"Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we'll have to blow them up."
At the May 27 Cabinet meeting, Trump warned Oman — a longtime U.S. ally and frequent Iran-deal mediator — not to enter any arrangement with Iran to share control of the Strait of Hormuz, or the U.S. would 'have to blow them up.' The next day at the White House briefing, the Treasury Secretary confirmed the line, said he had called the Omani ambassador, and described the tolling idea as 'a non-starter.'
The threat to a partner nation was folded into the broader 'Iran-deal confusion' narrative. The structural fact — the United States publicly threatening to attack an ally over a hypothetical shipping arrangement — rarely led; the 'freedom of navigation' framing the administration offered the next day was mostly accepted at face value.
A president threatened to 'blow up' a 200-year ally on the record, and a Cabinet secretary spent the next morning walking it back to a foreign government. When the cleanup is diplomatic and the threat is on camera, the threat is the news — not the cleanup.