The lies never stop with Donald J. Trump

Jun 15, 2026

At 10:15 this morning, an official White House social media account picked a fight with the weather. Responding to a Weather Channel forecast that warned of a 60 percent chance of thunderstorms in the Washington, D.C. area, conditions that could potentially delay the outdoor UFC cage fights being held on the White House lawn for Donald Trump’s 80th birthday party, the administration’s official Rapid Response 47 account attacked what it called “the friendless loser who wrote this bullshit clickbait headline.”

The response was so bizarre that if someone had described it to us a few years ago, we would have assumed the account had been hacked. It was petty, defensive, and a perfect snapshot of where we are as a country right now under unserious leadership. Because the Trump administration actually raged at The Weather Channel for reporting the weather.

The forecast was right. The storms came, and the cage fights on the South Lawn were delayed by roughly 45 minutes. The administration spent part of Flag Day attacking an accurate weather report and the person who delivered it for describing the sky. Then the sky did exactly what he said it would do. That is the whole presidency in a single morning. He can insult the forecast. He cannot move the clouds. And tonight, we’re watching him try the exact same thing with his war in Iran.

Because almost nothing Trump or his enablers say is true. Not the small things, and not the enormous ones. They make announcements, they declare victories, and they hope we never stop long enough to check whether any of it was actually true or even happened.

And it wasn’t just Trump’s UFC cage-fighting birthday party. He didn’t actually care that much about the fights themselves. He walked into the event looking terrible, with more hand bruises poorly covered with makeup, and then he appeared to fall asleep during it, because this was never really about the sport or the people there. It was about the image, the perfect scene, the perfect crowd, and the perfect birthday spectacle staged in front of the White House, as if the presidency was just another property he could turn into a private club. And then the weather refused to cooperate. So his administration did what this administration always does when reality embarrasses him: they attacked the person who described it.

But a party was never going to be enough for him. Especially not today on his birthday. He wanted something bigger than a cage fight on the South Lawn. He wanted a headline he could wear like a crown, something grand enough to shove the bad optics out of the frame and make everyone talk about him as the man who brought peace. So at 5:29 this evening, the President of the United States gave himself the present he wanted most. He announced that he had ended a war.

“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” he wrote. “Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

About an hour later, he posted again. “This Great Deal will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region,” he wrote. “Many presidents have tried to make Peace with Iran, and all have failed before me. The Leaders of the Region have, for the first time, found a President who can help them achieve real Peace. With the opening of the Strait upon the signing of the Deal on Friday, for purposes of mine removal, oil will flow on both ends again for the Region, and the World!”

And the lie is sitting right there inside his own words. He told us the deal was complete, and then a few sentences later, he told us it would not be signed until Friday. A finished deal does not have a signing date five days in the future. As of tonight, nothing has been signed. The terms are still being described as a draft. Iran’s leadership has so far not confirmed their agreement with this “deal”. And the one subject missing from both of his victory laps, the subject that was supposed to be the entire reason this war began, is the bomb, awkward pun intended.

But there’s something missing from all of this. This war was not sold to us as a fight over oil tankers and shipping lanes. Because those were not an issue before he started his war. He has constantly told us that this is a fight over Iran’s nuclear program, that he was protecting America and the world from a nuclear-armed Iran. That was the justification and the fear they used.

And now, after everything that has happened, Trump stands over the supposed ending of the war, and there is not a single mention of nuclear weapons. Not once. Because he lost that argument. He did not accomplish the very thing he told us this war was supposed to accomplish.

And what he really announced was yet another “concept of a plan,” another promise that the real solution is coming in “2 weeks.” Only this time it isn’t infrastructure, healthcare, or some policy that was always two weeks away. This time it’s a “memorandum of understanding,” with the nuclear issue supposedly being negotiated over the next 60 days. We are worse off than we were before he started this war. The central issue he used to justify it all hasn’t changed. And now he is panicking and trying to cover up his failure.

The reality is that this may be just one more empty announcement. Because tonight is not the first time he has ended this war. Since the fighting started on February 28, he has declared a ceasefire, a pause, a termination, or a completed deal at least six separate times. On April 8, he announced a two-week ceasefire and called it a big day for World Peace. Within hours, Israeli bombs were falling on Lebanon. On April 16, he announced another ceasefire. On April 21, he extended it indefinitely. On May 1, his own White House declared, formally, that the hostilities had terminated. On May 5, he announced that operations were paused because, he said, a deal was close. And now, tonight, the deal is complete. Every few weeks, the war is over. Every few weeks, it is back, threaded between fresh threats to obliterate the country, to decimate it in a single night, to wipe out a whole civilization. CNN, keeping count, found that he has claimed a deal was right around the corner at least thirty-eight separate times. And on April 12, in the middle of all of it, he told us the truth. He said most points were agreed to, but the only point that mattered, nuclear, was not. That was two months ago, and the one thing this war was actually about has not moved a single inch.

We have seen this before, and not from leaders who were on the right side of history. Declaring victories that do not exist is the oldest move in the authoritarian playbook. The strongman always needs the appearance of triumph, especially when the reality is far from it. Because the appearance is what keeps the followers in line. You announce the win, loudly and first, and you dare the rest of the world to call you a liar. Trump has run this play his entire life. The difference now is that he is running it as the president of the United States of America, and the stakes are higher than they have ever been. This isn’t a real estate deal or his latest financial con that he can walk away from when it falls apart. There are real consequences for his actions.

And the timing of this “deal” was not an accident either. He made this announcement on a Sunday, when American markets are closed, which guarantees that the first thing Wall Street sees tomorrow morning is a war declared over and the oil set to flow. We do not have to guess how that will impact the markets. It is already happening. Right now, tonight, the markets that open first in Asia are surging on the news. Japan’s Nikkei is up more than 5 percent. South Korea’s Kospi is up nearly 6. The announcement is doing precisely what an announcement dropped on a Sunday night is built to do. And the signing, the part that has not actually happened, is set for Friday, the end of the week, when the reporters and the analysts whose job is to pull it apart, whatever is actually signed, have a full weekend to lose the thread before anyone is watching closely again on Monday. It is the oldest trick in public relations. You put the good news where every eye can see it and the stock market can react to it, and then you time less favorable news for release ahead of the weekend, when fewer people are there to cover it.

And yet this weekend, in the one place he least wanted it to, reality happened, and the world saw it regardless of how upset he was or how hard he tried to stop it. His name finally came off the Kennedy Center.

After last month’s ruling that adding Donald Trump’s name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was illegal, the administration was told to take it down. Trump’s people fought it with everything they had. The Justice Department appealed. The Center’s board, stacked with Trump loyalists and chaired by Trump himself, went to court and argued that removing his name from the wall could bring the building to financial and structural collapse, and that no one but the President could possibly rebuild it or raise the money to keep it running. The judge did not move. An appeals court refused to freeze his order. And so, late Friday and into Saturday morning, construction workers climbed the facade and pulled his name down, six months after it went up. They hung a tarp over the front of the building while they worked, so no camera could capture the moment the letters came off. He could not even take the loss in daylight. He had to hide it in the dead of night behind a curtain.

This may seem like we won a battle against Trump’s ego, but it goes much deeper than that and carries the answer to a question so many of us have lived with all year. Are we too far gone? Can we come back from this?

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