What did Donald Trump do today?
He lied about the Strait of Hormuz being open.
Today, Trump told Kristen Welker on NBC's Meet the Press that the Strait of Hormuz is open to commercial traffic.
Even at the high-water mark of Trump's "peace" process, traffic never got back to more than 20% of prewar levels. Now, virtually no commercial vessels are attempting to transit the strait in defiance of Iran's latest warnings. It is trivially easy for Iran to damage or destroy civilian vessels that do, making the attempt both unsafe and uneconomical. Iran has struck at least three ships in the last few days.
Trump also claimed that Iran had "agreed to… a perfect deal" yesterday, only to break it. This is apparently either a lie or a hallucination on Trump's part: nobody on either side mentioned any such "deal" being struck yesterday. But even if Trump really believed that such a thing had happened, what he's describing is a situation in which Iran doesn't feel obliged to take him or the "peace deal" he needs to extricate himself from the war seriously.
It’s open. We bombed the hell out of them last night. They are very, very evil and sick people.
We had meetings with them… they agreed to a deal yesterday, a perfect deal for us. No nuclear, no this, no that, no nothing.
They gave up everything and then after that they left the room and then within an hour they launched a drone at a ship.
I said you people are sick, you are sick people. And so it is one of those things. I don’t want to talk about it.
Why does this matter?
- Reality doesn't change just because Donald Trump decrees it.
- Thinking that you can change reality by decree is why Donald Trump lost this war in such a humiliating fashion.