The president is claiming he's finally negotiated an end to the war with Iran. We'll see

President Donald Trump is so confident in his supposed ceasefire deal with Iran that he’s — once again — threatening to bomb them to smithereens if they “don’t behave” or try to make any further changes to the agreement.

Trump and his administration have been exceedingly cagey about the contents of the agreement, which was supposedly signed by the two nations over the weekend. It’s not actually a fully fledged deal, as Vice President J.D. Vance revealed during an interview with ABC News, but a “memorandum of understanding.” It’s basically an agreement to make an agreement. False starts are not exactly uncommon here. The president has claimed the war is over or that a deal is imminent dozens of times since attacking Iran in late February, so it’s not surprising that the announcement has been met with a hefty dose of skepticism. 

On Wednesday, during a press conference at the G7 summit in France, Trump fell back on one of his favorite negotiation tactics: threatening to blow stuff up if he doesn’t get what he wants. 

“It’s not final. It’s a memorandum of understanding, and if I don’t like it we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head,” Trump said. “If I don’t like it, if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.” 

Trump then went on to blast the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated between the United States and Iran under President Barack Obama. While many of the Trump administration’s stated goals were already addressed in the JCPOA — which Trump scrapped during his first term — the president is nevertheless intent on making clear that this is definitely better than whatever deal Obama struck with Iran. Trump repeated the false claim that Obama had gifted the Iranians “billions” in cash as an attempt to “bribe” the Iranians into an agreement. “They tried to bribe their way out of it. And you know what the Iranians did. They laughed at Obama and they said he’s a stupid son of a bitch,” Trump added. 

It’s worth noting that one rumored provision in the working deal is the creation of a $300 billion “investment” and reconstruction fund for Iran, should a final nuclear deal materialize. The administration has been bending over backwards to reassure the public that this fund would not be created out of taxpayer dollars, but would instead be an investment collective involving Trump’s gulf allies. Then again the president has repeatedly lied about when and how he’s using taxpayer money, so getting a straight answer from anyone in the White House orbit has been near impossible. 

Why is Trump’s deal so much better? He won’t — or can’t — tell you. “It’s a very strong deal. Nobody knows what it is, but it’s very strong, and most people seem to be very happy,” the president said when pressed on the contents of the memorandum.

All in all, it seems like most observers are waiting for the check to actually cash before going on an oil-and-gas spending spree or declaring the war officially over. After all, we’ve been in this position over a dozen times since the war began, and the president has yet to find a way to disentangle himself from the hallmark blunder of his second presidency.