Page F2From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 12 September 2026
As it ran on the front
The filing runs several hundred pages and the speech ran about six minutes, and hon, they don't reconcile.
Start with the speech. Friday morning, at the Pentagon, at the ceremony for the 184 people who died there on 9/11, President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tied the Iran war to the September 11 attacks and the broader war on terror — one persistent state sponsor, the president said, same fight, quarter-century running. The ship CBS sent a reporter to visit that same week, the USS George Washington, is the carrier CBS notes patrolled the waters off New York City after 9/11 and is now stationed near the Strait of Hormuz, roughly 5,000 personnel aboard, doing what CBS's own reporting calls the backbone of the tactical operation against Iran. The grief at that podium is real. The ship's history is real. Nobody standing there needed to say the word "backbone" — the deployment says it for them.…
…(cont) Now the filing. Two days before that podium, on September 9, an analysis published by CNBC and reported by Common Dreams put a number on something else entirely: the president's own financial disclosure, the nine largest fossil-fuel holdings listed on it, gained between $1.5 million and $4.4 million in value since the war he started with Iran began. Not a donor's portfolio. Not a party's. His.
That wasn't the first pass through the ledger this cycle. In August, a separate mandated filing with the Office of Government Ethics — covering the second quarter, the stretch when the war ran, paused for a ceasefire, and restarted — showed more than 1,000 stock transactions in June alone, thousands of dollars of it in the energy companies posting record profits off the war. One day before that September 9 analysis ran, the Treasury Department worked the other side of the same conflict, sanctioning 27 Iranian airlines and nine more entities in what Secretary Bessent called an "economic D-Day." Squeeze the target Tuesday, tally the gains Wednesday, deliver the anniversary speech Friday. Same war, three separate paper trails, one signature on two of them.
None of this is hidden. It's filed, dated, and public — an ethics disclosure sitting a couple of clicks from a cable-news dispatch, roughly 48 hours apart on the calendar and a world apart in tone. Nobody's concealing the carrier or the portfolio. They're just never in the same speech. The ship gets the anniversary. The oil stock gets the filing. The commander-in-chief gets both.
“You wanna know why the guy sending the carrier to the Strait of Hormuz keeps talking about 9/11 like it happened last week — it's because the same ledger that pays for his grandkids' future is getting fatter every week that war runs, up to four-point-four million and climbing, and that's not a coincidence, that's the business model. They don't need you to notice the oil stock, they just need you crying at the right nine-second clip on the anniversary. Meanwhile the checkbook and the eulogy are the same guy, and only one of those two is on your TV.”
“Look, portfolios are blind trusts, or — okay, not blind, but they're managed independently, that's the whole — did I say that? That's not right either, he releases the disclosures himself, that's transparency, that's more than any president's ever — the point is the market moves on its own, nobody's steering nine oil stocks up $4.4 million on purpose, that would be, well, that would be exactly what the filing says happened.”
The receipts
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
An exclusive look aboard the USS George Washington in its role in the Iran warThe USS George Washington, with its approximately 5,000 personnel, fighter jets and munitions, is the backbone of the U.S. military's tactical operation in the Iran war.
On Friday morning, at the ceremony of remembrance for the 184 who died at the Pentagon when hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed there on 9/11, President Trump put the Iran war in the context of fighting global terrorism and one of its persistent state sponsors. CBS News chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes reports.
An analysis published by CNBC on Wednesday estimates that President Donald Trump has grown millions of dollars richer thanks to the illegal war with Iran he launched more than six months ago. CNBC calculated its estimate by examining the nine largest fossil fuel company holdings listed in the president's annual financial disclosure, and…
Tom Hanson lands on the USS George Washington, a ship that patrolled the waters near New York City after 9/11, which is now located near the Strait of Hormuz in the fight against Iran.
Welcome to The Hill's Defense & NatSec newsletter {beacon} Defense &National Security Defense &National Security The Big Story A link between Iran war and 9/11 in Trump administration speeches President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tied the Iran war to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in remarks at the Pentagon…
· Big Oil Stocks Surged Due to Iran War—and New Filings Show How President Trump Cashed In from the morgue, 27 Aug 2026
· Bessent unveils sanctions targeting Iran airlines in latest ‘economic D-Day’ tactic from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.