President Donald Trump is “very serious” about his plan to impose a 20% toll on cargo transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, a White House official told Semafor, asserting that it’s a plan he’s wanted to move forward with for months.
The president has long flirted with the idea of charging a toll, wondering back in April “why shouldn’t” his administration do so and threatening to impose fees in June if a deal with Iran was not completed within a 60-day period. But Trump doesn’t always follow through with his musings, and until this week, he resisted formally announcing that plan — in part due to opposition from some in his orbit.
“This is what he’s always wanted to do, but people tried to talk him out of it,” the White House official said. “To him, this was his instinctual decision always, and he’s sort of just come back around to it.”
It’s not yet clear how such a fee system, which Trump has tied to a renewed naval blockade in the strait, would work, or whether the US has even consulted with Gulf states about the idea. Details of the plan are still being ironed out, according to the official. But Trump sees the 20% payments as a reimbursement for “costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Importantly, Trump’s announcement on Monday also contradicted pledges by some of his top officials not to charge tolls in the strait. Vice President JD Vance has said the administration believes “international waterways should be free of tolls,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio was part of a joint statement with the Gulf Cooperation Council that rejected “any tolls, fees or attempts to assert control over the strait.”