Interrogating Grok produces a 1968 Chess Life Magazine chess problem, submitted by a 22-year-old Donald Trump, a story indicating some Trump skill at the game, and his nascent litigiousness. But Grok admits, "the 1968 Chess Life story is a hoax. [It was} their main April Fool's prank on April 1, 2016."

April Fool's Day might be Trump's favorite holiday, other than Daddy's Day. Trump himself pranked 50 million American voters in the last Presidential election, a feat impossible to surpass again without full implementation of the Alex Karp manifesto.

The month of May brought Americans and the rest of the world Trump's most recent jest – pivoting from a Arabian Sea "blockade" of the already Iranian "blockaded" Strait of Hormuz to a new "Project Freedom" faux escort service for US friendly ships.

Definitions matter. The US "blockade" is only a blockade in the sense that it is an act of war – not that it is effecting any stoppage in ship travel. The Iranian "blockade" of the strait is instead a toll booth, enforceable and enforced, allowing passage of ships under publicized and consistent conditions. The real blockade is being created by the risk price calculated by ship owners and their insurance companies. This price has skyrocketed because of US/Israeli actions in the region, and yet this price is simultaneously beyond their control.

"Project Freedom" initially lasted less than 50 hours. This caprice should remind us of the fundamental reality that freedom is never a state project. Human freedom is usually the main target of the modern state, and the primary enemy of its massive bureaucracy in our technological age. Liberty must be first cherished (it is often not) and then exercised (that takes work) and finally protected like an alert hen protects her chicks, or a mother bear protects her cubs. A written constitution is never enough – societal ferocity for freedom must pre-exist and be practiced, but that is for another conversation.

Americans who follow Trump's foreign policy may have considered "Project Freedom's" temporary cancellation as one more jig to the White House jag. But it is more than that: this time Trump and his advisors clearly illustrated they have learned little from the past year. Exactly as Trump did on February 28th, instead of consulting and coordinating with the Gulf states and kingdoms beforehand, he publicly assumed he would use their remaining bases, radars and airspace as if it was his own property.

Instead of guiding stranded ships for humanitarian purposes in waters the US naval fleet fears to float, the "project" may be an attempt at a proto-no-fly zone closer to Iran, to facilitate a major US and Israel restart of kinetic war. Perhaps it is only a provocation or, in chess terms, a really ludicrous "announced mate."

The reason it paused, temporarily, must have terrified Washington. Gulf state allies – for the first time ever – told Washington "No dice!" Out of anxiety, distrust, anger and a really rotten state of economic affairs, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirate of Kuwait conducted a brief experiment in sovereignty. While quickly abandoned, a seed of sovereign thinking may have been planted, maybe long before this final war of choice by the waning US empire. Trends in sovereign wealth funds indicate many Gulf countries have long been considering whether an American president's ass is still worth kissing.