Trump pranks financial markets, again

Trump's April Fools' Day speech killed market hopes for a cease-fire and revealed a desperate president grasping for a way out.

If President Trump were an honest man, this would be his assessment of the Iran war he started on February 28: “We’re winning militarily, but Iran has gained an asymmetric advantage by stopping oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. We miscalculated on that, and we’ll solve the problem. But it’s going to take some time.”

Instead, Trump is falling back on a playbook he thinks has served him well during a long career in real estate, celebrification, hucksterism, and populist politics: Brag. Threaten. Browbeat. And if that doesn’t work, bail out while declaring victory.

Trump’s playbook has been remarkably effective when applied to gullible humans. But financial markets have built-in bullshit detectors, because of all the money at stake. You can fool markets temporarily, but as Trump ought to be learning, you can’t fool them for long.

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Trump tried to swindle financial markets during the April Fools’ Day speech in which he insisted the Iran war is going great while unwittingly demonstrating that it is not. He never should have given the speech. By hyping it as Trump’s first prime-time public address since the war started, the White House created the expectation of some breakthrough announcement. What Trump delivered instead was more like a desperate effort to repeat the lies he has been telling about the war, except for a much larger audience.