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Friday night on MS NOW’s The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle, I was grateful to be invited back for a full-hour Nightcap panel. I had the opportunity to make two arguments I’ve been building throughout this war.
The first is the one I think members of the media need to be tracking more diligently: the Iran War has been used as a pump and dump scheme, with insiders making millions. I laid this out in detail and in unmistakable terms.
Trump made 3,700 stock trades in Q1. He owns defense contractors while waging a war that benefits them. Reuters found $7 billion in oddly timed oil trades right before Trump’s fake “Iran deal” announcements. Insiders profit while Americans struggle. Stephanie Ruhle has been on this beat nightly, so I’m grateful to her and her team for their relentless coverage of this grift. More journalists should follow suit.
The second point I emphasized is the incompetence argument. If you run the madman theory but have no theory, you’re just left with a madman. Trump’s unpredictability has no strategy behind it. Now, the key objective of the Iran War negotiations is to solve a problem created by the war itself: reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Even if a deal is reached, experts warn of long-lasting global supply shocks. Iran emerges from this war stronger, with more leverage, and the US is left looking weak. Trump created this problem, and he’s failing to fix it.
Ron Insana, Anthony Fisher, and David Rhode were also on the Nightcap panel. What struck me was how well all of our analyses built on each other, and how their expertise validated and deepened the value of the conversation. Anthony broached Trump’s erratic decision-making. Ron laid out why even if a deal to open the Strait were to be struck tomorrow, it would not fix the supply shock already in motion. David closed with the geopolitical verdict: Iran emerges from this war stronger, with new leverage over the global economy, and the most powerful country on earth cannot stop them from using it.
This was a genuinely fantastic panel. You can watch a clip of some key moments above and read key takeaways below.
The Iran War Has Been Used As A Pump And Dump Scheme
All of these stories are tied together. The inflation numbers, Trump’s stock trades, the fake “deal” announcements, and the oil futures flooding the market on cue. Once you see the financial architecture underneath the chaos, it stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like a mechanism.
The economic backdrop makes the grift more devastating. I laid this out directly on the panel: annualized inflation from the Consumer Price Index is at 3.8%, up from 2.9% when Trump walked into office. Americans have spent $450 more on energy since the war began. That is a family’s tax refund wiped out by a war being waged by a president who owns stock in the industries benefiting from it.
Trump owns defense contractors while waging a war that benefits them. I said it plainly: Trump’s stock portfolio includes Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin while waging a war that requires the US to purchase more from defense contractors he has investments in. He owns NVIDIA while greenlighting NVIDIA chip sales to China. The conflicts of interest could not be more transparent.
Reuters analyzed $7 billion in oddly timed trades right before Trump’s Iran announcements. Like clockwork, about 20 minutes before Trump makes these announcements that never come to anything, hundreds of millions of dollars in oil futures flood the market. We do not know exactly who is benefiting. But someone is. And the American people see right through it.
If Republicans think this won’t come up in the midterms, they have another thing coming. I closed this section with the political consequence: the pump and dump framework connects the corruption to the kitchen table. Rising gas prices, rising energy costs, wiped out refunds, and a president making trades in the industries he is directly moving with his decisions. That is the midterm story that writes itself.
A War That Has Made America Weaker
The madman theory only works if there is a theory. There isn’t one, so we’re just left with a madman. We now have a negotiation trying to claw back to a status quo that existed the day before the war started, but it will be impossible to attain.
If you run the madman theory with no theory, you are just left with a madman. I made this point on the panel: some of Trump’s allies have tried to frame his unpredictability as strategic, acting crazy to extract concessions. That is the madman theory. The problem is that there are no consistent goals and no theory of the case. The unpredictability is not a strategy. It is simply the result of the president’s unstable mind.
The deal on the table is trying to solve a problem that the war itself created. I laid this out on the panel: the Strait of Hormuz was open on February 27th, the day before the strikes. The key objective of these negotiations is to reopen it. We are not even talking about nuclear capability or missile programs. We are negotiating to get back to where we started before Trump launched the war. But that’s not a status quo we can return to.
Even if a deal is reached tomorrow, the supply shock is already in motion. Ron Insana extended the argument with the financial reality: oil company executives are warning that not only will it take time to get oil to its destination once the strait reopens, but supplies have been drawn down so severely across the US, Japan, China, and Europe that we could see a global supply crisis regardless. That is true for fertilizer and other materials passing through the Strait as well. Ron’s conclusion: we have no visibility on whether the Strait even reopens within 30 to 60 days of a deal being signed.
Iran emerges from this war stronger, and the most powerful country on earth cannot stop them. David Rhode delivered the geopolitical verdict: there are 60 days of rough negotiations still to come on the nuclear program, and Iran is not budging. Iran can now take control of the Strait of Hormuz, shut it down, and the United States cannot stop them. My take: we’ve handed them a deterrent more effective than a nuclear weapon: the ability to short-circuit the global economy whenever they choose. Trump created this problem. He has no plan to fix it.
Bottom Line
The Iran War is a pump and dump scheme with $7 billion in oddly timed trades, a president who owns defense contractors while waging war, and fake announcements timed like clockwork to move oil markets. And after all of it, this new round of negotiations is trying to solve a problem that the war itself created. The Strait was open the day before the strikes. Now, Iran is stronger, the supply shock is already in motion, and Republicans will answer for this in November.
You can watch more from the A and B blocks of The 11th Hour panel on YouTube:
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