Ground Hog Day & the Iranian State of Play - Top 3 Takeaways – May 26th, 2026
Takeaway #1 Ground Hog Day?
The year was... Czechoslovakia was dissolved, creating the Czech and Slovak Republics. Martin Luther King Jr. Day became a federal holiday. What was known as the Great Blizzard took place March 12th and 13th of this year. The first World Trade Center bombing took place. The #1 song was I Will Always Love You, by Whitney Houston and if you still haven’t gotten it by now...Bill Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd President of the United States. This is clearly 1993. And there’s another cultural reference point that central to my top takeaway today. It was in 1993 that Bill Murray and Andi MacDowell starred in what became the somewhat surprising smash hit Ground Hog Day. With a production budget of under $15 million – it's unlikely that Sony envisioned that it would pull in over $71 million at the box office and would become a movie that’s still referenced 33 years later. Anyway, Ground Hog Day in its own way has become the cultural illustration of what we’d otherwise refer to as the definition of insanity...that is to say, doing the same thing and expecting a different result. By now there’s likely little doubt that what I’m referring to here is whatever will be with President Trump’s Iranian peace negotiations in the middle east. On Friday President Trump once again began suggesting that something substantive had begun to come together with Iranian peace negotiations. It was something that sounded just like what we’ve heard before, on multiple occasions during this now three-month-old conflict. However, actions do speak louder than words, and President Trump’s actions spoke particularly loudly over the weekend. The first bit of action related news was that President Trump, always the family man, wasn’t going to be able to make his oldest son (Don Jr.’s) wedding. The next bit of news was that he also canceled any Memorial Day weekend plans to leave Washington, D.C. (this included a cancelled trip to his Bedminster, New Jersey resort – you'll likely not be seeing him come to Mar-a-Lago again until the fall). So, in other words, the president’s actions were...
Takeaway #2 Different this time
This weekend marked the first time President Trump’s travel schedule changed at any point during the Iranian festivities. Heck, you may recall that the president was at Mar-a-Lago when the original Iranian strikes began. One might imagine that if he thought he was simply being jerked around by Iran’s Well Imamers (12th Imam) once again that he’d have prioritized Don Jr’s wedding within the mix. Importantly, there’s also something else that’s different about the current configuration of the negotiations. Leaders of key the regions key Islamic countries... Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain. Are all involved in the negotiations this time. Also, interestingly, following a conference call with all of the leaders of those countries on Saturday President Trump said Arab countries joining the Abraham Accords should be mandatory as part of this peace process. As posted on Truth Monday morning: I am mandatorily requesting that all Countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords, and that, if Iran signs its Agreement with me, as President of the United States of America, it would be an Honor to have them also be part of this unparalleled World Coalition. The Middle East would be United, Powerful, and Economically Strong, like perhaps no other area, anywhere in the World! By copy of this TRUTH, I am asking my Representatives to begin, and successfully complete, the process of signing these Countries into the already Historic Abraham Accords. In other words, most Americans are simply looking for something that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz so that oil will flow and gas prices will drop. It’s clear that DJT has his sights set on much bigger things. And that takes us to...
Takeaway #3 The Current State of Play
President Trump also offered this status update on peace talks on Monday: Negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran are proceeding nicely! It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all — Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before — And nobody wants that! Hmm...well that certainly sounds similar to what we’ve heard before. We also heard over the weekend that President Trump was giving Iran 5, 6, or perhaps seven days to finalize a deal. That certainly sounds like something we’ve heard before (like essentially at this time last week). So, here’s the thing this time around. The actions are different. The players involved in talks aside from Iran are different, however there’s no doubt that insanity plays a role in this thing...because again the people President Trump is trying to strike a deal with are bat crap crazy insane Islamic terrorists who believe that there’s an Imam in a well that’s just waiting for them to wash the world in blood. I wish that were different this time, however that’s the immovable object that’s been central to this thing. Given the well imam is the Iranian goal it may potentially be the case that the only way they’d cave is if they truly feel that they’ll all be wiped out without do enough along the way to bring the well Imam back out. How you successfully negotiate with that...I’ll never know and presumably President Trump reached that deduction along the way as he employed the assistance of the regions Islamic countries which perhaps can thread the crazy Islamic terror thing better than someone of a different cultural and religious understanding. We enter today with it feeling much like Ground Hog Day but maybe, just hopefully it isn’t? We can pray it is different this time and we should.