The Iran War is a Scam and Trump is planning to rig the Mid-term Elections

What are we doing in Iran?

Everyone assumes that Donald Trump started the Iran war because Bibi Netanyahu talked him into it, and he didn’t consider the possibility that the Straits of Hormuz would be blocked in retaliation for tens of thousands of airstrikes on Iranian targets. But what if he did consider it? What if his reasoning went like this?

“The United States produces enough oil to supply its own needs, especially with the addition of Venezuelan oil. Therefore, I can force the rest of the world into a record oil supply crisis (not to mention helium, fertilizer, plastic feedstocks, etc.) and the US will be fine.”

Here it gets really dark: what if he planned all along to profit from the oil shortage? With the US supposedly insulated from the supply shock, the oil companies can get increased profits from raising gas and diesel prices, and Trump et al. can profit from insider trading whenever he pretends there’s a breakthrough in peace talks. He figures he can drag it out for a few months, then release it in time for the midterms and then claim he’s won a tremendous victory in the peace talks.

Remember that during his last presidential campaign, he is said to have allegedly gotten a group of oil executives together in private and told them that if they donated a billion dollars to his campaign, they could have whatever they wanted after he got elected. He’s accustomed to making false, cheap campaign promises, so this story rings true to me. After all, Elon Musk alone gave more than a quarter of a billion dollars to the Trump campaign.

The Way Trump Honors His Commitments

To Trump, there’s a big difference between promises made in public (in search of votes?) and commitments made in private (often in exchange for promises of large sums of money). The former are cheap and disposable, just as often lies as truth. The latter are binding commitments, transactions made in exchange for money or favors. It’s a truism that Trump is a transactional actor and a con man. He is also inexplicably loyal to dictators and people with a net worth larger than his own.

The insider trading part of this was nailed down by a Reuters investigation. I won’t link to this, you’ll have to trust me, but they found that about twenty minutes before each Trump announcement of a supposed breakthrough, there is a sudden huge buy or sell order in the oil markets– to the tune of several billion dollars so far. These suspiciously well-timed trades have made the anonymous traders very, very rich.

A Special Forces soldier was recently arrested for a successful bet on a betting market that Maduro of Venezuela would be out of office in the next few days. I think he was just a fall guy because the amount he won was peanuts compared to these oil market trades. Such trades have to have a lot of money collateral behind them, so this is not something the average soldier could do.

There are those who say that Trump cares more about the loyalty of Republican office holders than the possibility that Republicans could lose control of the House and Senate in the mid-term elections coming up. This is based on the fact that he has ruthlessly primaried anyone who is insufficiently loyal to him, like Senator Cornyn. He is making an example of the Senator to show that he wants supporters who are rabidly loyal and equally without ethical scruples.

Cassidy Too

Trump also had Senator Bill Cassidy primaried, so he will be out at the end of the year as well. Cassidy famously voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges, one of seven Republicans who crossed the lines to make it a “bipartisan” effort to convict him. Of course, McConnell didn’t vote to convict, and without his leadership the rest of the Republican Senators failed to make it a truly convincing effort to destroy Trump politically. It is said that “if you try to destroy Trump, you had better kill him or else he will hit you back ten times as hard.”

Another lesson that Cassidy painfully learned was the futility of his attempt to get back in Trump’s good graces. Cassidy voted to confirm RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr would not have been elevated to that position without Cassidy’s vote because he had no training in medicine or biology– only as a lawyer with extensive experience suing vaccine manufacturers.

Despite Cassidy’s training and experience as a physician, he failed to drill into RFK’s complete lack of experience in medicine or his lucrative anti-vaccine legal practice. We wound up with a vaccine-denying, anti-science head of HHS who has cooperated in the destruction of our scientific establishment and starvation of vital research work over the last 18 months.

Cassidy was humiliated by that vote, and for what? Nothing could get him back in Trump’s good graces. He should have followed his instinct and training to reject RFK Jr. Giving up your principles for Trump does you no good; he’ll eventually throw you under the bus at the first opportunity. Conservative Republicans in the Senate seem to be oblivious to Trump’s strategy of appointing people with no experience as heads of departments to cause maximum chaos and loss of function. He has applied this strategy to the departments that he has not explicitly vowed to destroy– such as the Department of Education.

The strategy of destruction seems to be a central feature of the 2025 document disavowed by Trump before the election. Large parts of this plan are in fact being implemented, without public notice. DOGE was only the beginning; any part of the government spared their decimation is still on the schedule. Trump appointed, temporarily, a man with zero experience in any form of intelligence gathering or evaluation as Director of National Intelligence. His justification? “He can fire a lot of people who are deadwood” (my paraphrase!) This also applies to a number of Iran experts whose opinions we don’t need while we’re at war with the country (that was sarcastic).

Iran war started without a heads up to the American public

The fact that Trump started the Iran war without consulting the American public (much less Congress) seems to show that he either doesn’t care about public opinion or he is fatally misinformed. I submit that it is the latter. Those around him (who have a vested interest in white nationalism/supremacy and making money through rent-seeking from major US corporations) have been telling him that the “real” American public approves of everything he thinks up.

