Trump Wages an Illegal War. Congress Takes Vacation.

No authorization, no exit strategy, and someone's getting rich.

Mar 30, 2026

Three weeks ago, the United States started bombing Iran.

Congress didn’t vote. There was no Authorization for the Use of Military Force. No hearing. No debate. Trump just declared war, and nobody stopped him.

Since then, 160 children have been killed in a U.S. strike on a girls' school. Gas prices have spiked more than a dollar a gallon. The global oil market is in its worst disruption in recorded history. And a pattern of suspicious trading activity suggests that people in Trump's orbit knew about market-moving announcements before the public did.

Congress responded to all of this by going on spring break.

This war is illegal.

The Constitution is explicit: Congress declares war. The president commands the military. Those are separate jobs.

Trump skipped the first one.

He launched strikes on Iran in early March without a congressional vote, without an AUMF, without anything. At a private Republican fundraising dinner, he told donors he wouldn’t use the word “war” to describe what was happening because, in his words, “you are supposed to get approval.”

Since then, Democrats and a handful of Republicans have called for an AUMF vote. Nothing has happened. Pete Hegseth has requested over $200 billion in emergency supplemental war funding — one of the largest wartime funding requests in American history — and Republican leaders won’t say whether they have the votes to pass it.

Meanwhile, a congressional memorial was held for the 160 children killed in the girls’ school strike. Nine members of Congress attended. Out of 532.

Wars can have catastrophic consequences for our national safety and economy. This is why the War Powers Clause exists: to prevent one person from starting a war on impulse. The Republican Congress has ceded that responsibility to the president. One of the most significant constitutional erosions in modern American history.

Iran posed no imminent threat.

The administration’s justification for attacking Iran was an “imminent threat” — the legal and moral standard for preemptive military action under both U.S. and international law.

That claim fell apart from the inside.

Joe Kent, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in protest. Kent isn’t a liberal critic. He’s a veteran of 11 combat deployments and a Gold Star husband. He said publicly that Iran did not pose an imminent nuclear threat, that the case for war was driven by pressure from Israeli officials and American political allies, and that the arguments echoed the false intelligence used to justify Iraq in 2003.

Trump's own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had testified as recently as 2025 that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. When she appeared before the Senate this month, she reversed course and offered a stunning explanation: "The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president.

Read that again. The entire intelligence community — analysts, career officers, the NCTC — exists to provide independent threat assessments. Gabbard just said those assessments don't matter. Only the president's judgment counts. No institutional check. No independent review. And the last person who publicly applied that check — Joe Kent — just quit in protest.

Trump’s War Is Causing Economic Turmoil.

The International Energy Agency has called the Iran War the worst energy supply disruption in global history. Worse than the 1973 oil embargo. Worse than the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Worse than both of those combined.

What that means at ground level:

Gas prices are up more than a dollar per gallon since January. The national average has crossed $4 in eight states.
Oil has topped $127 a barrel.
Fertilizer and petrochemical supply chains are disrupted, which means grocery prices will follow this fall.
The S&P 500 just had its worst month since 2022.
The VIX — Wall Street’s fear index — spiked to 42. Anything above 30 signals panic.

Remember how Trump mocked Biden's gas prices at every single rally? Remember the promise of energy abundance and lower costs?

But that’s not it. Republicans are now floating cuts to Medicaid and Medicare to fund the $200 billion war supplemental. So the people getting crushed by a regressive gas-price spike, working and middle-class families, would also lose healthcare to pay for it.

Trump ran on lowering prices. Instead, he started an unauthorized war against a country embedded in global oil supply chains, presided over the largest gas price increase in modern presidential history, and now wants you to give up your healthcare to fund it.

This War is Corrupt.

At 6:49 a.m. on Monday, March 23, someone started selling oil futures. A lot of them. In a single minute, 6,200 contracts changed hands — worth $580 million. 10x the normal volume in a one-minute window with no public news to explain it.

Fifteen minutes later, Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. had been engaged in "productive conversations" with Iran and would pause strikes on Iranian power plants. Oil prices tumbled. The Dow surged over 1,000 points. Nearly $2 trillion moved within minutes.

Then Iran denied any talks had occurred. Markets pulled back. The "deal" evaporated.

Traders had also bought roughly $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures and sold $192 million in oil futures, all minutes before Trump’s announcement.

And it's not just Wall Street. On Polymarket, the prediction market platform where Donald Trump Jr. serves as an adviser and investor, one trader won 93% of their five-figure wagers on Iran, netting nearly $1 million from correctly predicting unannounced military operations. Six freshly created accounts made another $1 million by betting the U.S. would strike Iran by February 28. A user called "Magamyman" made over $553,000 betting on the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader just before an Israeli strike. In total, $529 million was traded on Polymarket contracts tied to the timing of strikes on Iran.

The one person whose job it was to investigate? Gone. Margaret Ryan, the SEC's top enforcement official, resigned after clashing with Trump's hand-picked SEC chair over pursuing cases with ties to Trump's circle. The Trump administration had already dropped two federal investigations into Polymarket that were opened under Biden. Senator Chris Murphy has introduced the BETS OFF Act to ban betting on war, assassinations, and government actions, but with Republicans controlling Congress, its odds aren't great.

It’s clear. As schools are bombed, US service members are killed, and costs increase, someone in Trump’s inner circle is getting very rich off this war. The pattern is undeniable. We have $580 million in trades placed in a one-minute window before a presidential announcement. We have a prediction market where Trump's own son is an adviser. We have the enforcement chief who tried to investigate, pushed out the door.

The question isn't whether corruption is happening. The question is who's going to stop it.

Sources

War Powers & Legality

Economic Impact

Global economy takes gut punch from war in Iran — Associated Press / Fortune

Insider Trading & Market Manipulation

Prediction Markets & Polymarket

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