“Mad King” Trump, “Insane War,” and “Deranged Market”

Original Source: Wall Street CN

On April 23, the US-Iran war entered its eighth week.

Just a few days earlier, a turning point seemed to appear: a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took effect, Iran announced the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and talks in Islamabad appeared imminent. But then, Trump declared the US naval blockade would not be lifted and ordered the boarding and inspection of vessels heading to Iran — Iran promptly announced the re-closure of the strait and forcefully rejected a second round of negotiations.

This volatility is not unprecedented.

From the outbreak of war to the present, this conflict can always be described with one word: madness. A “Mad King” president, who was escorted by aides into the Situation Room, waged an unwinnable war that reversed course by the hour, generating a chaotic market that even mainstream media couldn’t understand.

But newly revealed inside details now let us truly see where this “madness and loss of control” comes from, and where it will steer the situation.

The “Mad King” Trump: The President Shut Out of the Room

On April 22, according to the latest inside information leaked by local US media, a scene during the Easter weekend profoundly revealed how this war is being managed.

At that time, a US F-15 was shot down in Iranian airspace, and two pilots were missing. When the news reached the White House, Trump screamed at his aides for hours.

“The Europeans aren’t giving any help,” he repeated. At that time, the average national gasoline price had risen to $4.09 per gallon, and the images of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis lingered in his mind.

“Look at Carter [the 39th US President]… helicopters, hostages, it cost him the election,” Trump complained then. “What a mess.”

He demanded the military rescue them immediately. But his aides judged that his impatience wouldn’t help. So, they kept the president out of the decision-making room, only going out to update him on progress at key junctures.

Vice President Vance joined via video from Camp David, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles dialed in from her Florida home; the entire team tracked the rescue operation minute by minute — the plane getting stuck in the sand, feinting against the Iranian military… while the president could only wait outside for phone calls.

One pilot was quickly found. The second pilot wasn’t rescued until late Saturday night. Trump didn’t go to sleep until after 2 a.m.

Six hours later, on Easter morning, he sent that social media post that shocked the world: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you will live in hell.” At the end of the post, he attached an Islamic prayer.

This post did not originate from any national security plan. According to senior White House officials, it was Trump’s improvisation. He said he wanted to appear “as unstable and insulting as possible,” because he believed that was the “language Iranians understand.”

After posting it, he asked his aides: “What’s the reaction?”

From someone overwhelmed by fear to a strategist feigning madness — Trump made the switch within 12 hours. The question is: which one is the real him? Or perhaps, both?

International relations scholar John Mearsheimer used a single term in a recent interview: mad king.

“The Mad War”: Destruction of US-Iran Trust Foundation

Under this highly emotional leadership, US diplomatic actions have suffered severe, counterintuitive setbacks, directly leading to the collapse of the peace talks today.

Iran has repeatedly emphasized that it was America’s repeated threats and unpredictability that led them to reject the second round of negotiations.

In his review, Mearsheimer insightfully pointed out that last Friday, an extremely valuable ceasefire window actually appeared: when Iran initially opened the strait as a goodwill gesture, the US should have seized the opportunity to advance the Islamabad talks.

But the Trump administration tore up the tacit understanding at that very moment. Not only did he publicly announce the refusal to lift the naval blockade of Iran, but he even ordered US forces to intercept, fire upon, and board Iranian vessels for inspection.

“The result was that the Iranians did a 180-degree turn and re-closed the strait.”

This tactic, lacking any strategic consistency and “wavering back and forth” at critical moments, completely exhausted Washington’s strategic credibility. In the eyes of Iranian hardliners, the US has become a “madman” without any respect for contracts, making any negotiations meaningless.

The complete collapse of trust directly pushed the peace talks to the brink of death.

“The Mad Strategy”: How Israel “Sold” the War and “Controlled” Trump

And the source of this loss of control lies in Washington’s exceptionally rare “outsourcing” of grand strategy to foreign lobbyists.

International relations scholar John Mearsheimer stated that, except for a very few people like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, most senior US military and intelligence officials held strong skepticism or even opposition towards this war. They clearly foresaw extremely high risks, including Iran’s retaliatory closure of the strait.

But Trump completely ignored the warnings of US experts. Mearsheimer stated bluntly: “It was the Israelis who sold him a bill of goods.”

In the White House Situation Room, Mossad chief David Barnea and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu painted a fantasy for Trump: that the overwhelming power of the US military would bring a swift and decisive victory, rendering unnecessary any concern about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. Trump, fixated on the experience of a “bloodless regime change in hours” in Venezuela, eagerly bought in.

After the war began, Trump saw images of explosions inside Iran and clips of “victory videos” every morning. Aides described him as “shocked” by the scale of military power, repeatedly praising the performance of the US military.

But this “impressive” battlefield display did not translate into political victory. As the war entered deeper waters, strategic loss of control began to manifest.

On one hand, facing the blockade that strangled 20% of global crude oil supply, Trump rejected the military’s recommendation to deploy ground forces to seize Kharg Island (handling 90% of Iran’s oil exports) due to his extreme fear of unacceptable US casualties.

On the other hand, Israel even bypassed the US, directly striking Iran’s largest South Pars gas field, forcing Trump to urgently distance himself on social media. This state of being strategically beholden to others and tactically afraid of incurring costs doomed the war’s trajectory to complete loss of control.

