Trump’s Shocking Hormuz Plan: US Territory Declaration Coming Soon

Donald Trump told a crowd at a New York police academy rally Friday that he’ll soon declare the Strait of Hormuz United States territory — delivered, by multiple accounts, with a chuckle and enough ambiguity that reporters covering the event couldn’t say whether he meant it as policy or provocation.

“After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States,” Trump said, adding “essentially, that’s what it is” — a claim with no basis in international maritime law, since the strait runs through recognized Iranian and Omani territorial waters regardless of US naval activity there. The same day, in a separate Fox News interview, Trump struck a more conventional tone, saying the administration plans to hit Iran’s economy hard and that he’s indifferent to whether the war drags past November’s midterm elections, which will hinge partly on voter frustration over gas prices the conflict has helped push up.

The substantive news came from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, not Trump. Bessent told Newsmax Thursday that Washington is preparing a fresh round of economic measures against Iran, calling them a “one-two punch” combining new financial restrictions with the continued naval blockade of Iranian ports. “We are going to apply measures like have never been seen in the history of economic isolation on a country,” he said, without detailing what the measures would target — though the campaign has already hit Iranian banks, frozen assets, cryptocurrency accounts and government oil revenue over recent months. Vice President JD Vance framed the strategy’s twin goals as blocking an Iranian nuclear weapon and restoring stable energy markets, saying he’s confident the approach ends with the US “in a stronger position.”

Trump paired the sanctions preview with an explicit deterrence warning: “We’re capable of really destroying the whole place. We don’t want to do that,” he said, adding that any Iranian strike on US interests would be met with a response “100 times harder.” That kind of rhetoric — a soft territorial joke sitting next to a hard escalation threat — has become something of a pattern in Trump’s Iran messaging, often delivered in the same appearance without much effort to reconcile the two registers.

Iran’s response arrived within hours. Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi rejected the territorial claim directly, saying Hormuz “cannot be seized with a tweet, an aircraft carrier, an executive order, or a campaign speech” and that Iran fears neither threats nor shows of force — treating the remark as worth a formal rebuttal regardless of how casually Trump delivered it.

Whether Bessent’s promised sanctions land with the severity he’s advertising, or Trump’s territorial remark gets walked back as rally rhetoric, will likely be clearer within days — Bessent himself set next week as the timeline for the announcements he’s teasing.