The advisors around Trump claimed that the public unreservedly supports any offensive military action against Iran as long as soldiers aren’t killed. Apparently they forgot to model the effect that rising gasoline prices and resurgent inflation would have on public mood.

So Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is what matters to him; they’ll reflexively back him if he does anything that suits their prejudices (people who chant “Death to America” are bad so its OK to bomb them without warning in the middle of negotiations).

Therefore, the policy changes he favors, which happen to destroy African-American political representation in Congress, are just righteous payback for their opposition to his regressive policies and their lack of support for his inspirational leadership.

The extreme gerrymandering and destruction of cohesive districts like Memphis that vote Democratic and happen to be African-American are part and parcel of this urge to dominate the Republican Party. Gerrymandering makes for more extreme politics, especially on the right. Obliterating representation for Black voters seems to be right up his racist alley, and makes room for more white representatives (who are likely to be Republicans…) There is a theoretical risk that aggressive gerrymandering could blow back in the face of strong opposition– a blue wave could overtop districts that aren’t “Republican enough”.

Frantic Pace of Scandals

So a deluge of unpopular actions and situations over the last six months has made people’s head spin if they are paying attention too closely. First, Trump’s defeat on the Epstein files debate ended with a humiliating and nearly unanimous House and Senate diktat that the government release all the files in its possession by a date certain (which was not met). Second, Marjorie Taylor Greene noisily defected from the MAGA caucus and resigned her House seat (as soon as her pension vested). Third, Joe Rogan posted comments critical of Trump, especially after he started the Iran war.

Fourth, the Iran war.

Fifth, Trump’s defeat on his “$1.776 billion” compensation fund. Backlash to his controversial proposal, even among Republicans, forced him to withdraw the fund– although he hasn’t yet withdrawn the most corrupt part: freedom from IRS audits and penalties for himself, his family, and their corporations.

Sixth, popular outrage at the shootings of two American Minnesotans (who were protesting ICE peacefully) forced ICE operations to go underground. Since then, ICE roundups have proceeded without any publicity.

ICE currently holds about 60,000 people; it has a target/projection capacity of 100,000 individuals and 30,000 families. “Supplemental funding bills provide ICE enough resources to run upward of 135,000 beds through the end of October 2029.” (via American Immigration Council)

ICE strategy appears to be focused on rapid departures of individuals and families it targets. It has stopped allowing people to bail out and is imprisoning them in squalid, overcrowded, unsanitary, disgusting conditions without access to lawyers or family visits. It repeatedly advertises for people to “self-deport” and offers detainees opportunities to give up their attempts to stay.

ICE is detaining many people who are sincerely going through the asylum procedures because they are escaping real persecution. It is attempting to force them to give up their cases by detaining them instead of allowing humanitarian parole as had been the practice for the last fifteen years. Normally, asylum seekers who passed a “credible fear” screening were paroled. During Trump’s first term, he attempted to detain all asylum seekers but was forced by a lawsuit to restore parole temporarily.

On the first day of his second term, he terminated all humanitarian parole programs and shut down the “CBP One” app that was allowing applications for asylum from across the border. This has caused chaos in the courts, with multiple contradictory appellate rulings; a Supreme Court ruling is expected in early 2027 (and is likely to support mandatory detention due to semi-believable but motivated reasoning).

The result of these policies is institutional cruelty and degradation, but this is OK because the victims are “other”– nonwhite, non-American, poor, inconsequential. The outrage that this cruelty has provoked seems to be intentional and it has obscured attempts to publicize other, more serious violations of law and ethics. Congress has prepaid this policy for three years so that when Democrats take over the House they won’t be able to take funds from ICE.

Direct costs of detaining 135,000 people total roughly $8 billion a year. DHS plans to buy large industrial/commercial warehouses and convert them into holding facilities, costing $38 billion. Congress has authorized $45 billion for ICE detention plans and supplemental spending of $11.25 billion a year through the end of fiscal 2029 (which ends in September 2029). It was able to do this with a simple majority in the Senate because it was shoehorned into a supplemental spending bill which is allowed twice a year

Seventh, and most recent, Congress has decided not to take up Trump’s proposal for a billion in taxpayer funds to finish his White House ballroom. It even delayed taking up the Republican end run that prevents a Democratic controlled Congress from reducing ICE’s funds for next year: a three-year funding proposal that insulates the agency from later second-guessing.

Parenthetically, a program that allows immigrants to live in the community under supervision (such as ankle monitors or smart-device check-ins) costs less than $10 per person per day versus a cost of roughly $160 under detention– about $5.6 billion a year more for 135,000 people. Most of this money goes to private prison corporations, with more going to transportation costs.

