Trump’s Iran War Is Already Making Money—for Russia

Russia may be about to get rich off of Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran.

The spiraling regional conflict, sparked by ongoing attacks from the U.S. and Israel, has sent the price of oil skyrocketing to almost $120 per barrel. As a result, demand for discounted Russian oil has spiked.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced last week that the U.S. would issue 30-day waivers to allow Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil that was “already stranded at sea,” promising doing so would “not provide significant financial benefit” to the Kremlin.

However, India typically imports an average of 10 million metric tons of crude oil per month through the Strait of Hormuz, Vaibhav Raghunandan, an EU-Russia analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Politico.

“Even if half of this volume is replaced with Russian volumes at sea, it will translate to huge profits for the Kremlin,” Raghunandan said. As of February 2026, Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of stranded oil tankers held approximately 150 million barrels of Russian oil worth an estimated $6.4 billion, according to the Robert Lansing Institute.

“We may unsanction other Russian oil,” Bessent said to Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow Friday. But permitting further sales of Russian oil would undoubtedly offer a financial boon to the country’s ongoing war effort in Ukraine. So far, Trump has largely proven powerless at forging a deal between Moscow and Kyiv—and war with Iran could only make matters worse.

All of this comes after the White House dismissed reports that Russia was assisting Iran in targeting U.S. assets in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, called for the European Union to lift sanctions on Russian oil amid escalating conflict in the Middle East, which has brought global trade to an abrupt stop. Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriyev echoed Hungary’s request.

“What you propose is very difficult, as it would require EU bureaucrats to think and understand how markets work—and, most difficult of all, to acknowledge their strategic blunders and atone,” he wrote on X. “And yet, they will have to do it very soon.”

It seems that President Trump has scared every man in his Cabinet into wearing the matching shoes he bought for all of them.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Trump has developed a strong affinity for the American shoe brand Florsheim, and has bought a pair for Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, communications director Steven Cheung, deputy chief of staff James Blair, and speechwriter Ross Worthington. Even those not in his Cabinet, such as Fox News host Sean Hannity, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Tucker Carlson, have been gifted a pair. They are around $145.

“Did you get the shoes?” he’d ask them.

“All the boys have them,” one female White House official told the WSJ. “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” said another.

Rubio and Vance got their Florsheims after an Oval Office meeting last year. “Marco, JD, you guys have s—y shoes,” Trump said before getting a Florsheim catalog and asking them their shoe sizes.

“The president kind of leans back in his chair and says, ‘You know you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size,’” Vance said.

While this strange development may have little to do with policy, it does offer more insight into the psyche of the president. He is someone who wants control of aesthetics and the patronage that comes with gift-giving.

At least two members of the president’s Cabinet have recently purchased bomb-proof bunkers.

Ron Hubbard, the creator of Atlas Survival Shelters, told The Telegraph over the weekend that orders have gone up “tenfold” since the United States and Israel attacked Iran earlier this month.

“I’ve been inundated with calls,” said Hubbard.

But among his anxious clientele are two chief members of Donald Trump’s team, according to the shelter maker.

“One of them texted me yesterday, asking me: ‘When will my bunker be ready?’” he told The Telegraph.

Hubbard constructs hundreds of galvanized steel shelters each year at Atlas’s factory in Sulphur Springs, Texas. Its catalog offers underground shelter options from tornado bunkers to hidden gun rooms, with prices ranging from $200,000 to $5 million. On the higher end of the spectrum, Atlas’s bunkers can come with practically every amenity imaginable, including mud rooms, swimming pools, cinemas, armories, and gun ranges.

And right now, business is booming. The company has so far averaged $2 million a month in sales for 2026, but Hubbard predicts that could jump to as much as $50 million next month.

“Bunker building is like being a farmer. When it’s time for harvest, you have to reap all you can,” he told The Telegraph.

But politicos are not the only people tapping into the doomsday-prepper lifestyle. Hubbard described the vast majority of his customers as being “Christian, conservative CEOs.” Last year, Hubbard met that crowd at a familiar watering hole—Mar-a-Lago—to advertise the drastic solution.

