President Deals ends the Iran war for the seventh time

I think this means he’s ended 19 wars now:

After two days of pounding Iran with airstrikes, President Trump on Thursday morning promised to hit Iran hard again for a third day and mused about invading a strategic island. Then in the afternoon he abruptly called off the attacks, and claimed, once again, that a deal was close to being signed.

Iran’s leadership did not immediately confirm any progress in the talks. Earlier this week, Mr. Trump had claimed a peace deal was imminent, but hours later, the two countries attacked each other.

Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump said that a deal could be signed “maybe over the weekend, in Europe,” but that if so, Vice President JD Vance would take part. He also claimed that Iran’s supreme leader had approved the deal, though he said it was not finalized. According to Mr. Trump, the deal would result in the resumption of shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, but the nuclear issues that have been a major sticking point in peace talks were still being discussed “conceptually.”

Thursday’s comments were the latest in a dizzying series of statements Mr. Trump has made this week about a war that is stretching into its fourth month and is increasingly unpopular among his supporters. The latest round of tit-for-tat strikes has embroiled the Middle East and raised fears that the conflict could spiral out of control.

Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had made it clear the escalation was not retaliation for a particular Iranian military action but was instead meant to pressure Tehran to agree to peace on Mr. Trump’s terms. Multiple rounds of talks over the past two months failed, with both sides presenting themselves as winning and maintaining their hard-line stances.

It has taken a remarkably long time for the purportedly independent American media to learn that the evidentiary value of anything Trump says is precisely zero, but the way the NYT story above is phrased suggests that this fact is beginning to sink in, if very, very slowly.

“All politicians lie” is the cynically exaggerated version of the true statement all politicians try to shade the truth to their advantage. The combination of sociopathy, delusion, dementia, and a lifetime of unremitting bullshit that is Donald Trump is something that the received narrative frames proved utterly unable to assimilate.

. . . also too, America’s favorite racist grandpa fell asleep at yet another meeting today. IIRC Trump had a nickname he used all the time for Biden but I can’t remember what it was, and neither can the media apparently.

The way his supporters deal with it is to simply deny it happened. That’s what Rubio did at the last cabinet meeting, and what Dolan did after Game Three of the finals, where Trump clearly fell asleep in his seat before leaving early.