On Monday morning, President Donald Trump told the New York Post that Vice President J.D. Vance was traveling to Pakistan for talks with Iran. “They’re moving forward now,” the Post quoted Trump as saying. “They’ll be there tonight, [Islamabad] time.”
Except that wasn’t true. Shortly after Monday morning, people familiar with Vance’s plans told CNN’s Alaina Treen that the vice president was expected to leave for Pakistan on Tuesday for talks that begin Wednesday. Vance’s motorcade was soon seen at the White House.
Trump’s misguided comments may have stuck, the kind of little things a busy president can get wrong. But it’s part of a pattern that has accelerated over the past week — this president’s wrong on even the most basic matters related to the Iran war.
“The big difference between the current round of US-Iran diplomacy and previous rounds is that this administration and especially the president are unreliable storytellers,” Eric Brewer, a former National Security Council counterproliferation official, posted on social media Friday. “Iran watchers have gotten pretty good at parsing statements from both sides over the years, but we’ve never had to deal with a US president so prone to blatant and exaggerated, fabricated and outright lies.”
Trump’s Monday claim about Vance’s trip was just the latest in a series of false, dubious or unsubstantiated comments about the war. Many of them were more important.
On Friday, after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that the Strait of Hormuz would be “fully open” to commercial ships during the ongoing cease-fire, Trump posted that “the situation in the Strait of Hormuz is over” and that “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz.”
But the situation was clearly far from over: Trump himself had posted that same morning that the US would continue its embargo on ships sailing to or from Iranian ports; Araghchi said its strait-opening lane applies only to the Iran-approved passage near its coast before ships; And an Iranian official later posted that the ships must obtain approval from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Navy and pay tolls.
As for Iran’s alleged agreement to never close the Straits again? The next day, Iran announced it would close the strait.
False claim after false claim by Trump
On Thursday, Trump claimed to reporters: “The Pope made a statement. He said, Iran may have nuclear weapons.” Pope Leo XIV, an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons, did not say so. In a Fox Business interview that aired Wednesday, Trump claimed that the Persian Gulf countries “didn’t expect to be hit” by Iran. In reality, retaliatory Iranian strikes on these countries were widely expected. In a Fox News interview last Sunday, Trump claimed about Iran: “Their military is gone, it’s all over.” But Iran still had a military with devastating capabilities, even though the US and Israel had humiliated them.
Trump’s Monday claim about Vance was the second bit of misinformation about his own vice president in at least two days. On Sunday, Trump told MS NOW that Vance would not be part of Pakistan’s delegation for security reasons. But after the president said, “two senior US officials told MS Now that Vance would indeed lead the delegation to Islamabad,” the outlet reported.
The administration’s plans may have changed since Trump spoke. But even here the President’s statement about this simple question could not be accepted as a fact.
Trump’s assertion at an April 6 press conference was emblematic of how shockingly detached from reality many of his claims about the war were. “The only planes we lost were planes – friendly fire, they call it,” he said. He said this in a program where he has already talked at length about what happened after Iran shot down an American fighter jet.
How true were Trump’s winning claims about the negotiations? We don’t know yet
Trump has a years-long history of lying about a remarkable variety of subjects. Whether he is intentionally deceiving the public about the Iran war or is repeatedly ignorant or misinformed, the frequency of his lies has made it impossible to trust his statements about what Iran is saying behind the scenes.
In a phone call with reporters last week, Trump made a series of triumphant declarations about major concessions Iran has allegedly made. It also includes an “indefinite” moratorium on nuclear activities (per Bloomberg), an end to support for all proxy groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah (per CBS News), and the US removing and taking over Iran’s enriched uranium (per CBS News).
When CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang asked Trump if Iran had agreed to permanently stop uranium enrichment, he replied: “They agree on everything.”
Experts strongly doubt that Trump’s claims were made by Iran. And Iranian officials quickly announced that they didn’t agree with everything Trump said; “Enriched uranium is as sacred to us as the soil of Iran and will not be transferred anywhere else under any circumstances,” a foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement.
“The President of the United States made seven claims in one hour, all seven of which were false,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament and chief negotiator, posted on Friday.
Certainly Iran’s words cannot be trusted. Its leadership has repeatedly lied about the war and many other matters. And competing power centers within its government often make it difficult to discern which officials’ comments carry the most authority.
So, if the US-Iran deal is finally reached, it is possible that some of Trump’s assertions will be proven correct. But Trump’s history means that we can’t assume that the US president’s claims about negotiations are more accurate than Iranian leaders’ claims – or even consider it likely – until we see evidence of that.
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