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What do you do when you can't trust the government?
The haze of contradictions and confusion is a feature, not a bug.
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We’re a month into President Donald Trump’s increasingly disastrous Iran war, and we have no idea what’s really going on.
In part, that’s because Trump is now nothing but a creature of pure id surrounded by enablers, running the country like an enormous out-of-control toddler. But it’s also because the administration is not at all interested in providing the American people with objective, reliable information.
That erasure of truth leaves us unmoored.
Trump’s increasing instability was always going to lead to chaotic, contradictory statements about the war, blurting out whatever ideas have taken hold in the nest of spiders inside his head.
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These constant reversals about what he plans to do next aren’t always random or delusional, but the sheer volume of Trumpian proclamations that seem divorced from reality does a terrific job of obscuring when something is deliberate.
That was the case at least until earlier this week, when Trump decided to use the Iran war to engage in a little light market manipulation. Well, some pretty hefty market manipulation, actually.
Follow the money
Trump spent last weekend frothing at the mouth with threats to bomb Iran’s power plants unless it opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. Sure, attacking a country’s civilian energy infrastructure can be considered a literal war crime, but that sort of threat is really par for the course for Trump these days.
After ratcheting up his rhetoric all weekend, Trump abruptly reversed course Monday morning around 7:05 a.m., posting on Truth Social that the United States and Iran “have had, over the last two days, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East,” According to Trump, the “tenor and tone of these in depth, detailed, and constructive conversations which will continue throughout the week” led him to postpone any strikes against power plants for five days. (Tellingly, Trump was unable to specify which if any Iranian officials were parties to these alleged negotiations.)
So while Trump was publicly telling Iran that he was prepared to do war crimes to get them to yield, the administration was also somehow simultaneously engaged in “good and productive conversations” with Iran about ending the war. Even in the shambolic world of the Trump administration, it seemed unlikely both of these things were true. But Trump contradicts himself so often that we’ve become accustomed to disregarding it as nothing but background noise, conveying nothing meaningful. It’s not worth trying to separate fact from fiction when it might all be fiction.