Team Trump “learned” from the fallout in Minnesota that there’s “real benefit in looking reasonable on immigration,” cheers The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel. Good moves: Making border czar Tom Homan point in Minneapolis, ousting Kristi Noem from Homeland Security and rolling out body cameras on ICE agents. The White House also tapped “well-liked” Sen. Markwayne Mullin to replace Noem, and he addressed Dems’ “remaining concerns” about ICE. “Yet because it might rob them of their ‘issue,’ Democrats, hilariously” griped that “the GOP was giving them exactly what they want” — making “vividly clear” the DHS shutdown “is unrelated to DHS policy.” Dems see they’re now “losing ground” and “scurried” to produce a counteroffer. Lesson for the GOP: “Good policy is good politics.” 

“Much to the delight of the liberal media,” America’s allies were “getting their revenge” after a year of “Trump pissing off” and “demeaning” them for failing “to pull their own weight,” observes Batya Ungar-Sargon on Substack. But “after weeks of huffily insisting” they wouldn’t help the prez on Iran, our European allies “decided it’s better to be there at the finish line than not have helped at all,” and “issued a joint statement” stating “collective readiness to heed the President’s call” to “ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz.” The liberal press again “got it backwards”: It was Trump’s willingness to “put Europe on blast” that compelled the allies to act.

Critics call Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz “a setback for, and a blunder by, the Trump administration,” but Richard Porter argues at Real Clear Politics that it may be more a “feature” in US planning. “Iran’s erstwhile ally China suffers the greatest direct impact” of the move, thereby showing Beijing “that its oil supply chain is protected by and vulnerable to the U.S. military.” Should the United States “seize Iran’s oil facilities on Kharg Island to squeeze what’s left of Iran’s leadership, the squeeze will be felt in Beijing, too.” Europe, meanwhile, gets far less oil and gas via the Strait than it does from America — and the US request for help in reopening it exposes how “European left-wing governments” can’t stay in power without “voters sympathetic to the Palestinians and the Islamic Republic.”

Joe Kent’s resignation last week as US counter terror chief “titillated the digital left,” notes Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, but the real question is “why he was there in the first place.” His resignation letter “is a hot mess of witless foreign-policy posturing and infantile Israel-hate,” written by someone who “knows zilch about global politics.” To Kent, “Trump is merely gullible while the Jewish State is monstrously sinister.” His animus for Israel “has the pungent whiff of antisemitic conspiracism.” The MAGA movement, whose extremist fringe has embraced anti-Zionism, “needs to sort itself out” and reject “vain, self-exonerating hatred” for Israel, “because Israel isn’t the cause of your wars or your depression or your girlfriend troubles or your baldness.”

“The Israelis are exerting their will to create the conditions for a revolution that Iranians have tried and failed to incept for more than a quarter century,” reports The Free Press’ Eli Lake. In targeting the regime’s Basij militia, Israel is “removing the forces of repression.” Meanwhile, “the Iran Freedom Congress” works “to create a broad coalition of external and internal Iranian regime opponents.” Reza Pahlavi, “the exiled son of the deposed Shah,” may be “the most viable candidate to lead a transition” because he’s “seen by millions of Iranians as the alternative to the Islamist ideology imposed by a hated regime.” “Israel is evening the odds for a revolution by putting its air force in the service of Iran’s dissidents.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board