“The Mad Strait of Hormuz”: A Problem No One Planned For

When top decision-makers are both unpredictable and pulled by external forces, execution at the lower levels inevitably descends into chaos. The Strait of Hormuz is the prime example.

Before the war broke out, Trump told his team that the Iranian government would likely capitulate on the strait issue, and even if they didn’t, the US military could handle it. When oil tanker traffic quickly ground to a halt after the bombing began, some White House advisors were caught completely off guard.

Trump later expressed belated surprise: “A guy with a drone can just shut it down.”

This is the most ironic image of the entire story: those who started the war never considered what would happen afterwards.

Facing this dilemma where top leadership lacked a plan for a core chokepoint, Jim Bianco, founder of research firm Bianco Research, put it more bluntly at the Hedgeye investment summit on April 23:

“My frustration is that they had no plan for the Strait of Hormuz, or they had a plan that simply doesn’t work. What the market really cares about now is the flow of oil. The market can be patient on nuclear weapons; but on the flow of oil, the market has zero patience.”

In this game of political back-and-forth, Brent crude has already broken $102, completely reversing last week’s decline, and continues to climb higher.

“The Frenzied 市場“: “Crude Oil Pricing Mechanism Has Broken Down”

When political decisions lose their anchor, financial markets also lose theirs.

The first thing to collapse was the pricing mechanism for underlying commodities. Jim Bianco revealed an extremely dangerous signal: the pricing function of the global crude oil market has become dysfunctional.

In a normal year, the price spreads between Western Canadian Select, Brent, WTI, and Oman crude typically remain in a very narrow range of $1 to $2, a sign of a healthy global energy supply chain. But today, amidst mutual blockades and a “no-timeline” protracted war, the spreads on these physical crude oils have exploded to a staggering $60!

“If you are extremely bearish, you can find an offer at $70; if you are extremely bullish, there are also physical offers in the market at $130.”

Bianco warned that this extreme dispersion proves the physical network of the oil market has been severed by geopolitics. Brent crude breaking $102 is just the surface. The truly fatal issue is that the fundamental pricing anchor has vanished.

In other words: no one knows what oil is actually worth. This isn’t market volatility; it’s market failure.

Yet, facing the abyss in the real economy, US financial markets are displaying a kind of “doomsday party” frenzy.

US stock market indexes are still hitting new highs. Money is flowing into high-frequency trading based on Trump’s emotional tweets, just like chasing “meme stocks.” Whenever the White House releases a sliver of good news, the market blindly buys.

Meanwhile, Trump himself, even amidst the war’s stalemate, has been spending significant time boasting to donors about deserving a “Medal of Honor” and studying renovation blueprints for the White House ballroom.

But the illusory candlesticks cannot mask the underlying bleeding. The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index delivered the harshest verdict — this authoritative survey with a 74-year history plunged to a historic low of 47 points in March this year.

The level of despair among the American public regarding the current economy far exceeds that of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the 9/11 terror attacks, and the Great Inflation of the 1970s.

This paints an extremely torn and completely out-of-control K-shaped macroeconomic picture: stock market bulls are toasting to the news flow manipulated by the White House, while the $4.09 gasoline price tag has already punched through the survival bottom line of ordinary people.

Is Trump “Manipulating” the Market?

This is the most sensitive and least openly discussed question among market participants.

Keith McCullough at the summit directly voiced what many people think: “Trump seems increasingly accustomed to manipulating market trends whenever he wants, in whichever direction he wants, because people are still overly focused on single factors.”

He further pointed out that the correlation coefficient between the dollar, oil prices, gold, and Bitcoin is currently approaching 95%. “This isn’t complicated,” he said. “If you can know the direction of oil prices and the dollar in advance, you can know the direction of almost all assets.”

Even more striking was a detail he mentioned: Iranian sources have started posting memes of Lego toys, mocking the fact that someone was shorting oil just before each time Trump announced the strait was “about to open.”

“This is already an open secret,” McCulloch said, “and it seems like no one cares because everyone wants the same thing — the market is up, Trump is driving it, okay, let’s keep going.”

The Real Risk of This Game

Mearsheimer said something in the interview worth pondering repeatedly:

“The Trump administration should want to reach an agreement. For two reasons: first, they cannot achieve victory on an escalatory path; second, they risk pushing the global economy off a cliff. So, they should want a deal.”

“But sometimes Trump acts like he wants a deal, and sometimes like he doesn’t.”

This is precisely the most dangerous aspect of the current situation — not a deliberate act of destruction by either side, but a systemic loss of control driven by chaotic decision-making.

Trump neither dares to actually send ground forces to seize Khark Island, nor can he stop issuing the strongest threats on social media, and he even sends contradictory signals when his aides try to manage the situation.

In this “game of chicken,” both sides are waiting for the other to blink first. The problem is: when one side’s decision-maker is inherently in an unpredictable state, no one can truly calculate where the Nash equilibrium of this game lies.

And once the gears of “loss of control” start turning, it is very difficult to stop in the short term.

この記事はインターネットから得たものです。 “Mad King” Trump, “Insane War,” and “Deranged Market”

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