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.

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 the situation very clearly wasn’t over: 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 its 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 posted later in the day that ships had to get approval from the navy of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and pay tolls.

As for Iran’s supposed agreement to never close the strait again? Iran announced the very next day that it was closing the strait again.

On Thursday, Trump claimed to 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 very obviously still had a military with destructive capabilities, though the US and Israel had degraded them.

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. But after the president said that, “two senior US officials told MS NOW that Vance would, in fact, lead the delegation to Islamabad,” the outlet reported.

It’s possible the administration’s plans had changed after Trump spoke. But here too, the president’s words about even this simple question couldn’t be taken as fact.

A claim Trump made at an April 6 press conference was emblematic of just how bewilderingly detached from reality many of his claims about the war have been. He said, “The only planes, really, that we lost were – friendly fire, they call it.” He said this at an event at which he had already spoken at length about what happened after Iran shot down a US fighter plane.

Trump has a yearslong history of lying about a remarkably diverse range of subjects. Whether he has been deliberately deceiving the public about the Iran war or has been repeatedly uninformed or misinformed about it, the frequency of his falsehoods has made it impossible to rely on his statements about what Iran is supposedly saying behind the scenes.

In phone calls with journalists last week, Trump made a series of triumphant declarations about major concessions Iran had purportedly made. These included an “unlimited” moratorium on nuclear activities (per Bloomberg), an end to its support for all proxy groups including Hamas and Hezbollah (per CBS News), and the US both removing Iran’s enriched uranium and taking it (also per CBS News).

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. And Iranian officials soon declared that they had not agreed to everything Trump had said they had; a spokesperson for the foreign ministry issued a statement saying, “Enriched uranium is as sacred to us as Iranian soil and will not be transferred anywhere under any circumstances.”

“The President of the United States made seven claims in one hour, all seven of which were false,” Iranian parliamentary speaker and key negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf posted Friday.

Iran’s words can’t be trusted, of course. Its leadership has lied repeatedly about the war and many other matters. And the competing power centers within its government often make it hard to figure out which officials’ comments carry the most authority.

So, if a US-Iran deal is eventually reached, it’s possible some of Trump’s assertions will be proven accurate. But Trump’s history means we can’t take it for granted that the US president’s claims about the negotiations are more correct than the claims of Iranian leaders – or even assume this is likely – until we see that proof.

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