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| Trump Cheerleader - Greg Swenson |
That audacity belongs to Greg Swenson, founding partner of London-based merchant bank Brigg Macadam, Chairman of Republicans Overseas UK, and reliably one of the most polished purveyors of pro-Trump economic cheerleading available to international broadcasters.
Appearing on Al Jazeera's Counting the Cost, Swenson offered the full bouquet of administration talking points: GDP is growing, jobs are being created, America is a net oil exporter, and therefore the economic consequences of this catastrophic, unprovoked war of aggression against Iran are, essentially, nothing to worry about. Each of these claims deserves scrutiny, because each of them, on examination, is either wrong, misleading, or a deliberate half-truth designed to paper over a steadily worsening reality.
On 18 March, Al Jazeera reported:
Could the Iran war trigger a global recession?
Energy prices are surging as the Iran war disrupts supply, raising risks for the US, China and Europe.
All eyes are on the Strait of Hormuz.
The longer it remains closed, the greater the damage to the global economy.
Iran continues to block tankers from shipping close to 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.
That is roughly twice the disruption the world suffered during the energy shock of the 1970s.
Big oil shocks have historically led to considerable economic turmoil, high inflation, stagnation and recession.
Oil and gas prices are already surging, and economies are expected to slow.
On GDP, Swenson was almost certainly citing the Q3 2025's headline-grabbing 4.4% annualised growth figure, conveniently neglecting to mention that Q4 2025 came in at a feeble 0.7%, the weakest quarter in over a year. That weakness was partly a consequence of the administration's own government shutdown, which the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates subtracted a full percentage point from growth. Full-year 2025 GDP expansion of 2.1% represents a decline from 2.8% in 2024. This is not a story of economic momentum. It is a story of deceleration dressed up as dynamism.
On jobs, the situation is, frankly, scandalous. The Bureau of Labor Statistics initially reported 584,000 jobs added across 2025, already a modest figure. After receiving complete state-level data, that number was revised down to just 181,000 for the entire year. That is the weakest non-recessionary performance since 2003. It represents a collapse from 1.46 million jobs in 2024, and it sits alongside the second-largest negative payroll revision on record.
Federal employment alone has shed 327,000 positions since January 2025, largely due to the administration's own mass redundancy programme. Economists have taken to calling this a "jobless expansion." When a banker on television tells you more jobs are being created, you might reasonably ask: compared to what?
The net oil exporter claim is perhaps the most cynically constructed of the three. PolitiFact rates this assertion "Half True": the US exports more petroleum products than it imports in aggregate, but it remains a net importer of crude oil, taking in 6.2 million barrels a day whilst exporting barely 4 million.
The refinery mismatch, namely US infrastructure built over decades to process heavier Middle Eastern crude, means that regardless of domestic production volumes, American consumers are paying at the pump for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices have already risen by nearly a dollar per gallon, reaching a national average of $3.88. Only 27% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of fuel costs. The "net exporter" talking point isn't an economic argument. It is a confidence trick.
Swenson is not alone in this enterprise. Senator Lindsey Graham appeared on Fox News to describe Trump's illegal war as "a good investment," adding that once "this regime goes down, we're gonna make a ton of money." This is the authentic voice of American imperial economics: war as commercial opportunity, body counts as market conditions. It should chill any observer with a functioning moral compass.
And then there is the profiteering. Verified reporting from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Responsible Statecraft confirms that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are actively investing in Powerus, a Florida drone company positioned to capitalise on the Pentagon's sudden, urgent demand for drone technology, demand created directly by their father's war. In 2025, Trump Jr.-backed companies received hundreds of millions in Defence Department contracts.
On March 10, The New Republic reported:
Trump Sons Back New Drone Company Amid Iran War
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have found another avenue to make money off their father’s presidency.
President Trump’s sons are trying to sell drones to the Pentagon.
...
Powerus wants to build more than 10,000 drones a month.
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.
Jared Kushner's private equity firm Affinity Partners, meanwhile, receives $25 million annually from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the same Saudi government that, according to the Washington Post, actively lobbied Trump to attack Iran. The conflicts of interest are not subtle. They are structural.
The media's role in all of this deserves its own reckoning. Coverage of the Strait of Hormuz closure in much of the Western press has been framed primarily as an Iranian aggression problem, a crisis to be managed, rather than the foreseeable and widely forecast consequence of an unprovoked military attack launched without congressional authorisation, without an imminent threat to the United States, and without a coherent post-conflict plan.
