Donald Trump has played this hand before during the 5-month-old Iran war.
It starts with a grim warning to Tehran that he’s on the cusp of ordering U.S. forces to “obliterate” its power plants or seize key parts of its oil industry if its leaders don’t quickly agree to U.S. terms to end the war. It ends with him edging away with a last-minute declaration, sometimes at the behest of Gulf allies, that he’s going to give diplomacy more time.
The hardball strategy — one that Trump honed during his years competing in New York’s real estate scene and has employed in politics — aims to create movement in negotiation through pressure and chaos. But the tactic is facing a challenge with an Iranian theocracy that believes it holds a higher threshold for strategic pain than Washington.
It’s not a “hardball strategy,” it’s pure market manipulation, and this is something like the 40th time he’s done it with this war alone.
He’s also done it with tariffs, threatening to impose them, only to quit the day before, then do it again in a week, with the predictable waves in the market waves following.
The tariff thing ran out of gas because of SCOTUS, so they had to pivot to a war to do the same thing.
Now he has a scheme to sell advance information about his upcoming statements: he’ll give his subscribers advance knowledge of his announcements to bomb or not to bomb, and they can buy stock based on that advance info. He’s going monetize Insider Information.