Hubbard refused to name his wealthiest customers but nonetheless boasted to The Telegraph that he has built shelters for several of the richest men on the planet, and that more tech moguls have recently come knocking for similar products.

The president, meanwhile, has done nothing to abate concerns. When asked by Time last week if Americans should be worried about Iran attacking them on U.S. soil, Trump responded: “I guess.”

“Like I said, some people will die,” Trump told the magazine. “When you go to war, some people will die.”

So far, seven U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Eighteen American soldiers have also been seriously injured. More than 1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, including dozens of children at a girls’ school in the country’s south. A U.S. assessment report found that strike was “likely” the fault of American forces.

A woman who says Donald Trump abused her when she was 13 years old in 1984 shared information about her life that turned out to be true.

While her story about Trump is still unproven, The Post and Courier, a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, was able to corroborate details of her life provided in recent releases from the federal government’s Jeffrey Epstein archives. The woman was interviewed four times by the FBI in 2019, detailing abuse she faced at the hands of Trump and Epstein.

She gave details about her life and legal history that the newspaper was able to verify using news reports, court records, police reports, and government records from multiple states. None of the confirmed details are directly related to her allegations against Trump.

In her interviews with the FBI, she describes Epstein’s activities in the mid-1980s on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, where the financier sexually assaulted minors. She said that Epstein constantly pressured her to find more girls to “come party,” describing his friends as “disgusting.” These so-called parties usually involved alcohol and drugs, and would turn violent with beatings and hair pulling. She said that Trump forced her to commit a sexual act on him around 1984 after she traveled to New York or New Jersey with Epstein.

She detailed that one incident took place while Trump was developing a casino in Atlantic City. She was led to Trump in a “very tall building with huge rooms.” Trump allegedly told others to leave the room, and told her, “Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be,” before unzipping his pants and forcing her to perform a sex act. She told the FBI that she “bit the (expletive) out of it,” which angered Trump, who slapped her and cursed.

A friend of the woman also reported her allegations about Trump to the FBI, asking that her friend be protected, according to an email circulated around the bureau that the Justice Department made public. The woman herself named business associates of Epstein in North Carolina who also abused her, and the newspaper was able to identify some of them.

In a statement to the newspaper, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the woman’s allegations were “baseless accusations from decades ago’’ that “are backed by zero evidence or facts. Leavitt described the accuser as “a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history.” But Trump has sought to diminish and bury every Epstein revelation that paints him in a negative light, and his critics will point to this woman’s account as one of the reasons why.

President Donald Trump says he wants hundreds of ships to “show some guts” and sail through the war zone he created.

Speaking to Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade Sunday, Trump tried to bully shipping companies into reopening the Strait of Hormuz—where global trade has come to a screeching halt amid Iran’s retaliation to U.S. and Israeli strikes.

“These ships should go through the Strait of Hormuz and show some guts, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” Trump said.

“They have no Navy, we sunk all their ships,” he added.

The halt of trade in and out of the Persian Gulf has quickly rippled out into the global supply chain, sending oil prices skyrocketing. Last week, Trump offered to send the U.S. Navy to escort ships through the essential passageway, but the surplus of stopped ships is likely too great for American assets to assist. On Sunday, more than 1,000 vessels waited to sail through, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Appearing on Fox Sunday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright pledged that “energy will flow soon” through the Strait of Hormuz, and that energy prices were only rising out of concerns that the conflict could become a “drawn-out crisis.”

While Trump has insisted he only wants the war to last four weeks, U.S. Central Command is making plans to keep fighting until September, and the Pentagon is eyeing a request for supplemental defense funds. Trump and other top administration officials have also refused to rule out deploying troops to Iran. Why would that sound drawn-out?

The current standstill at the Strait of Hormuz is unprecedented. “In the whole written history of the strait, it has never been closed, ever,” JPMorgan Chase analyst Natasha Kaneva told the Journal. “To me, it was not just the worst-case scenario. It was an unthinkable scenario.”

President Trump’s sons are trying to sell drones to the Pentagon.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are merging their publicly traded golf-course holding company with Powerus, a Florida-based drone company, with the goal of filling the gaps left by the Trump administration’s ban on Chinese drones.

