It's times like these when the real consequences of electing a pathological liar as president of the United States come home to roost.
President Donald Trump sent a Truth Social post on Monday morning before the stock and oil commodity markets opened, saying that the United States had productive "CONVERSATIONS" with Iran over the weekend and thus his Monday evening deadline for Iran to capitulate to his demands or else have major infrastructure in their country hit by military strikes is now postponed by a few days.
Trump wrote in an all-caps post, seemingly to reiterate to stock traders how serious he is about his latest TACO:
I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS.
It sure is curious how all of Trump's comments making it seem like the war is coming to a close happen when the markets are opening, and escalations of the war on Iran tend to happen when markets are closed.
Despite having been made fools of by Trump chickening out in the past, traders ate up his comments. The post caused the price of oil to fall over 10% and led the stock market to rise 2% when it opened Monday morning.
Of course, almost immediately after, Iranian state media said there were no talks with Trump. And an Israeli security official—which is the U.S.’s primary ally in the war—told Sky News that they believed Trump's comments were an effort to manipulate the markets. Not mincing words!
Rubble covers the furniture of a destroyed living room in a residential building hit in an earlier U.S.-Israeli strike in Tehran, Iran, on March 23.
"I’d approach this cautiously, with a grain of salt," the unnamed Israeli security source told Sky News' Yalda Hakim. "It’s early Monday morning in the U.S., the start of the trading week. Markets opened higher, largely as expected following the weekend reports on the negotiations and the latest statement by Donald Trump. That said, I wouldn’t view this move as a final step. We saw a similar pattern last week. Oil prices have also declined, supporting the positive sentiment in the short term. For now, it appears he has bought a few more days roughly into week four, until the Marines arrive and complete their initial deployment and organization phase."
What's more, both Israel and Iran are continuing to launch attacks at each other.
Doesn’t seem like things are going as perfectly as Trump made them out to be.
Meanwhile, when reporters pressed Trump on the talks, he refused to provide details and instead looked a lot like he was lying about the situation, telling reporters that the Iranian official negotiators spoke with was “a top person" whose name he wouldn't divulge because he doesn't "want them to be killed." Okay, then …
Ultimately, while Wall Street traders desperately want to believe the war is nearing an end, experts say Trump's rosy social media posts can keep the markets from crashing for only so long.
At the end of the day, oil is a physical commodity, and if there is a shortage of it, prices will rise—no matter how much traders don't want them to.
"So much of the world now can increasingly just be driven by overconfidently posting through it—but not oil, not for long," Rory Johnston, an oil commodities expert, wrote in a post on X. "[Strait of] Hormuz flow still hasn't resumed and every day we're shedding more oil from the system. That'll catch up."
What's more, even if the war does soon end, as Trump has suggested, experts say high gas prices will linger. It could take weeks, months, or even years to get oil moving at its previous speed and to repair the damage done to oil infrastructure in the Middle East.
"Even the best-case scenario for energy markets is disastrous," The Economist wrote in an alarming headline on Monday.
"Even if the war ended tomorrow, we estimate that it would take at least four months to bring energy markets back to some semblance of normalcy," Economist Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom wrote in a post on X.
And that will be bad for us consumers, who are expected to see the downstream inflationary effects of high gas prices.
At the end of the day, Americans will pay handsomely for Trump to try to negotiate what sure looks like the same Iran nuclear deal that he had torn up during his first term in office.
What an utter waste.
