Greed is the only thing keeping Trump from dropping a nuke on Iran

Trump has been flirting with the idea of using nuclear weapons since he ran for office in 2016. That year, during a townhall with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, when Matthews told Trump, “They’re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.” Trump answered, “Then why are we making them?” During the same interview, Trump said, “Would there be a time when it could be used? Possibly. Possibly,” finishing his comments on the use of nuclear weapons by telling Matthews he wasn’t going to “take any cards off the table.”

During a national security briefing at the Pentagon after he took office in 2017, Trump told the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that he wanted the U.S. nuclear stockpile increased significantly. It was after Trump’s comment on nukes that Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” on his way out of the briefing.

Today, The Economist ran a cover story called “Blind Fury” on why the “War in Iran is making Trump look weaker – and angrier.” They’re right. Trump’s fury is on the rise. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the room yesterday when TV footage showed explosions at the South Pars and Ras Laffan natural gas facilities being hit in an exchange of missiles by Israel and Iran. The explosions sent oil prices above $120 a barrel before they settled at $109 late today.

Big explosions give Donald Trump bad ideas. There he is in his little dining room off the Oval Office quaffing a Diet Coke and stuffing a burger in his mouth, and all those fireballs belong to somebody else.

The point is this: Everything about this war is pissing him off. He thought it was going to be the one-and-done kind of deal he pulled off in Venezuela. Knock off the Big Leader, wait until they appoint someone who’s intimidated by your power, then make a deal. He came out of his Maduro kidnap with 50,000 barrels of Venezuelan oil and a cash-transfer of $500 million to an account in Qatar that was reported to be “controlled by Donald Trump.” Now we’re hearing that the $500 million was “returned” to Venezuela to be “disbursed for the benefit of the Venezuelan people at the discretion of the U.S. government, an unnamed U.S. government official told Reuters.”

You believe that one, and I’ve got a rare metals mining claim in Nevada to sell you. Do you remember when it was reported that at a fundraising dinner, Trump “asked” the big oil companies to contribute $1 billion for his election campaign? Subsequent reporting revealed that oil executives and companies contributed hundreds of millions in “dark money” to Trump superPACs. You know what dark money is: It’s a rumor. It’s money we don’t know the source of, we can’t watch it moving, we don’t know where it ends up. What we can be sure of is that if it’s dark money, some of it ends up in the pocket of the man who asked for it. Trump cancelled tax incentives for solar and wind energy and gave more than $20 billion in breaks for fossil fuel companies. Do you think they didn’t kick back some to him?

Yesterday, it was announced that the Treasury Department “eased” sanctions on Venezuelan oil. Don’t you love that word, “eased?” What the fuck does it even mean? Before that, Trump’s little money-gofer Scott Bessent was “easing” sanctions on Russian oil. Then the stories started coming that tankers carrying Russian oil were parking in ports and off-loading oil. Eight days ago, it was reported that Russia is making $150 million a day in unsanctioned oil revenues. Then the figure moved up to $230 million a day. Now they’re using the word “billions” to describe the windfall Russia is making on oil.

Who is in charge of Russian oil? Who put in the oligarchs that get all that cash? Where does a goodly portion of it go? Let me see if I can remember…oh yes! Vladimir Putin! Who has Trump been on the phone with since his war began? Uhhh…I’m having trouble here, can you help me? I’ve got it! Putin!

Today, it was reported that Oil-money-boy Bessent may remove sanctions on…wait for it…Iran’s oil that is currently floating around various oceans in tankers. How much of it, you ask? Oh, only 140 million barrels of it. Who is Iran’s only ally in this war besides maybe Belarus? That’s right. Russia.

With all this oil money sloshing around, do you think some of it could be going to you-know-who?

