Surprise, Surprise, Surprise! The World Got Trumped Again!

Mar 24, 2026

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Yesterday, Trump told Iran it has until the end of Monday to free the Strait of Hormuz, or he will destroy all of Iran’s power plants, starting with the biggest one. Iran replied (paraphrased), “Not interested, but we’ll certainly start destroying everyone else’s power plants if you do that, including Israel’s nuclear plants. The war must go on.”

It would appear Iran’s counter-threat hit Trump in the rump like a Shahab-3 missile suppository. As soon as Trump saw that his big threat fell on deaf ears, he found a way to chicken out of his bluff today by telling the nation the US and Iran had held “productive” talks; therefore, he is going to delay destruction of Iran’s power plants for five days to see where the talks go. The stock market, which reliably trades on Trump’s usually vain words, leaped 900 points (settling to 600 by day’s end) with many rushing in to buy as soon as Trump delivered his message.

Iran didn’t let him get away with that face-saving move and called his claim of “productive” talks “fake news.” That didn’t matter, though, because Trump’s assurances had already achieved their purpose. This was a TACO Trade that worked to perfection. You see, only fifteen minutes before Trump’s announcement, the volume of shares bought in what had been thin market trade shot up in a straight, quick spike! Someone (or someones) bought a sudden bunch of stocks only minutes before the president let the world know what he was backing down on his megathreat of blowing up all of Iran’s power plants.

It makes one wonder if Mar-a-Lago members got the advance presidential tip. Maybe that is a benefit for paying those high membership fees. Or was this strictly a family trade or a White-House elite trade as staffers knew what their president was about to do. Just ordinary insider trading in that case, not market rigging, as the other cases would be. After all, the market rush of greed whenever the president says something it wants to hear is as predictable as the president getting the largest serving of dessert when entertaining dignitaries just to show them who is boss. Ah well, all is fair in love and war.

After the trade was complete and Iran called “fake” on the news, Trump toughened back up and warned Iran that “total decimation” was coming if they went past his five-day grace period. The market ignored this entirely because it doesn’t look that far forward anymore. Trades are short-term, made in nanoseconds, and often switched back mere seconds after a trade triggers other algorithms to all buy in or sell. So “total decimation” five days from now is news for another day and another trade.

Trump didn't realize that “total decimation” is impossible because “decimate” means to kill one-in-ten, and 10% destruction, by definition, can never be total. That’s a common mistake about the meaning of a word used by the Romans to speak of punishment they doled out after they captured a city where they grouped the citizens by tens and then randomly killed one in every group to teach the city a hard lesson. A little Roman roulette.

Nevertheless, most people use the word to mean large-scale destruction. So, I’m not faulting Trump for not knowing that, since I didn’t know it myself until a year or two ago; but I thought it was a fitting symbol of how Trump, on a nearly daily basis (and often multiple times a day) makes claims or promises that sound way bigger what he apparently means, based on the outcome.

We shouldn’t be surprised when one day TheRump says he is applying huge tariffs; then, when the market bombs, says the next day the tariffs won’t need to be that huge because he heard a good word from some unnamed individual (so no one can deny the word). If he does get carried away and names the party, they almost always do deny it. We shouldn’t be surprised when one day TheRump says the war will end soon, and the next day he says he is expanding the war with troops moving in. We shouldn’t be surprised when one day farts out of his mouth that he will blow up all the power plants in Iran and the next he says he won’t. And we should not be surprised that he or others in the know capitalize on his daily vacillations with some hugely profitable stock trades. All in a day’s work.

Today’s Trump Trade worked well for jawboning down oil prices, too, which slid 11% today. There should be a big party at Mar-a-Lago tonight for the billionaires who will be dancing the flipflop as they wait for their new ballroom to built at the White House. Anyone living over there in Miami, check and see if the lights are all on and if you can hear the music, and report back.