He doesn't need a war to commit insider trading
No, but the absolutely insane and perfectly predictable swings in market prices, over and over and over, each one capable of eating hundreds of billions of dollars, can't be done as easily any other way. Those are very specific asks. He already did all the "low level" hundreds of millions stuff. This is bigger.
It's also not only about the money.
This war is extremely damaging to the vast majority of the economy, and keeping the economy going is the only way he maintains power while in the office.
This is where you are way off. His goal is enrichment. The people who put him there have the goal of destruction of the American government. This achieves both.
He specifically maintains power by destroying the ability of the American system to function. That's what his cronies want. Eventually he will obliterate the economy too.
He has been destroying the foundations so that when the final blow lands, it's a KO. Again this is not his plan, this is the plan he agreed to, thought up by actually smart groups of people, who needed his one-domain skills to help them enact it.
You are giving him a lot more credit than he deserves, and feeding the idea that he's some sort of Machiavellian character, when in reality he's just an oaf scrambling from one scheme to another.
No, I'm not. You are. I am and always have been claiming that he is an excellent con man. He is a goddamn idiot savant. If I say "that guy is a really good football player" no one assumes I'm calling him a multi-domain genius. But somehow every time I point to trump's very obvious history of successful cons, and the fact that he's doing the exact same, beat for beat thing he always does, the One Fucking Thing he is good at, in the entirety of his life, One Thing, everyone builds a strawman of me calling him a genius. So they can tear it down.
Many idiots are really really insanely good at one thing. It happens. It's a normal part of the human condition.
he's just an oaf scrambling from one scheme to another.
Yes! Yesyeshesyeayeayeas! This! A million times this! And he's a god tier "oaf scrambler", and only this!
Do you think that the likes of Ronald Regan or George Bush were also secret geniuses?
No, but there are groups of aristocratic funded geniuses who have been guiding the process you have correctly identified occuring over many presidents, congressmen, senators, governors, etc.