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.
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.
“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!
It’s not TACO or anything like that. It’s just plain and brazen market manipulation.
It’s just plain and brazen market manipulation.
All of his decisions are. He’s not even hiding it anymore
and just in case anyone doesn’t know, this is what he’s done all through his real estate career. he was well known for playing games of chicken with potential business partners by coming to a quasi sense of agreement and then reneg. the only thing that kept him afloat there for a while were his ties to organized crime
What is this, 40 times? Something like that. 40 times he’s threatened to “End Their Civilization,” sending the Dow plummeting, only to change his mind at the last minute, sending the Dow skyrocketing.
All while the Iranians swear they don’t know what he’s talking about.
It’s nothing but market manipulation. These are the kinds of announcements he wants to sell early access to. He wants to monetize his insider trading.
