Hi, everybody out there. I am Andrew Eger, White House correspondent with the Bullwork,

co-author of our Morningshots newsletter with The Got of My Right, Bill Crystal, our editor at large. We're the Morning Shots authors, and this is Morning Chaser. We're coming to you on Tuesday morning to talk about our newsletter, talk about what's going on in the world and in the week ahead. Thanks for tuning in on YouTube. Thanks for tuning in on Substack, wherever you might be.

We are at such a strange place when it comes to the conflict, the war, still not 100% sure what to call it.

Calling it a war feels like sort of cowtowing to the reality that Congress is completely cut out of this thing.

But it does feel like a war.

It's basically a war.

It's a war in everything but name. We're in a weird place with it. We are continuing to ramp up. Pete Hegeset, the Secretary of Defense, said this morning that that today is going to be the most

intensive day yet of bombing and of, you know, aerial planes in the sky over Iran.

And yet, we are also starting to get some of the strongest signals yet from the president,

especially because there's been a lot of economic shakiness with the price of oil and things like that.

Some of the strongest indicators yet that the president is already looking for a way out of this thing.

He's got his eyes on the exits.

We're not 100% sure what's going to happen in the next few days,

but Bill had a great item this morning in morning shots talking about, you know,

the old taco trade, the old Trump always chickens out,

way of analyzing the White House, particularly last year after tariffs,

applying that to kind of what's going on in Iran today.

Bill, what do you make of where the president is in his headspace right now and what that means for the war in the days ahead?

I think he pretty clearly is looking for the exits.

I wrote about this Thursday in morning shots when I put myself with Trump's mind, always a very difficult and painful thing to do. It takes me a day or two to

cover from that, you know, and thought that he would be looking for a way out. I do think the one

lesson he's learned over 50 years is prolonged wars in the Middle East are bad for presidents.

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