Eighth, in a news item that has been hidden by many more serious stories, a federal judge ordered Trump to take his name off the Kennedy Center within two weeks. Uncharacteristically, Trump responded by saying he was giving up his attempts to rescue the Center from its dilapidated condition and Congress could deal with it from now on. Normally this story would be handled with wall to wall 24 hour coverage but there just isn’t room for a local news item like this any more. A crowd did gather to watch the letters being removed after 3:00 in the morning on June 13.

This perfect storm of events has helped to obscure reporting about the massive, unprecedented grift that has been going on ever since the election. Of course, the cryptocurrency story was big; people aren’t familiar with that particular scam, but it was clear who was profiting from all this meme coin production. Later, more profitable long-running cons are still going on under the radar. There’s so much other bad news that it crowds out the corruption story.

There are those who hypothesize that Trump has a deep, dark purpose behind all his bizarre behavior: that he’s crazy like a fox. I disagree. I think all his behavior stems from a few simple assumptions (his obvious racism, misogyny, and xenophobia), his naked self-interest, and his complete lack of principles/morals/ethics. When you multiply this by his incipient dementia and resultant disinhibition, you get a proposal for a 250 ft high triumphal arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery.

Trump tries (hard) to avoid being seen as racist or misogynist, but the truth easily peeks through. He doesn’t try very hard to avoid being seen as a xenophobe– he thinks everyone is a xenophobe. Thus his “gaffe” in his first official candidate speech, when he called Mexican immigrants some ugly names. He thinks we all see Mexicans that way.

My Dark Suspicions and Paranoia

So this thought I had, that Trump is profiting from high oil prices, sort of assumes that he knew what he was doing when he started the Iran war rather than the idea that he blundered into it. Of course, he could have mistakenly thought that we would be insulated from an oil crisis because we produce so much ourselves. He could have discounted the worldwide fertilizer shortage with resultant famine as just being a few people in “shithole countries” suffering.

My extremely dark suspicion is that Trump started the Iran war knowing that the Hormuz Strait would be closed. In fact, he planned to profit from it and to steer profits in the way of his friends, the oil companies.

This isn’t even the worst thing he’s doing or planning to do

Don’t get me started on what he’s doing to Cuba, starting with a de facto oil embargo. Or the fact that a million people, mostly in Africa, have died so far because he cut off funding for USAID to give food and vaccines to starving children– a disaster that will be made worse by the fertilizer shortage. Our response to the new Ebola outbreak has been hampered by the loss of US support for health infrastructure in Africa.

What Is Trump Going to do About Iran and the Midterm Elections?

The Iranians are calling Trump’s bluff and refusing to commit to any terms at all to end the war. They want the war to continue indefinitely because they feel that they can sustain suffering better than we can. They are right.

Trump’s circle is desperately trying to figure out how to give Iran everything they want and spin it as an American victory. Their only play is to wait a month or two, then present Iran with terms they’d be nuts to refuse, like a complete end to the sanctions and a $12 billion down payment (what’s frozen in overseas assets right now) on reconstruction– with nuclear negotiations delayed indefinitely.

The Iranians might decide to humiliate Trump further, but they’d be better off taking a sweet deal– assuming Trump has the sense to offer it.

The mid-term elections are looming. All bets are off there. The currents are flowing swiftly against the Republicans but there is a lot of suspicion that Trump will try something underhanded to affect the election results. He won’t try to prevent elections but he has already been claiming that they will be rigged by the Democrats– so he can pre-emptively claim any losses are due to fraud.

The most likely interventions Trump will undertake are seizure of ballot boxes in specific locations that are heavily Democratic and attempts to stop vote counting early (to preserve the red mirage that occurs because Republicans are more likely to vote in person on election day and have their votes counted first).

Cases of ballot seizures have already occurred, first in Fulton County, Georgia. In Riverside County, California, ballots from a special election held in November 2025 were seized by a County sheriff. In Maricopa County, Arizona, the DOJ seized digital ballot images from the 2020 election. In Wayne County, Michigan, the DOJ demanded the handover of ballots from the November 2024 election, but the county office was unable to comply– stating that local municipal clerks had possession of the physical ballots under Michigan law.

Recently, in Wayne County, Wisconsin, the FBI has begun subpoenaing records and interviewing election workers and police officers about the 2020 presidential balloting. This suggests that the FBI or DOJ has an overall agenda to investigate a number of counties in which Trump had poor results in 2020, leading to his loss of the election.

Trump and his followers are attempting to find the fraud that they are certain must have caused his election loss in 2020, The fact that people voted against him would be much more easily explained by the reaction to his policies during the COVID pandemic– but he can’t accept that anything he did would keep people from actually voting for him.

Trump is also pushing an investigation into a conspiracy that Obama supposedly engaged in to try to prevent him from being elected in 2016. Any strategy that Obama and the Democrats cooked up to try to keep Trump out office must have been illegal by definition– in his mind, anyway.

What Will We Do?

We’ll do nothing to stop him because he’s inevitable. That’s not right. Maybe we should do something illegal to stop him. The possibilities are endless when you give up the constraints of law. Just use your imagination.