Not a day goes by.

When Donald Trump doesn’t make me chuckle.

Dejectedly, disdainfully, despairingly, sure. But chuckle all the same.

On Wednesday, following the quickest annual headline CPI print in more than three years, Trump was asked at a White House event whether he’s “concerned about the latest inflation numbers.”

“No, I love it,” a sleepy-sounding, possibly sarcastic, Trump drawled. “The numbers were great.” Before the inquisitive reporter could follow up, Trump delivered an — what’s the right word? — interesting monologue. Here it is, verbatim:

You know what I really love? I love the inflation, you know why? Because as soon as this war is over — you know I can say it now, something you didn’t know. Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil? Nobody knows it — you know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now. I’m just announcing it for the first time right now. We’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Millions of barrels. Every night, we took out oil. But now I’m gonna tell you because they just figured it out. So now that they figured it out I can tell you. It was very hard for me — I wanted to say it so badly, I didn’t want to ruin it but — millions of barrels of oil ha[ve] come out, and that’s why it’s at $85 or $90 a barrel instead of $250.

It wasn’t immediately clear what Trump meant by “taking out,” but one can only assume he was referring to the same dynamic Bloomberg documented on Wednesday when Weilun Soon, Salma El Wardany, Prejula Prem and Alex Longley noted that “a growing number of tankers are turning their transponders off to lift oil flows” through the Strait of Hormuz.

That “stealth” effort to “sneak” by the IRGC undetected is bringing a meaningful share of stranded supply to market. When considered with much smaller volumes freed up by the US Navy’s initiative to shepherd vessels through the blockaded waterway, the total amount of liberated supply amounts to “millions of barrels” and the flow through the Strait has gone from “a trickle to a stream,” as the same linked article put it.

I doubt Iran’s actually unapprised. And I’m certain they’re not completely unaware, as Trump suggested. Moreover, the dark flows aren’t a fix, they’re a last resort. No one wants to drive a tanker through a (possibly mined) waterway at night, with the lights off, to avoid being shot at, boarded, commandeered or all three, by the IRGC. This isn’t a sustainable strategy.

The gist of the Bloomberg piece is that some two million barrels per day of product are slipping through the IRGC’s quarantine. Between that “extra” (versus the near total cessation of flows observed during the worst of the crunch) supply, stepped up US energy exports, pipelines that bypass the Strait and the dramatic decline in Chinese imports mentioned here on Tuesday, the world’s managed to avert an existential price spike. So far.

But, again, this is far from ideal. And now that Trump’s celebrating, publicly, the so-called “dark transits,” the Guards can be expected to step up enforcement efforts. How effective they’ll be at plugging the proverbial leak’s an open question, but what’s not up for debate is the fact that flows won’t resume at anything beyond a fraction of their peacetime levels absent an actual, durable peace deal.

In the same Wednesday remarks, Trump said the US military intends to follow up on Tuesday’s retaliatory strikes for the downing of an Apache near the Strait.

“We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them hard again today,” he said. “We’re going to be attacking them and attacking them very hard.”

Peace through strength. Truce through violence. Price relief through inflation.