President Donald Trump told The New York Post on Monday morning that Vice President JD Vance was already on his way to Pakistan for negotiations with Iran, but people familiar with Vance’s plans later told CNN’s Alayna Treene that the vice president was expected to depart for Pakistan on Tuesday for talks beginning Wednesday, and Vance’s motorcade was soon spotted at the White House.
Who Controls the Story
"They’re heading over now," the Post quoted Trump as saying. "They’ll be there tonight, [Islamabad] time." That was the latest in a string of claims from the White House that did not line up with the basic facts available afterward. Trump’s inaccurate remark was part of a pattern that has accelerated over the past week of him being incorrect about basic matters related to the Iran war.
Eric Brewer, a former National Security Council counterproliferation official, posted on social media on Friday: "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," and "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."
That is the apparatus at work: officials, spokespeople, and media outlets trying to sort truth from a stream of claims that keep shifting under pressure. The public is left to parse statements from both sides while the people making the statements keep moving the goalposts.
The War of Claims
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 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 the 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 later said ships had to get approval from the navy of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and pay tolls. Iran announced the very next day that it was closing the strait again.
On Thursday, Trump told reporters, "The pope made a statement. He says, Iran can have a nuclear weapon." Pope Leo XIV, an unequivocal opponent of nuclear weapons, had not said that. In a Fox Business interview that aired Wednesday, Trump claimed that Persian Gulf countries "were not expected to be hit" by Iran. In reality, retaliatory Iranian strikes on these countries was widely expected. In a Fox News interview the Sunday before last, Trump claimed of Iran, "Their military is gone, everything’s gone." But Iran still had a military with destructive capabilities, though the US and Israel had degraded them.
These are not small slips. They are the kind of statements that shape public understanding of war, diplomacy, blockades, and the movement of ships through a strategic waterway. When the head of state keeps making sweeping declarations that do not match the record, the result is not clarity but manufactured confusion.
What the Negotiators Say
Trump’s Monday claim about Vance was at least his second bit of misinformation about his own vice president in two days. On Sunday, Trump told MS NOW that Vance wouldn’t be part of the delegation to Pakistan for security reasons. After the president said that, two senior US officials told MS NOW that Vance would, in fact, lead the delegation to Islamabad.
Last week, in phone calls with journalists, Trump made a series of triumphant declarations about major concessions Iran had purportedly made, including an "unlimited" moratorium on nuclear activities, an end to its support for all proxy groups including Hamas and Hezbollah, and the US both removing Iran’s enriched uranium and taking it. After CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang asked Trump whether Iran had agreed to permanently cease enriching uranium, he responded: "They’ve agreed to everything."
Experts expressed strong skepticism that Iran had done what Trump claimed. Iranian officials soon declared that they had not agreed to everything Trump had said they had; a spokesperson for the foreign ministry said, "Enriched uranium is as sacred to us as Iranian soil and will not be transferred anywhere under any circumstances." Iranian parliamentary speaker and key negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf posted Friday, "The President of the United States made seven claims in one hour, all seven of which were false."
The article says Iran’s words cannot be trusted, and that its leadership has lied repeatedly about the war and many other matters. It also says the competing power centers within its government often make it hard to figure out which officials’ comments carry the most authority. If a US-Iran deal is eventually reached, it is possible some of Trump’s assertions will be proven accurate, but Trump’s history means his claims about the negotiations cannot be taken for granted until there is proof.
For now, the public is left with the usual imperial theater: blockades, delegations, ceasefires, and a president whose version of events keeps collapsing under the weight of the next statement. The people below are expected to treat that as governance.