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This week, James Matthewson joined me from Edinburgh for another Across the Pond episode, and we dug deep. Deeper than the headlines. Deeper than the mixed messaging and the fake claims of peace talks. We got to what is actually driving all of this: the character of the man making these decisions, and what this moment demands that he simply cannot provide.
This week, Trump declared the war won. Simultaneously, sent more troops. Claimed Iran was in peace talks. Iran said that it was fake news used to manipulate oil markets. And through all of it, NBC News reported that Trump has been receiving his daily war briefings in the form of two-minute montages of successful airstrikes, described by one official as videos of “stuff blowing up.” This is the President of the United States having his ego managed like a child.
We also got into the insider trading pattern that is becoming impossible to ignore. $580 million in oil futures flooded the market 16 minutes before Trump’s Truth Social post announcing peace talks. $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures were purchased, and $192 million in oil futures were sold five minutes before the same post. Senator Chris Murphy called it “mind-blowing corruption.” And the administration has undermined the very agencies that would investigate it.
We also made time for something important: a careful, principled conversation about Netanyahu, the Israeli government, and why nuance in this moment is a necessity.
You can watch the full conversation above and read the key takeaways below.
Trump Is Happy-Talking His Way Through A War He Cannot Control
Trump spent this week trying to talk his way out of a war he cannot control. He declared victory while Iran kept firing. He claimed peace talks were underway while Iran called it fake news designed to manipulate oil markets. And when he stood by Marine One and spoke for a single minute, James counted six direct contradictions. He said the leaders were dead, but the U.S. is negotiating with them. The war is won, but send more troops. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, but we have never been in better shape.
I raised the central absurdity of Trump’s position this week. He cannot simultaneously tell the world the war is won and ask allies to send ships into a minefield. If the war is won, why do you need reinforcements? And if you need reinforcements, what exactly have you won? Iran explicitly responded to his peace talks announcement by calling it “fake news used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped.”
James made the point that cuts to the heart of how far we have fallen. We are now in a position where America’s allies cannot determine who is telling the truth between the United States government and the Iranian regime. At one time, that would have been obvious. It is not anymore. James noted that Trump lies on an hourly basis, minute by minute, and the result is a world where even those who despise the Iranian regime cannot simply trust the American president over them. That indictment deserves to sit with us.
I pointed out that what Trump is really doing is happy-talking a war he privately knows has no clear off-ramp. When he was younger, Trump got deeply into manifestation thinking and positive self-talk. He now operates from a worldview where speaking something positively enough makes it real. That is not leadership. That is delusion cosplaying as confidence. Iran has a vote in when this war ends. Any deal available now will be worse than the deal available before this war started, because the regime has been decapitated toward its more extreme elements, the IRGC is expanding its power, and its military command uses what is called mosaic leadership, a decentralized structure with no central command to dismantle. You cannot bomb your way to a negotiating table with people who have nothing left to lose.
The Propaganda Reel: Trump’s Two-Minute Briefings & The Sycophancy Machine
NBC News reported this week that Trump has been receiving his daily war briefings in the form of two-minute video montages of successful US strikes on Iran, described by an official as clips of “stuff blowing up.” He is reportedly frustrated that media coverage does not match the success story he is being shown. This is not incidental. It is the operating logic of this entire administration.
I laid out what this reporting actually tells us. Trump is being managed. People around him are curating his information flow to keep him happy, the same way you keep a child calm with a screen. He has no attention span for real intelligence briefings, required picture books in his first term, and now requires a highlight reel in his second. The result is a commander-in-chief who does not have a stable grip on reality during an active war. A president needs all the facts, including the negative ones, to make sound decisions. Trump cannot receive negative information without seeing it as an attack on himself. So his staff filters it out.
James identified the pattern underneath the briefing problem. Trump associates people with how they make him feel. If someone delivers bad news, they become the bad news. They get fired. It is a base impulse, animalistic even. And the entire administration has adapted around it. Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, presents herself as a steadying hand but has become, as I put it, an efficiency machine for sycophancy and loyalty. The system is not malfunctioning. It is working exactly as designed by a man who cannot tolerate reality.
The Leadership Void: What This Moment Demands & What Trump Cannot Provide
This is the thread that ran through the entire conversation. I have been reading Ryan Holiday’s Stillness Is the Key, and it gave us a framework for exactly what is missing. The book walks through how leaders in history - from Lincoln to JFK - relied on stillness, deliberation, and the capacity to sit with complexity before acting. Trump is the antithesis of every one of those qualities.
I raised JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis as the clearest possible contrast. Advisors around Kennedy were telling him to bomb the missile sites in Cuba. He took a beat. He sat with it. He chose the blockade, a show of force that did not escalate beyond the point of no return. That deliberation is what prevented nuclear war. Trump would have bombed. He responds to force, so he assumes everyone else does too. He cannot project himself into the shoes of an adversary, which means he cannot understand what an adversary needs to stand down. Hegseth said this week that the US is “negotiating with bombs.” That is not a negotiating strategy. That is a confession of foolishness.
