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.
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