The drone market “is certainly going to grow faster than, say, golf courses are,” Powerus CEO Andrew Fox told The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump-backed investment firm American Ventures, the Trump-backed investment bank Dominari Securities, and drone parts maker Unusual Machines, the latter of which Trump Jr. is a shareholder and advisory board member of, are involved in the public merger. Eric Trump is also invested in Israeli drone maker Xtend.

Powerus wants to build more than 10,000 drones a month.

While the financial and political impacts of this merger remain to be seen, it is impossible to ignore that as drone usage ratchets up, as the Trump administration blocks drones from China, and as Trump wages war in Iran using AI, the president’s sons and their investment firms are immediately at the scene ready to reap any benefits they can find. Family corruption has been a defining aspect of Trump’s second term, so much so that his sons investing in drones while he starts what may be yet another violent, drawn-out war in the Middle East is just another headline.

“Raise your hand if you elected @realDonaldTrump so his kids could make money off of government contracts,” one large pro-Trump X account complained.

“Rushing to cash in on Daddy’s failed war before they’ve even gotten Barron and Kai to enlist,” another large account on the liberal end of the spectrum wrote. “Truly deplorable behavior, but what we expect from these corrupt reprobates.”

Fox News does not air reality.

The conservative broadcaster caused uproar on Sunday when it showed footage of a December 2025 dignified transfer rather than the one honoring six U.S. soldiers recently killed in Kuwait. The big difference: Donald Trump dared to don his own merch—a white-and-gold USA baseball cap—for the funereal procession that took place over the weekend, an exploitative fashion faux pas that was apparently too egregious for the network to air.

But the error forced Fox & Friends weekend co-host Griff Jenkins to apologize.

“We want to acknowledge a mistake made earlier on our program,” Jenkins said. “During our coverage of yesterday’s dignified transfer, we inadvertently aired video from an older dignified transfer instead of the ceremony that took place yesterday. We deeply regret the error and extend our respect and condolences to the servicemembers’ families.”

So far, seven U.S. soldiers have lost their lives fighting Iran. The six service members honored in the weekend ceremony were Capt. Cody Khork, 35; Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, 42; Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, 39; Sgt. Declan Coady, 20; Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien, 45; and Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan, 54, of the 103rd Sustainment Command.

“All American heroes,” Jenkins said.

The Pentagon announced Sunday that a seventh troop had been killed when Iran struck a Saudi military base on March 1. The seventh troop has not yet been identified.

Exactly how the network could have mistaken the event is not clear, considering that the broadcasting software used to pull clips for air sorts them chronologically. Beyond that, Fox News is the largest media company in America—they should know how to put together a show. If they don’t, then the network’s morbid flub warrants scrutiny of all their broadcasts, and whether the conservative machine is capable of documenting and relaying the real world.

Trump’s casual disregard for American troops, however, has been going on for years. He has requested that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades; refused to visit a World War II graveyard; derided deceased soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”; and claimed that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. Trump doesn’t have any military experience of his own, however, thanks to a conveniently timed bone-spur diagnosis that helped him skirt the Vietnam War draft in 1968.

Meanwhile, the president is privately warming to the idea of deploying U.S. troops on the ground in Iran, showing “serious interest” to the possibility of keeping a small contingent there for “specific strategic purposes,” reported NBC News. Trump’s vision for Iran involves controlling the government, securing its uranium, and leeching off its oil supply, similar to how the White House infiltrated Venezuela in January, according to internal sources that spoke with NBC.

When it comes to Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham says it’s time to get rich or die trying. For other people, of course, not him personally.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Graham described Trump’s military campaign in Iran as a “good investment” toward security—but clearly, he saw another upside, too.

“When this regime goes down, we’re gonna have a new Mid-East, we’re gonna make a ton of money, no one will threaten the Straits of Hormuz again,” Graham said.

How exactly would the United States get rich off of Trump’s illegal war? By installing a friendlier regime it could “partner” with on energy deals. “Venezuela and Iran have 31 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We’re gonna have a partnership with 31 percent of the known reserves,” he said. “This is China’s nightmare.”

