After Iran intensified its demands over the weekend before it would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump didn’t threaten new strikes but instead indicated that he planned to choke Iran economically. “We are low-keying it,” he told Axios over the weekend. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”
This broke with Trump’s usual rhetorical pattern in talking about Iran, in which the president generally declares that a conclusive deal with Iran is imminent, threatens to annihilate Iran if it doesn’t comply, then calls the attacks off at the last minute — only to do it all over again.
What, precisely, does it mean to “low-key” the events of a war? It’s not the first time the president has employed this peculiar turn of phrase, transforming a word typically used as an adjective or adverb into a verb. In early April, as Israel’s continued bombing of southern Lebanon threatened negotiations with Iran, Trump used it to describe a phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I spoke with Bibi and he’s going to low-key it,” he told NBC News at the time. “I just think we have to be sort of a little more low-key.”
