Daniel Dale writes:

On Monday morning, President Donald Trump told The New York Post that Vice President JD Vance was already on his way to Pakistan for negotiations with Iran. “They’re heading over now,” the Post quoted Trump as saying. “They’ll be there tonight, [Islamabad] time.”

Except that wasn’t true. A bit later on Monday morning, people familiar with Vance’s plans told CNN’s Alayna Treene that the vice president was expected to depart for Pakistan on Tuesday for talks beginning Wednesday. Vance’s motorcade was soon spotted at the White House.

Trump’s inaccurate remark might be shrugged off, the kind of little thing a busy president could understandably get wrong. But it’s part of a pattern that has accelerated over the past week – of this president being incorrect about even the most basic of matters related to the Iran war.

“One of the big differences between the current round of US-Iran diplomacy and prior rounds is that this administration and the President in particular are unreliable narrators,” Eric Brewer, a former National Security Council counterproliferation official, posted on social media on Friday. “Iran watchers have gotten pretty good at parsing statements from both sides over the years, but we’ve never had to contend with a US president that is so outspoken and prone to exaggeration, fabrication, and outright lies.”

Trump’s Monday claim about Vance’s travel was only the latest in a series of false, dubious or unproven comments about the war. Many of them were more substantive.

On Friday, after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared that the Strait of Hormuz would be “completely open” to commercial vessels during the ongoing ceasefire, Trump posted that “the Hormuz Strait situation is over” and that “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again.”

But the situation very clearly wasn’t over: Trump himself had posted the same morning that the US would continue its blockade on ships heading to or from Iranian ports; Araghchi had said its opening of the strait only applied to a specific Iran-approved path near its coastline rather than the lanes ships had generally used before; and an Iranian official posted later in the day that ships had to get approval from the navy of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and pay tolls.

As for Iran’s supposed agreement to never close the strait again? Iran announced the very next day that it was closing the strait again. [Continue reading…]