Later on Sunday, Graham took to social media to criticize Israel’s strikes on three Iranian oil depots, while claiming the goal was to keep infrastructure intact and “liberate” Iran. You’ll have to remind me, do liberation plans often make foreign super powers rich?

The South Carolina Republican also urged other Middle Eastern nations to join the effort. “Has any Arab country struck Iran? Now if you want a treaty with the United States, you need to get in this fight. Now America is not going to the Mid East just to fight alone,” he said.

His plea doesn’t seem to have gone over well abroad. UAE billionaire Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor called out Graham in a post on X Monday.

“Senator Graham says they are ‘the Arabs’ allies’ and that we need and benefit from U.S. protection. And I say to him: We do not need your protection. All we want from you is to keep your hands off us,” he wrote.

Graham is on the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committees, and will be a key decision maker on approving any potential supplemental defense funding.

Even GOP Senator Lindsey Graham—one of the most hawkish, warmongering politicians in this country—has come out against Israel’s recent attacks on Iran, specifically the fuel-supply bombings in Tehran that caused black oil to rain from the sky on Sunday morning.

“Our allies in Israel have shown amazing capability when it comes to collapsing the murderous regime in Iran. America is most appreciative. However, there will be a day soon that the Iranian people will be in charge of their own fate, not the murderous ayatollah’s regime,” Graham wrote Sunday on X. “In that regard, please be cautious about what targets you select. Our goal is to liberate the Iranian people in a fashion that does not cripple their chance to start a new and better life when this regime collapses. The oil economy of Iran will be essential to that endeavor.”

Israel struck at least three oil depots in the Kuhak and Shahran areas of Tehran on Saturday night, releasing “significant quantities of toxic hydrocarbon compounds, sulfur, and nitrogen oxides” into the air and putting thousands of Iranians at risk of skin burns and lung damage.

The goal of “liberation” that Graham mentions is hard to take seriously as the U.S. and Israel bomb elementary schools. But their concern for oil—especially as costs skyrocket worldwide—is very serious.

Graham wasn’t the only U.S. insider more bothered by the oil attack than the more than 1,300 Iranian casualties. “We don’t think it was a good idea,” an anonymous senior U.S. official told Axios. And according to an Israeli official, the U.S. response to their attack was “WTF.” A White House adviser told Axios that “the president doesn’t like the attack. He wants to save the oil. He doesn’t want to burn it. And it reminds people of higher gas prices.”

The American and Israeli war on Iran is causing oil prices to skyrocket, fueling alarm around the world. 

Finance ministers from the Group of Seven, a collection of the world’s seven wealthiest nations, plan to meet on Monday to discuss a possible joint release of their emergency oil reserves in an effort to lower prices, Reuters reports. South Korea also plans to cap fuel prices for the first time in close to 30 years. 

At an emergency meeting, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung called the war “a significant burden on our ⁠economy, which is highly dependent on global trade and energy imports from the Middle East.” Japan, which imports close to 95 percent of its oil from the Middle East, is reportedly preparing to release oil from its reserves, although no decision has been made yet. 

Vietnam has removed its import tariffs on fuel, while Bangladesh has shut down its universities to conserve energy. Last week, China asked its refiners to suspend fuel exports and cancel any existing oil shipments. 

In the Middle East itself, Iraq cut production in its oil fields by 70 percent, while Qatar, the world’s second-leading liquefied natural gas producer, has halted natural gas exports. Kuwait Petroleum Corp cut oil output on Saturday and declared force majeure, meaning that it can’t fulfill its contractual obligations. Bahrain’s state-owned Bapco Energies also declared force majeure on Monday after its refiners were attacked.  

Trump is trying to deflect concern about the oil price surge, posting on Truth Social Sunday night, “Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, ‌is a ⁠very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!” But that’s of little comfort to the rest of the world. Oil prices have shot up to over $110 a barrel, the highest levels since the pandemic. With no plan in place for the war’s aftermath and no end in sight, it doesn’t look like things will get better anytime soon.