What did Donald Trump do today?

He somehow managed to blunder the United States into a situation where it had to drop sanctions against Iran mid-war.

Desperate to bring oil prices down and forestall a looming collapse in the energy sector, Trump did something that may be completely without precedent in modern warfare: he dropped economic sanctions against the country the United States is currently waging war against.

To be clear, Iran was selling oil anyway—and at a brisk pace, too, since only it can safely ship oil through the Persian Gulf. But Trump's order allows countries that still respect U.S. sanctions to buy Iranian oil—and give Iran the money it needs to fight back against the United States—as opposed to having it sold exclusively to countries like China or Russia that were already ignoring the sanctions.

In other words, having inadvertently created a situation where only countries hostile to the United States can freely trade in oil, Trump is now trying to pay Iran to get in line.

Trump's actions today won't have much effect on oil prices, any more than the other stopgap measures he's tried this week. They were foreshadowed by Trump's earlier move to un-sanction Russian oil, although that at least could be explained by the personal hold the Putin regime has always had over Trump, and the fact that Trump is essentially on the opposite side of the Russia-Ukraine conflict than the rest of the United States. 

It's worth explaining why Trump is this panicked. It's not just that prices are high: normal market forces have gotten oil prices to this point before, although only rarely. And it's not just that they'll go higher, because even then, basic supply and demand pressures would mean that they would eventually come down under normal circumstances.

But in the current scenario, Trump has blundered into giving Iran a stranglehold on the entire world energy sector. The global oil market depends on a complicated mechanism that balances production, shipping, and refinery capacity. The chaotic effects of the war, exacerbated by the fact that Trump was completely unprepared for the consequences, are only just starting to be felt. It's like a bubble of air in the bloodstream: small in the grand scheme of things, but completely catastrophic in terms of its effects on the body.

That also explains why Trump now seems to be pivoting back to declaring victory and trying to go home while leaving the mess for the rest of the world to try to clean up. Today, he once again floated the idea on his private microblogging website that it was time for (unspecified) "other Nations" to take over the "easy Military Operation" of undoing Iran's stranglehold on the Persian Gulf—something that Trump himself has been completely (though predictably) unable to accomplish with the entire might of the United States military at his disposal.

So far he hasn't gotten any takers.

Why does this matter?

• It's hard to explain what a catastrophic fuckup this is becoming because there isn't any precedent for a catastrophic fuckup of this size.