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.
Iran is playing Trump like a fiddle because they understand the real power running the US. So they turn their guns on Saudi Arabia, and choke the flow of oil because Trump is openly desperate to get gasoline prices down before the fall. No one in the USA cares about Iranian schoolgirls, pedophilia or even corruption, but $5 a gallon of gas is personal.
I might be biased because I switched to electric but…
…I hope it stays up so he gets hanged by the pump.
Edit: we can dump trump at the pump. Like Mussolini! Huh… interesting name for an electric charging station…(Scribble scribble)
Trump and Putin could end up in 100 years as the greatest environmentalists in history. The entire world is working to wean off oil.
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.
Everything is a Epstein distraction and market manipulation.
It’s boring, quite frankly.
The “hardball strategy” works when stiffing those less powerful than you. Anyway, Trump only cosplayed as a businessman. He got his money through inheritance and money-laundering. He couldn’t negotiate a quantity discount for McDonalds cheeseburgers.
And it’s not even TACO Tuesday! Tsk tsk!
Of course conservatives/regressives pick a coward to represent them.
They don’t mind if he’s a coward, as long as he’s a bully.
Iran knows his threats are all bullshit. There is NO support in America for a ground invasion, and they know it. They’ll just wait it out until Trump switches his attention to Greenland or some other dumb adventure, and his interest wanes.
Meanwhile, they now fully control the Strait. Who needs a nuke?
The thing is trump got some stuff because the countries he pulled bulltrump on before were all heavily intertwined with the dollar economy. Heavily sanctioned places like iran don’t have that leverage. I bet europe and china are jelly with their ability to tell him to go hang.
Europa is just ignoring his shouting at the moment. No statements, no retaliation, just back to their usual slow bureaucratic movement and untangling of those interdependencies.
Saudi Arabia is now scared and Trump will do whatever they want.
“Buy!”. “Sell!”. “Buy!”. “Sell!”. And the beat goes on…
This is why they stopped negotiating
They can’t trust anything he says or does, minute-by-minute. They could grind out a peace deal that EVERYBODY agrees to, and we could wake up the next to find that he bombed them mercilessly, on a whim.
İmperialist U.S.
It’s Tuesday, right?
8D Uno. This guy is a genius.
it’s monday.
oh wait, his tuesday’s gonna be full of making fun of the newly-announced months-dead mcconnell, he had to fit his chickening out in early
Did he get played by that evil master mind Trump again? He’s really his equal!
