Right now, President Trump is facing some serious headwinds in D.C.
His ratings are down, and polling for Republican candidates is likewise looking worrying ahead of a critical midterm election.
But if we’ve learned anything in the last ten years of Trump’s dominant political career, it’s to expect the unexpected. The chips have been down for Donald Trump on numerous occasions — and yet he’s consistently come out on top.
That’s why I’m expecting October 15th to be a pivotal date for this year’s elections, and for the market moving forward.
Here’s why:
Video transcript:
This is Moneyball Economics, and I’m your host, Andrew Zatlin.
Today, I’m going to share something I’ve been talking about on our sister channel, Capital Gains Trader.
I believe you need to be prepared for a major jump in the stock market sometime in mid to late October. That’s when President Trump is going to engineer some kind of event in Iran. And to understand why it’s mid-October and to understand why it’s going to be a military event in Iran, we have to go back in time and start with late 2010 and President Obama…
President Obama was looking incredibly weak, both domestically and internationally. The Democrats have just thoroughly been trounced in the midterm elections. The economy’s not doing well. And internationally, Obama’s looking like a pushover.
For example, you’ve got the Arab spring, Syrian government slaughtering tens of thousands of its own people. And Obama comes out and says, stop or else. Except the Syrian government doesn’t stop and there’s no or else. You’re talking about the leader of the strongest country on the face of the planet backing down. I mean, talk about inevitably just a one-term president — except things changed overnight.
In May 2011, that’s when President Obama announced that he had authorized the SEAL team to go in to the heart of Pakistan, incredibly hostile territory, and assassinate Osama bin Laden in an incredibly successful mission.
Overnight, the public sentiment turned in his favor. He was no longer incompetent. He was incredibly capable. He was no longer weak. He was strong. And he wrote that change in sentiment to a second term. And now I believe that the circumstances are very similar for President Trump.
Coming into this year, Trump was looking pretty strong. He had defeated the Democrats and the government shutdown. The economy was taking off. And to put it mildly, he was looking like Johnny Badass on the international scene.
We had flipped Argentina to team America, went into Venezuela, took out Maduro, and now they were more team America. We had an embargo on Cuba. We had all of our adversaries from Russia to China to Iran on the defensive. In fact, Iran suddenly came to the table and was talking about what could be done with their nuclear weapon ambitions.
And then it fell apart for Trump.
By attacking Iran and not ending it quickly, the US economy started to struggle. And let’s face it, the Iranian situation today just telegraphs weakness. For example, we are five months into a standoff. The strongest military in the face of the planet is being held back by a pretty weak third world country. And there doesn’t seem to be an end at this juncture.
To top it off, every week that goes by, President Trump comes up bombastically saying we’re going to attack.
We’re going to do all these things only to back off. So if President Trump and the Republicans want to win the midterms, they have to do it with a convincing event. And I think history tells us that it’s got to be a military event. It’s got to be a military event because quite frankly, the Iran war is the core of his weakness.
It’s like what happened with Jimmy Carter, and Trump doesn’t want to be Jimmy Carter part two. So what we also understand why it needs to be a military event is because that rallies the electorate. I mean, it wasn’t just President Obama who benefited from a military mission. George W. Bush post 9/11, he goes into Afghanistan and that is the point where he has the highest approval ratings. Now with President Trump, we’re already in Iran. It’s just we got to get closure.
So let’s talk about the when and let’s talk about what.
The when is going to be sometime in mid to late October because you do it earlier than that and the news cycle moves on and the electorate isn’t as engaged. You do it later than that and it’s too close to the midterms to really penetrate.
The what? I believe we’re going to go in and try to seize the uranium stockpiles that started this whole adventure. See, we started the war. Bear with me for a second. We started the war by saying Iran clearly has nuclear ambitions. That needs to stop.
If we go in and seize the uranium stockpiles, destroy their facilities, Trump can say there, I did exactly what we wanted to do. Minimal loss of US life and we’re done. We’re done with this war. He will look like Obama did, capable and competent and strong.
And that’s what he needs to win this midterm election.
Now, is that fantastic? Can we send troops 500 miles deep into remote parts of Iran and do this? Well, it’s not as fantastic as you might imagine. Tons of other countries have done even more fantastic things.
Look at what the Mossad did.
In 2018, they drove across hostile countries, entered Tehran 500 miles from the border. They went to warehouses in the heart of Tehran where the Iranian National Archives were stored that talked about their entire nuclear ambitions. They loaded up the trucks and got out. Okay?
So there have been more fantastic military things that have taken place. Even Obama, the SEAL team going into the heart of Pakistan. That’s pretty amazing. What would it take to pull this off? Well, again, you’re in a remote part of Tehran, which is actually good because it’s difficult for the Iranian military to do anything.
It’s 500 miles from the border, so it’s going to be very much an air-driven type of campaign. So you’re going to probably need some kind of airfields or refueling tankers in the sky or both. So it’s not that hard to do. Is there going to be loss of life? Are there potentials for problems? I think there are, but I also think that the US is prepared for that. Let’s talk about this.
So first of all, we have already executed with Iran a very effective decoy campaign earlier on. If you go back to February, that’s when the Iranian leadership was feeling pretty strong and powerful. Why? Because we had a spat between Israel’s Netanyahu and Trump, which wasn’t true, but it just created that impression that things weren’t going the way of an attack.
Then you’ve got ongoing diplomatic negotiations in Switzerland. You’ve got the US moving stealth fighter pilots away, the bombers away, and you even have the calendars of Netanyahu and Trump and all their underlings being fairly open.
So not quite full of meetings and hands on deck.
It was successful at lulling the leadership to sleep. I believe we’ve got a similar decoy campaign going on right now. Again, you’ve got a public spat between Vance and Netanyahu. You’ve got the impression that the US can’t go in militarily because we don’t even have the weapons now. And on and on and on.
You got Trump saying, “Hey, I’m not going to do anything. I’ll just hold on and we’ll just wait for the economics to succeed.” And again, it’s got the Iranian leadership very much lulled into a state where they’re not expecting another attack. What kind of attack would it be? I think we’ve also had a test case.
Remember that we had a fighter pilot go down again in the heart of Iran and we extricated him. What if that was not accidental, but deliberate?
What if that was a way of testing what the Iranian military could or could not do in the event we needed to go in and seize territory? Possible. But even if it wasn’t deliberate and it was an accident, we still got that same knowledge. We sent in massive numbers of troops, military aircraft. We seized the territory, we retrieved the pilot and got out. And that was when they had all this weaponry and capability. Well, I think it’d be a lot easier to do that with a remote area where far fewer troops can get in from the Iranian side. We can control the airspace a lot better.
We don’t have to worry about civilians because it’s the desert and on and on and on. So I believe that this would be the winning play because let’s face it, if Trump can stand up and say, “We did what we said we were going to do, minimal loss of life. We’ve basically eliminated Iran from being a nuclear capable state.”
The public’s going to love it.
He’s going to win the midterms with the Republicans and he’s going to cement his legacy. It’s too compelling for Trump not to consider.
So let’s see what happens in mid to late October, but you need to be prepared maybe by some spy leaps or something for later the year or even into next year. Get ready for this because we’re in it to win it, folks.
Zatlin out.
Andrew Zatlin
Editor, Moneyball Economics