Today on the Playbook podcast, All Eyes Again on the Strait of Hormuz as the US blockade begins.

The president seems more interested in going to war with Pope Leo.

And a tough weekend for J.D. Vance as MAGA world favorite, Victor Orban, gets a thrashing in Hungary. And Congress is

back. But Eric Swalwell is out of the race for California governor. Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard.

And I'm Dasha Burns. It is Monday, April 13th.

That was a lot of news for Monday morning, wasn't it, Dasha? We've already one minute.

My goodness, gracious, we're in for another week. How many times have we started the week saying that? But this is kind of crazy this week. So in just a few hours' time at 10 o'clock in the morning, Eastern time, the US is going to break in the blockade of the straight-over moose that Donald Trump announced over the weekend following the failure of those peace talks in Pakistan. This feels to me, does like a really, really big and dangerous moment.

This is a very different type of military proposition that America was undertaking here to what we

seen before, and no one has really gained this one out, except for the fact, A, it will be

very economically damaging to Iran, obviously, and we don't know how they're going to react to that. And the other people who are going to be very affected by are China who receive a lot of the oil coming from the Strait of Hormuz at the moment, and how are they going to react? And no one really knows the answers to those questions, and we're going to find out in just a few hours' time. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think we really have

been in that critical moment. If you've been paying attention, really for the last week, plus,

you know, since the president's press briefing last Monday, I personally have been on the edge of my seat because I can see

the inner workings of the president and his inner circle and the people that are trying to be

in that inner circle and the real back and forth of how close do we go to the edge, how much do

we pull back, and what the calculations are there? And it's really

changing minute by minute because, you know, the way that President Trump operates, he's not a

long term, let's draw this out and let's really sit down for days and hours and talk through this.

He wants action. He wants a victory. And if he wants an off-ramp, that has become really complicated

since J.D. Vance, the vice president, and the other negotiating team members have come back

empty-handed, essentially. The off-ramp is murky and the alternative of more military escalation, it's on the table and potentially more likely than some people would like to, I think, admit right now.

Totally. And beyond the military implications, which we just cannot predict how this is going to play, as you say, there is reporting around that America is considering restarting strikes against Iran as well as this blockade.

Obviously, Iran could react in a very violent way to what America is proposing to do.

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