Multiple Pentagon officials have confirmed to CNN that the administration underestimated Iran's willingness to close the strait. Pete Hegseth's response was not to acknowledge that failure. It was to berate journalists for reporting it, and to speculate openly about the day CNN would fall under the editorial control of a Trump family ally.
On March 14, Rueters reported:
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth on Friday said he was eager to see Trump ally and Paramount Skydance, CEO David Ellison, take over CNN, as he criticized the U.S. news media's coverage of the Iran war.
"The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better," said Hegseth, a former Fox News show host and combat veteran, referring to Paramount's $110 billion deal to acquire CNN-parent Warner Bros.
This determination to suppress inconvenient truth rather than confront it runs as a thread through everything the administration does. Whether it is doctoring economic statistics, dismissing independent analysis, silencing military advisors who question the war's strategic logic, or threatening the institutional independence of broadcasters who report accurately on its consequences, the Trump administration has demonstrated a consistent and deliberate commitment to managing perception over managing reality.
The American public is being asked to trust an administration that punishes honesty, rewards loyalty over competence, and has measurable financial interests in prolonging a conflict it launched without legal authority, without a credible threat to justify it, and without the faintest outline of an exit strategy. That the bombs keep falling while the approval numbers keep sliding appears, to those in the White House, to be just a communications problem.
Then there's the sanctions debacle. Three weeks into the conflict, the Treasury Department quietly lifted sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian crude oil at sea, freeing it for purchase by American allies. The United States is now actively generating revenue for the government it is simultaneously bombing. Senator Richard Blumenthal called it "sickeningly, shamefully stupid," and critics across the political spectrum have noted that Trump spent years denouncing Obama for returning $1.7 billion of Iran's frozen funds, and is now handing Tehran up to ten times that amount.
This isn't a strategy. It is the behaviour of an administration stumbling through a war it had no plan to win, launched at least in part to drown out a far more uncomfortable story: the partially released Epstein files, from which the DOJ illegally withheld documents directly implicating Trump in abuse allegations, and which vanished almost entirely from news reports and public discourse the moment the first bombs started to fall.
Trump's overall approval rating tells its own story, though the picture is more nuanced than a single number suggests. Depending on the pollster, his approval sits somewhere between 35% and 42%, with the most comprehensive rolling tracker, Civiqs, recording 39% approval against 57% disapproval across nearly 93,000 registered voters surveyed through to March 19, 2026. Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin aggregator puts his net approval at -15.3, a new second-term low, and three points worse than at the same stage of his first term. The Economist/YouGov survey has 56% of Americans strongly disapproving. Just 27% approve of his handling of fuel costs.
Internationally, the picture is bleaker still. Gallup's survey across 135 countries puts median approval of US leadership at just 33%. Pew Research, polling across 24 nations, found that 62% of people worldwide lack confidence in Trump, with his ratings trailing Joe Biden's by an average of twelve percentage points across those same countries. In Germany, confidence in Trump sits at just 12%. In Mexico, a mere 6%. The man who promised to make America great again has made it, by most global measures, less trusted, less liked, and less respected than it was under the predecessor he never stops attacking. He dismisses all of it: "I don't care about polling. I have to do the right thing."
The "right thing," it seems, has already cost Americans more than $11.3 billion in the first six days, with the conflict now burning through over a billion dollars a day. The Pentagon has subsequently requested a further $200 billion in supplemental funding from Congress, a sum four times larger than originally signalled. When asked to justify the figure, Hegseth's response was, "Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys." He added that the number might increase, oblivious to the reality that all the United States is currently doing is killing civilians and the world's economy.
At the current rate of spending, that $200 billion would fund the war for just another 100 to 200 days. To put that in perspective, the entire annual US investment in global health, which funds HIV treatment for 25 million people and has saved an estimated 65 million lives since 2002, amounts to $12.4 billion, meaning the $200 billion war chest equals roughly 16 years of US global health spending, all to be consumed in under a year. News agencies are conspicuously silent about what this all means for the United States' already unmanageable $39 trillion of government debt. Meanwhile, tariffs have raised the average American household's costs by $1,500, pushed inflation well above where it would otherwise sit, and handed the Trump family's investment portfolio a timely and lucrative shot in the arm.
Greg Swenson sat before a global audience and called this a success story. It is not. It is a protection racket, and the American public is the one being protected from the truth.
