Start with the week itself, in order.

On Aug. 14, at a police training center in Garden City, New York, President Donald Trump told a room of law enforcement officers that once Iran is finished, “pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” He added the sentence that was not a joke: “We have the blockade. No ships get through unless we want them to.” Then he asked Americans to accept a higher price at the pump as the cost of keeping a very evil country from a nuclear weapon.