Trump’s Casino Royale: The Iran War

Given that Donald Trump conceives of the presidency as a casino—why else would he be trying to makeover the White House to look like the Bellagio?—it makes sense that his administration has turned the war with Iran into an insider-trading scheme.

It used to be that wars were fought to make “the world safe for democracy” or “to end all wars” (a World War I expression), but now wars are fought so that Trump insiders can get rich quick in prediction markets or to help the president’s family (and its remittance men) corner the Persian Gulf oil market.

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Part of the reason why the war is lingering in the Persian Gulf is that several sides in the conflict—in particular the United States and Iran—have an interest in high-priced oil, which may explain why Iran is blockading the Strait of Hormuz, and the Trump administration is blockading Iran. Make that win-win kaching sound.

I realize that at the start of the war, Trump was babbling on in his midnight posts about regime change in Iran and shutting off its access to enriched uranium, but those declarations of war were always just investment smoke-screens, as talking up oil at $100-a-barrel would hardly work to win many seats in the mid-term elections.

That said, Trump’s only interest in public office is to cash in his chips, not to help some drudge of a congressman win in Missouri’s fifth district.

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Trump’s mercantilism goes something like this: in exchange for the oil-exporting states (Saudi Arabia, all those friendly Gulf sheikdoms, etc.) tipping billions into his family companies, Trump does his insane best to drive the price of oil over $100-a-barrel by turning the Persian Gulf into a shooting gallery.

It may not be the cleanest of transactions, but you cannot argue with the bottom line if you’re sitting on a country full of oil (something Trump shares with many oligarchic cronies, including the Saudis and Vladimir Putin ).

Left to its own devices, the oil market would probably find equilibrium around $18-a-barrel, which explains Trump’s sudden interest in fighting a war in the Persian Gulf (to get Iran to agree what it agreed in 2015).

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When it comes to foreign policy, insider trading is about the only geopolitical concept that Trump understands.

Best of all, to manipulate world markets, Trump has resources that go well beyond the reach of other fraudsters, such as Bernie Madoff, who to spin his schemes was reduced to inventing stock and bond positions.

On his side, Trump has a captive, wholly-owned Supreme Court behind his back, which guarantees him immunity even it turns out that the president himself is the source of the leaks that allowed insider traders to make hundreds of millions trading in prediction markets.

Given that Trump talks out loud to everyone (including, most often, to himself), it is not surprising that a few White House junior staffers have started up trading rings (think Teapot Dome or Crédit Mobilier but add on some zeros) that miraculously “predict” when Trump is about to kill the ayatollah or dispatch the navy to the Gulf of Oman.

Best of all, when these insider traders are caught (which would be easy, if the Department of Justice had any interest in looking for them), Trump can pardon the guilty even if the blockchain goes back to some of his sons or his estranged wife (all of whom cashed in cryptocurrency positions when Trump was sworn in for his second term).

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Monetizing the Iranian war for the Trump family would be the natural outcome of his presidency, which in its second term discovered that just by threatening tariffs on foreign-made goods, the Trump syndicate could extract payoffs (gold bars and watches from Switzerland; golf courses from Qatar; or billions in cash from Asia) from threatened nations.

Then there was the war in Gaza, in which Trump sent American weaponry to Israel so that the Israeli Defense Forces could wipe out Gaza’s civilian population. When that was in hand, Donald Trump himself could be anointed chairman of Gaza’s Board of Peace (initiation fees are $1 billion) with the mission of turning the Strip into a Vegas-like development with seaside condos and golf resorts for “world people”.

Gaza’s economic model (let Trump make billions from the misery of the Palestinians) is not unlike the initial public offering now in play in Venezuela.

There, the U.S. military was dispatched to take over the local petroleum market and deliver authority over the oil-export operating cash account to one Donald J. Trump, who presumably will cite his cloak of immunity from the Supreme Court should a few billion petrodollars go missing or should the IRS come after him for failing to file a FNBAR report on his overseas disbursement account.

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To corner the oil market in the Persian Gulf for himself, Trump has had a lot of practice at using the power of the presidency to enrich himself.

Take Trump Media, the social media company that trades publicly on NASDAQ under the symbol DJT and which has a market capitalization of about $2.6 billion (it used to be about $10 billion, but we know how attracted Trump is to red ink and bankruptcy).

Trump owns 114 million shares in the company, which is roughly 50% of the float. He received this controlling interest, not by investing any cash, but by agreeing to post (but only for six hours) his social media bile on its site; in other words, he was gifted $1.3 billion (in today’s market), which was funded by listing the shares on NASDAQ and dumping the rest on “greater fools”.

Because the Securities and Exchange Commission (nominally the markets’ watchdog, but now their sleeping kitten) reports to Trump, no one cares that the American president is sitting on top of a pyramid that last year reported sales of $3.6 million and operating losses of $711 million.

Nor did it weaken the president’s get-out-of-jail cards that both the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and the FBI Director, Kash Patel, made millions on the pad from Trump Media before and after they joined the Trump administration as the top cops.

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I assume that the war in Iran will end when the mullahs finally agree to convert the Islamic Republic into a meme coin controlled by World Liberty Financial, the DeFi (decentralized finance) platform that is jointly-managed by the Trump and Witkoff families. (Donald Trump’s title is “Chief crypto advocate; Don Jr.’s is “Web3 Ambassador”; and Baron’s is “DeFi Visionary.”) Why else are we sending Jared and Steve to Islamabad, if not to come back with a PER$IA coin deal?

When on January 27, 2025, Donald Trump issued his own meme coin, $TRUMP, that cryptocurrency was tethered only to political opportunism—meaning nearly all the funds used to purchase $TRUMP went directly into the president’s pockets. (The First Lady had her own coin side hustle called MELANIA; the name was changed, the gas was the same.)

At its high, $TRUMP had a market cap of $27 billion, although today it is down to $662 million, perhaps a predictive indicator as to how the mid-term elections might go in November. I hope the Trumps didn’t miss that predictive bet.

Even if they did, the template is there for World Liberty Financial to handle the issuance of PER$IA, which, if they wanted to make it a stablecoin, could be backed by Iranian oil export revenue, if not a little eternal salvation.

Iran could get some up-front funding to rebuild its bombed-out country, and the Trump family could gain experience in learning how further to monetize splendid little wars—clearly with more to follow.