugs generally would operate very differently.

Today there are many efforts on the part of nonprofits working to educate the public on many topics related to individual and public health. They work at cross purposes with these agencies that have worked to foist onto the markets what the market would have otherwise been inclined to either filter out, deprecate, or reject entirely.

Could we do without the FDA? We would likely be far better off.

For more on the ways that government intervention reduces market-based incredulity while subsidizing fraud, ill health, dangerous products, and lies, see my interview with Stephan Kinsella.

Join the conversation:

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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Author

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-if-the-fda-were-eliminated/

Dad with Stage 4 cancer dies after insurance said tumor-shrinking treatment ‘not medically necessary’

It didn’t matter that Eric Tennant’s oncologist had recommended the medication to shrink his tumors.

The patient’s health insurance allegedly stood in the way — until it was too late.

In early 2025, after more than two years of chemotherapy that hollowed him out from the inside, the frail 58-year-old was deemed a good candidate for histotripsy, a new treatment that could target the tumors in his liver with ultrasound waves instead of surgery.

Tennant’s wife, Rebecca, had heard of histotripsy and brought the idea to her husband’s doctor. There was a relatively narrow window in which he could receive the treatment, and his medical team was ready to start.

Multiple rounds of appeals were unsuccessful. Out-of-pocket costs for the Tennant family — which included Eric, his wife and their two grown children — would have been about $50,000.

Tennant, a mining safety instructor from Bridgeport, West Virginia, was put on hospice last year and died in September.

“He wasn’t afraid to die, but he didn’t want to die,” Rebecca told KFF. “And you could tell the last day that he was fighting it big time.”

Tennant had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer that attacked his bile ducts before spreading to other parts of his body. By the time Rebecca discovered histotripsy, his largest tumor was in his liver.

It was unlikely the proposed treatment would have sent Tennant into full remission, but the family believed it could have bought him some more time.

This tragic turn of events is not uncommon.

Prior authorization — a bureaucratic headache for patients, their families and their doctors — is a widely unpopular quirk of the health care system that can keep sick people languishing without proper treatment indefinitely.

According to a recent report from KFF, delaying or denying care in some cases actually drives profits for health insurance companies.

The health news outlet added that more than a quarter of US physicians surveyed by the American Medical Association in December 2024 said “prior authorization had led to a serious adverse event for a patient in their care.”

And 8% of respondents said prior authorization “led to a disability, birth defect or death.”

The main justification for prior authorization is that it “acts as a guardrail” against the irresponsible administration of certain medicines, a spokesperson for a health insurance industry trade group told KFF.

But for families such as the Tennants, the only outcome is heartbreak.

Per KFF, the late Tennant was insured by the Public Employees Insurance Agency of West Virginia, which partners with UnitedHealthcare. (The Post reached out to both agencies for comment.)

Early last year, when those two agencies and an outside reviewer deemed histotripsy was not medically necessary for Tennant and denied coverage, the family briefly considered tapping their retirement savings to cover the out-of-pocket cost.

But a few months later — notably after KFF and NBC News contacted the health insurance agencies with questions about the denial — the decision was reversed.

At that point, however, it was too late. Tennant’s condition had worsened, and he was no longer a candidate for histotripsy.

Last fall, after her husband’s death, Rebecca told KFF that if he had undergone histotripsy when his doctor ordered it, the lethal tumor in his liver might have been neutralized.

But no one can say for sure.

“We’ll never know. That’s the thing,” the widow said at the time. “Any lawyer for the insurance will say, ‘Well, you don’t know it would have helped.’ No. You took that chance away from us.”

https://nypost.com/2026/04/10/health/dad-with-cancer-dies-after-insurance-said-treatment-not-medically-necessary/

Trump's War on Medicaid Fraud Finally Gains Steam

Vice President J.D. Vance's effort to clean up waste in Medicaid began in earnest last month, with the first meeting of the administration's Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.

Judging from a new federal report, he's got his work cut out for him.

The study, issued last month by the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), found that Medicaid fraud convictions increased in 2025, as did the number of fraud cases opened.

The size and scope of Medicaid's fraud problem is hardly news.

Finally, a presidential administration appears willing to do something about it.

Medicaid has wasted staggering amounts of taxpayer money on improper payments in recent years — nearly $543 billion between 2015 and 2024, according to the federal government's own data.

But those numbers almost certainly understate the extent of the problem. A more thorough analysis by the Paragon Health Institute estimates that improper payments totaled almost $1.1 trillion over that time.

The OIG report suggests that the administration has already gotten more aggressive about rooting out fraud in Medicaid. For starters, the number of fraud convictions has ticked upward lately, from 817 in 2024 to 856 last year.

The amount of money the nation's Medicaid Fraud Control Units have been able to recover also increased last year, to $1.3 billion — up from $961 million in 2024.

These victories are worth celebrating.

But they represent only modest progress toward ridding the program of the kind of rampant abuse that has proliferated in Medicaid.

For example, President Biden's efforts to weaken oversight and enforcement of the entitlement's eligibility rules resulted in a massive increase in the number of Medicaid enrollees who didn't quality for the program under the law.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly 13 million beneficiaries fit this description in 2022.

Vice President Vance's new Task Force seems poised to tackle this challenge. That group was first announced during President Donald Trump's State of the Union Address, in February. And it was officially established through executive order just weeks later.

"This is not just the theft of the American people's money," Vice President Vance said. "It is also the theft of critical services that the American people rely on."

What's been missing, according to the vice president, is a "whole-government approach" to the problem.

Democrats have condemned these efforts — as well as related reforms aimed at targeting Medicaid resources towards those who need them most.

This is most apparent in the progressive campaign against the Medicaid work requirements established by last year's budget reconciliation law.

Under this new policy, all able-bodied, working-age Americans who wish to enroll in Medicaid must spend a minimum of 80 hours a month working, training, or volunteering in order to qualify for benefits beginning in 2027.

Much like the fraud crackdown, these requirements represent a commonsense attempt to rein in a program that has strayed far from its original purpose of caring for the disabled and destitute.

Today, Medicaid covers more than one in five Americans — many of whom are perfectly capable of working and providing for themselves.

The Urban Institute estimates that between 3 million and 7 million Medicaid enrollees might lose access to the program as a result of this reform. That's a relatively small reduction for a program that currently covers more than 68 million Americans.

Further, Medicaid spending is projected to exceed $1 trillion this year — and $2 trillion by 2032. Taxpayer resources are not limitless. It makes sense to preserve the program for those for whom it was established 60 years ago.

The first step in that process is to ensure that no more taxpayer money is wasted paying for coverage for people who don't belong in the program.

Sally C. Pipes is President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Healthcare Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is "The World's Medicine Chest: How America Achieved Pharmaceutical Supremacy — and How to Keep It."

https://www.newsmax.com/sallypipes/vance-fraud-hhs/2026/04/10/id/1252499/

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