Have you heard of crypto? Does your recollection go back far enough to recall what Trump said when he was in office the first time? He said crypto was a scam and called Bitcoin “not money based on thin air.” We have only one real currency in the USA, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”

And then came Liberty Financial. Trump’s attitude about Bitcoin and everything else crypto started changing the minute he moved into the White House in 2025 and crypto started flowing, or squiring electrons, or whatever the hell it does. Tens of not hundreds of millions are going into Trump’s pocket in crypto of every sort. That $500 million in Venezuelan oil money that was “returned” could have been $400 million by the time it hit a treasury account. After what Elon Musk’s DOGE boys did at the IRS, Social Security, and Treasury, will you ever trust another figure with a dollar sign next to it released by anything or anyone connected to Donald Trump?

There is only one thing Donald Trump loves more than political power, and that is money. It’s why he got in the game in the first place. Was he a billionaire back in 2014 to 2015 when he first started thinking seriously about running for president? He may have called himself a billionaire, but he didn’t have billions in a bank. Come to think of it, there was only one bank that would do business with him back then, Deutsche Bank, and he owed them money, not the other way around.

So, what is Trump going to do, now that he is loading his buddies’ bottom lines with oil profits ripped from the pockets of his MAGA faithful and pocketing some of it for himself?

The word “unsustainable” begins to enter the picture here. Profits are fine with Donald, so long as they’re going in the right pockets, including of course, his. But there is this other bothersome word that keeps being mentioned: the “economy.” Economies are made of money, but they hate being unstable, and they really, really hate chaos. And that’s what’s going on in the world economy right now: chaos. Trump would love to keep his oil money scam going, but it’s beginning to cost him politically, and even with all the Bitcoin and other crypto cash he’s got stashed away, he’s still got just under three years to go as president, and the Economist, bless its heart, is exactly right. This war is making him look weak.

A quarter of the stories that ran in my newsfeed today were about the MAGA crackup. Another quarter were about his crashing poll numbers. And then there is the quarter of stories about the shellacking Republicans are going to take in November at the polls. A new scary word has begun to be flung about along with “House,” and that is “Senate.” The new guy up in Maine is looking like he’s going to beat Janet Mills in the primary, and he’s young, which suddenly counts a great deal, and it looks like he’ll knock off the execrable Susan Collins. All of a sudden we’re seeing the word “Iowa” and “Senate” together. “Shift by Independents Leaves Iowa race close.” There you go.

Independents don’t like Trump’s war on Iran at all. Not even a tiny bit. Neither do young voters, and young voters are turning out in record numbers in Democratic primaries, which is really, really good, right?

All this means that Trump is going to have to figure out a way to end this war and end it fast. That’s why we’re also seeing the word “offramp” in about half the stories about the war. But the problem with offramps is, they go places. If you take the wrong offramp, you can end up in a bad neighborhood. In fact, Tom Wolfe wrote an entire novel about this unfortunate truth.

Trump’s choice of offramps has gone from narrow to practically invisible. He could have probably declared victory and gotten the hell out of Iran in the first week, or maybe even the beginning of the second. But he can’t now that Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz.

He’s fumbling around trying out his allies and finding that allies only show up when you’re nice to them. He hasn’t been nice at all. Today Trump made a “joke” about Pearl Harbor as he sat next to his ally, the Japanese premier in the Oval Office. Responding to a question about why he hadn’t notified allies about the attack on Iran before it happened, Trump explained that it wouldn’t have been a surprise. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan? OK, why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

You could have fried an egg on the top of the head of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

So, what’s he going to do? Trump would just love to lob a couple of nukes at Iran, but there is the not-terribly-small problem of world markets. Oil at $200 a barrel? Gas at $8 to $10 a gallon? Mortgage rates through the roof of houses not being built?

World depression, anybody?

So the guy who came into office for the first time over ten years ago itching to increase our nuclear stockpile and do something with the nukes, to the point that General Mark Milley was warning military commanders to call him before they followed any crazy orders given by the guy in the Oval Office who was screaming that he had won the election he had lost and was going to do something about it, damn it!

Thank goodness for crypto. Thank goodness Donald Trump was born with his hand in a cookie jar – or is it Big Mac jar? – and has never pulled his hand out of it.

Here is something I never thought I’d say: Greed is good, especially when it’s Donald Trump’s greed. It’s going to save us…hopefully.