James drew the Obama contrast using Obama’s own memoir. In office, Obama would go around the table, collect multiple opinions, weigh them against each other, and choose the best path. Trump does the opposite. He starts with his conclusion and finds people who agree with it. He is not gathering intelligence. He is seeking validation. The result is a war launched without a coalition, without an exit strategy, and without any understanding of how Iran actually works. James put it plainly: every intelligence agent who briefed this president knew about Iran’s decentralized military command. Trump did not care.
I made the point that Trump sees everyone as an NPC, a non-player character with no inner life, no sentience, no interests worth understanding. He views the world as a game in which he is the only real person and everyone else exists to serve his will. That is why he called fallen soldiers “suckers and losers.” He cannot comprehend self-sacrifice because it does not exist in his worldview. And as James noted, it is why everything Trump does is projection. I added that he sees people acting with genuine decency, but he cannot accept it as real. He assumes they are performing the same way he performs. It is the only explanation that fits his behavior.
Profiting Off The War: The Insider Trading Pattern
The corruption case around this war is not hypothetical. It is documented, it is patterned, and the regulatory infrastructure that would investigate it has been deliberately dismantled.
I laid out the facts. $580 million in oil futures flooded the market in a single spike 16 minutes before Trump’s Truth Social post on Monday, claiming peace talks with Iran. Five minutes before that same post, $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures were reportedly purchased while $192 million in oil futures were sold. Orders four to six times larger than anything else happening at that hour. No news event. No economic data scheduled. Senator Chris Murphy said publicly, “Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer? This is corruption. Mind-blowing corruption.” The same pattern appeared before the Maduro capture in January, before the Liberation Day tariff pause last spring. This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern.
James called it what it is: blatant, obvious, and almost certainly consequence-free. He connected it to the 2008 financial crisis, where financial crimes of enormous scale produced almost no accountability. He put it in terms that cut through the abstraction: someone made hundreds of millions of dollars from a single trade on a Monday morning when people cannot afford eggs and cannot put fuel in their cars. He called it the “let them eat cake” moment of this administration. The people running this country are enriching themselves and their friends off the suffering they are creating with their own policy decisions. James also flagged that he personally had to pay £26 in Trump tariffs to collect a birthday gift sent from the US, Trader Joe’s products that are only available in America. That is the policy in its most human form.
I also added that the prediction markets, Polymarket and Kalshi, are completely unregulated spaces where people are effectively gambling on war and death in real time. I called for a full ban on stock trading for all high-level government officials while in office, and robust regulation of prediction markets that have become vehicles for insider trading on national security decisions and everyday reality itself.
Netanyahu, The War’s Extension & The Importance of Nuance
While Trump was announcing peace talks, Netanyahu was deepening Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, with over a million people displaced and a humanitarian crisis growing by the day. James and I both took time to say the quiet part loud: Netanyahu is extending this war for domestic political reasons, but we also made a point that Netanyahu’s actions must be criticized with care so we don’t stoke antisemitism.
James made the distinction that I want to be unambiguous about. He criticizes the Iranian regime. He criticizes the Israeli government. He does not criticize the Iranian people or the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish people are not responsible for Netanyahu’s actions. Most of the Jewish people James knows in Britain are on pro-Palestinian marches every weekend. The equation between the Israeli government and Jewish people globally is not only false, it is a trap, and Netanyahu benefits from it every time someone falls into it. James also noted that Bibi Netanyahu uses antisemitism as a shield to deflect from actions that have nothing to do with Jewish culture or faith.
I pushed back on something in the chat where a viewer said Israel had lost the right to exist as a country. No. That is not where we go. There is a line. The Israeli people deserve safety. I also noted that Netanyahu and his far-right coalition are doing in Gaza and Lebanon is setting back the Israeli cause. His conduct is what feeds those who would generalize their contempt for a government into contempt for an entire people. I have spent years editing academic work on antisemitism and extremism. I know the tropes and the history. And that is exactly why I refuse to let the nuance get flattened.
James closed this section with something worth repeating. He said: Be angry, be outraged, criticize every corrupt man in every country who is destroying this planet and oppressing his own people. But the second that anger falls into hate of people who had nothing to do with any of this, you have fallen for the trap. The people trying to divide us, Trump, Netanyahu, the Ayatollahs, the white supremacists, are all two cheeks of the same arse. They all benefit when we generalize. The only response is to resist it.
Bottom Line
Trump is happy-talking a war he cannot control, receiving briefings as propaganda reels, sending contradictory signals that even America’s allies cannot decode, and presiding over what looks very much like systematic insider trading on his own market-moving announcements. The agencies that would investigate it have been dismantled. The IRGC’s mosaic leadership cannot be bombed into submission. Israel’s offensive is extending the conflict while Trump claims it is over.
James’s closing words said it best. The clock is running out. The world does not have enough oil supply to sustain a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Something is going to break. And when it does, we need to be ready to hold this administration accountable for everything it has done.
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