You don’t even have to turn on the financial news. You can tell whether oil prices will be up or down in the morning by simply reading the president’s midnight social media posts. If he announces confidence in the ceasefire with Iran, oil will be down in the morning. If he posts about Iran glowing in the dark or about the stone age, you don’t want to be short petroleum.

Here’s a representative example from May 6, posted by The Kobeissi Letter, a capital market commentary:

“At 3:40 AM ET today, nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news. This is equivalent to ~$920 million in notional value, an unusually large trade for 3:40 AM ET. At 4:50 AM ET, just 70 minutes later, Axios reported that the US is ‘close’ to a ‘memorandum of understanding’ to end the Iran War. By 7:00 AM ET, oil prices had fallen over -12 percent with these crude oil shorts gaining approximately +$125 million.”

An unusually large trade. Precise timing. And it wasn’t a first.

Reuters reported that on March 23, “investors sold $500 million in oil futures just 15 minutes before an announcement by Trump that he would delay attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure, which stunned markets and then triggered a 15 percent drop in the crude price.”

The Reuters account includes similarly well-timed trading on April 7:

“Investors placed an approximately $950 million bet on oil prices falling just hours before the U.S. and Iran announced a ceasefire, the latest large wager on the direction of the world’s most traded commodity ahead of a major policy ​announcement by President Donald Trump…

Trump stepped back from threatening the destruction of ‘a whole civilization’ and announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, knocking crude ​futures down by some 15 percent to below $100 a barrel at the start of Wednesday’s official trading session.”

Someone, somewhere is making a lot of money. It’s the most brazen plunder since Hillary Clinton was trading cattle futures in Little Rock. Or since Nancy Pelosi was placing stock trades.

Come to think of it, there seems to be a whole lot of plunder going on in the world of politics.

It’s not just oil in the “Age of Trump.” As President Ronald Reagan’s budget director and a Wall Street veteran, David Stockman is a seasoned observer of political plunder. When Donald Trump suddenly offered up the suggestion that “we” (the taxpayers) buy struggling Spirit Airlines, Stockman wrote a piece called, “Was It You, Barron? Someone Made 3.5X On The Donald’s Spirit Airlines Socialism.”

This chart shows Spirit Holdings share price spiking when Trump started his takeover talk on April 21 (and then quickly collapsing).

It is fair to interpret that Stockman’s questioning of the president’s son Barron is only a proxy for the wider circle of Trump family members and their rampant cronyism. The main thrust of Stockman’s piece was the socialism of it all, and that somehow the White House was better able to assess the value of Spirit’s assets than the market. Trump had intuited on the basis of completely invisible due diligence that “they have some good aircraft, good assets.”

Of course, people in the industry who assess changing aviation conditions on a daily, or even hourly basis (and risk only their own or their willing investors’ money and not that of unwilling taxpayers), do so “on the basis of knowledge and efficiencies,” Stockman wrote, that Trump cannot even remotely imagine. “And for crying out loud,” he asked the president,” do you think they would send Spirit’s post-liquidation aircraft out to be parked in an Arizona desert in order to bleached in the sun for time immemorial?”

On many levels, it was all “so Trumpian,” wrote USA Today columnist Chris Brennan about the skyrocketing fuel costs that pounded a nail into the airline’s coffin. “Start a needless war that pushes an American company into bankruptcy and then anticipate taking credit for using our tax dollars to—maybe—fix the mess he made.”

Brennan bothered to dig into an earlier Trump SEC filing to find out about Trump’s previous aviation success, and found this disclosure:

“Trump Shuttle, Inc., launched by President Trump in 1989, defaulted on its loans in 1990 and ceased to exist by 1992.”

For now, the Trumps’ cashing in is on overdrive: cryptocurrencies including the Melania Coin, Bibles, fragrances, golf shoes, and sneakers (“Official President Donald Trump Footwear”), Trump Wine sold at Coast Guard exchanges, and Trump guitars, both acoustic and electric. A Florida company called Powerus that makes military drones brought Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric on board. That, according to the Associated Press, positioned the company “to potentially benefit from a war that their father began.”

Plunder is what happens when a nation’s ideals are exhausted. As the sun sets on an empire, large-scale war profiteering is to be expected. I describe the related syndrome of of imperial overstretch in my book Empire of Lies: Fragments from the Memory Hole.

Things were different 250 years ago when America’s sun was rising. It’s hard to imagine George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or John Adams stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down. Their vision extended beyond themselves. The signers of the Declaration of Independence wanted to let America prosper and see free Americans thrive. To that end they were willing to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Benjamin Franklin, our native renaissance man, refused to take out a patent on the Franklin stove he invented, saying, “That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”

They were cut from a more noble cloth than today’s leaders whose interests are self-interest. Whatever personal exhilaration Donald Trump found in bluster and bombing Iran was short-lived. The Atlantic magazine reports that “Trump is ‘bored’ with the war he started.” Time to build a new monument or name another landmark after himself.

By some malign coincidence, as I sat down to write this piece I received an email pitching Trump Watches. “Join President Trump’s Watch Community. Be a part of History.”   

No thanks. You don’t need a Trump Watch to read the signs of the times.