Trump and the Iran Deal That Wasn't

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trump-and-the-iran-deal-that-wasnt

Trump and the Iran Deal That Wasn’t
It’s tough to reach an agreement with a President whose word is not his bond.
By Susan B. Glasser
April 23, 2026

So how, exactly, does America’s war with Iran, the one that Donald Trump said would probably be over in a couple of days, or four to six weeks, nearly eight weeks ago, end?

Since Trump has thus far failed to achieve the peace deal that he — and the world’s financial markets — had anticipated by the end of his two-week ceasefire with the hard-line Iranian regime, the conflict has entered into a liminal state that Gideon Rachman, of the Financial Times, called “the fog of peace.” It’s a murkiness befitting a President who has conducted this conflict in the Middle East as a one-man smoke machine obscuring reality behind such a cloud of lies and disinformation that it’s difficult to imagine that even Trump himself could keep straight what is real and what is fiction. On Monday, he told the New York Post that Vice-President J. D. Vance was in the air, en route to Pakistan, to seal an agreement with Iran. But Vance had never left, and days later he still hadn’t. By Tuesday, after variously threatening to bomb all of Iran to smithereens and claiming that he was on the brink of a “FAR BETTER” deal to halt Iran’s nuclear program than any of his predecessors, Trump unilaterally announced an indefinite ceasefire.

As of Thursday morning, Trump was publicly demanding that the U.S. Navy “shoot and kill” any Iranian boat dropping mines in the Strait of Hormuz and then, half an hour later, insisting that “we have total control” over the “Sealed up Tight” strait. Also, the President wanted Iran’s leadership to know that he doesn’t need a deal; however, he might kill any Iranian negotiator who did not give him what he wanted. The bottom line appears to be that more negotiations may or may not take place in Pakistan soon and that there may or may not be an unofficial new Trump deadline of this weekend for Iran to come back to the table. Got that?

One safe conclusion amid the confusion is that it remains, a decade into the Trump era, extremely difficult to distinguish between Trump in dealmaking mode and Trump in meltdown mode. Was the President lying when he said that Vance was on a plane to Islamabad? Out of the loop? Playing some clever game of head-fakery with his adversaries? At one point earlier this week, Trump gave interviews to four different publications suggesting that he had a deal with Iran and listing specifics, including that the regime had agreed to an “unlimited” suspension of its nuclear program and to hand over all its enriched uranium. Not only was this not true but it was almost impossible to believe that it could ever be true with this Iranian government, as experts quickly pointed out. “They’re running into the same fundamental hurdle that shaped the long decade-plus of negotiations” that led to Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, Suzanne Maloney, of the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Post, “which is that the Iranians are completely immovable on the question of enrichment.”

Trump’s instability and inability to read his adversaries correctly aren’t the only reasons to wonder: Why would anyone make a deal with this man?

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