When the “Benjamins” (Not Bibi) Sing

The over 900 pages exposing his last year’s $2.2 billion in income is just a bit shorter in length than the Tolstoy novel, but it’s also about “War and Peace.” Thanks to the financing of his crypto and other family investments by Gulf sheikhs, who have more than a passing interest in the wars which he is fighting and those which he is pretending to settle, most of the Benjamins are singing “Hail to the Chief” in Arabic.

More than a billion represents his personal profit from Saudi financing of a venture in worthless “meme” coins paid for by loyal suckers who wound up losing that much and more, and now have no other place to stick them but in some other type of “wallet” where the proverbial sun don’t shine.

So now, what’s the deal with the two go-to “personal emissaries,” the billionaire family member and the trusted real estate mogul who are being financed by those “Sovereign Wealth Funds”?   Exactly who do they represent when they “negotiate” while they or their families are doing side hustles with the interested parties? There always seems to be more than a whiff of rainmaking when they land somewhere.

With Ukraine, it was the attempted $5 billion shakedown for the “rights” to mine rare earth metals as the price for U.S. assistance.  With Gaza it’s a $7 billion buy-in to sit on the not very transparent “Board of Peace” that will carve up the territory.  The deceptively neutral-sounding “Board” is a scam that includes interested Arab states plus a motley list of authoritarian countries like Turkey and El Salvador, all hungry for plum concessions that will emerge from the chaos there, and what Trump himself has openly coveted: deals on waterfront property.

So an entire professional diplomatic corps at his fingertips, the US sends in the same flush pair of amateurs, while they or their families or the Oligarch-in-Chief himself have running deals going on with the parties affected.  I guess the State Department can’t do bagman.

It’s probably a good guess that next year’s hot sheet of Benjamins will come from an Iran deal. It fits the pattern: nobody seems to know which way Hormuz is going, but we are told “it’s going well” with “reasonable people” on the other side.  And then it’s “over,” they’re “scum” and let’s bomb the crap out of them.

Turn on the fog machine, fake right, fake left, and then call in Heckle and Jeckle to make the “deal.”  A deal about what? The first thing you heard, actually the only thing you have heard definitively, was about money, not nukes. Billions in cash will be released so the Iranians can buy U.S. products (from whom?), and for allowing the U.S. to “help in running” (in other words, charging extortionate fees) for use of the Strait.

Be patient.  The whole thing will eventually be “settled,” in some War and Peace muddle, where the Benjamins sing “Hail to the Chief” in Farsi, too.