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Everything Is Quiet in Trump’s Mind. The Real World Is Another Story.

Trump’s press conference dedicated to stabilizing global markets was filled with delusions and wish-fulfillment fantasies about a peaceful, compliant planet.

President Donald Trump leaves the stage after speaking to the Republican Members Issues Conference at Trump National Doral Miami on March 9, 2026, in Doral, Florida.

After declaring from his Doral, Florida, golf resort that the war he launched with Israel last week is “very complete,” President Donald Trump held a press conference dedicated to stabilizing global financial markets that tanked for much of Monday amid spiking oil prices. In between, he hosted a confab of top Republican Party donors and a gathering of the party’s congressional conference that kicked off with a North Korean–style minute-and-a-half-long standing ovation for the Maximum Leader. Trump’s frantic pronouncements on the historically unpopular and ecologically catastrophic Iran war were no more convincing than the symbolism of an announcement that economic conditions would be trending upward after the Iran “excursion” in America’s already inflation-battered, job-starved economy from a private golf club.

Yet, as Trump declared earlier in the day to CBS News, wrapping up the Iran war “is all in my mind, nobody else’s”—and the same glorified mind-cure formula holds for his declarations on the war’s calamitous economic fallout. This is, after all, the president who continually hails the onset of an economic golden age for the country as the cost of living spirals, new hiring flatlines, and trade policy has devolved into a long pratfall.

Trump’s press conference was basically an extension of the delusions and wish-fulfillment fantasies that studded his interminable State of the Union address last month. He began with a litany of the war’s achievements—the disabling of Iran’s navy and air force, the immobilization of 90 percent of its missile program, and ongoing US and Israeli bombing raids. Then, without missing a beat, he declared that the political objective behind the war was to install a new “head of the country who would be able to do something peacefully for a change”—since, as we all know, the way to ensure a country’s peaceful compliance is to bomb the shit out of it and kill more than 1,000 civilians, including some 160 students at a girls school.

He segued awkwardly from last June’s bombing assault on Iranian nuclear facilities—which he likewise claimed at the time to be a devastating blow to the country’s nuclear ambitions on a par with the Hiroshima........

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