As this week got underway, The Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump had privately expressed optimism about reaching a deal with Iran that would finally reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but the president’s confidence didn’t last long. MS NOW reported a day later that Iranian officials said they would only agree to reopen the strait if the U.S. met all of the conditions that Tehran contends are in the June memorandum of understanding between the two countries.

That would mean, among other things, that the White House would have to unfreeze Iranian funds and take steps to the end recent fighting in Lebanon.

It’s reached the point at which some in the region are reportedly starting to see Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz as a new normal that will persist, even if they would prefer this were not the case.

It’s against this backdrop that the American president apparently has an idea: pretend that Iran doesn’t control the strait, reality notwithstanding.

In his latest missive published to his social media platform, the Republican wrote, “The U.S.A. has total control over the Strait of Hormuz. I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT! … Praise be to Allah!” The weird post came roughly 12 hours after he made similar comments to reporters during a brief Q&A on an airport tarmac.

“We totally control the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said. “We have control over it. Nobody else, only us.” He added soon after, “We have total control over the Hormuz Strait right now. They don’t have control. We have total control. We own it.”

A day earlier, the American president similarly insisted that the Strait of Hormuz is “open now,” adding that the U.S. is “the only one that has control” over the waterway.

I am mindful that “Trump says false thing” is not a headline that generates a lot of attention, but this is qualitatively worse than the Republican’s usual nonsense. In the midst of a war, the president is (a) aware of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz; (b) negotiating with Iran in the hopes of ending its control over the Strait of Hormuz; and (c) bragging incessantly about Iran’s lack of control over the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s quite a bit like Trump looking at weak economic growth, an anemic job market and rising consumer prices and declaring that Americans “have the greatest economy maybe in the history of the world.”

There is a difference, in other words, between the American president’s routine dishonesty and claims that border on delusion.

The post On the Strait of Hormuz, Trump increasingly prefers made-up boasts to reality appeared first on MS NOW.

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From MS Now.