He did it again: Trump announces seemingly imaginary Iran breakthrough, taking Wall Street for another ride

We still don't know how or when Donald Trump's war on Iran will end, but if you believe Donald it's ended a half dozen times already and ended again today.

That was one of a long and conspicuously manic series of posts this morning, and if the world gets out of Donald's war only with a renaming of the Strait of Hormuz to the "Strait of Iran" we'd all get off lucky.

But there are reasons to suspect that Trump is embellishing the situation again. One of the biggest clues is that the (conspicuously manic!) accompanying posts smell strongly of Trump hallucinating things while on the toilet.

Yeah, that probably didn't happen.

There's not a chance in hell that happened.

A joint U.S.-Iranian minesweeping operation that's already removed some of the mines, huh. That is a thing that has already happened, huh? And was NATO there, with big tears in their eyes, as this was going on?

So far, however, the most important indication that the "Strait of Iran" isn't open is that Iranian officials have come out with new statements that make it clear they have "opened" it only to the degree they've previously announced it to be "open." Which is: Not entirely open.

The "coordinated route" being referred to is a route that hugs the Iranian coastline, and one that can only be traversed by coordinating with Iranian authorities. The toll Iran is now imposing on ships taking that route appears to be still in place; the only obvious change being made appears to be that if Israel's ceasefire in Lebanon holds, U.S.-linked merchant ships will now be allowed to coordinate safe passage along with all the others. But there may be a fee. And U.S. warships are barred from passage regardless.

There's many reasons Iran would prefer to keep traffic through the strait close to their own shoreline, but the most likely reason is because if Iran has mined the strait, it's mined the center of the channel. It can't guarantee the safety of ships taking that route, toll or no toll. It can assure ships that one specific route of its own choosing is "safe," however.

So the situation in the strait itself seems today to be almost exactly what it's been, but now Trump is attempting to sell—really, really sell—that status quo as a great victory and lasting deal. And it comes with other apparent U.S. concessions, too:

I'll spare you the need to parse the weird details of that one, but the big one is Donald's announcement that Israel is now "PROHIBITED" from bombing Lebanon.

Oh really? That would be the first ultimatum Trump has ever given Netanyahu, and the odds of Netanyahu agreeing to it on Israel's behalf are, realistically, zero. There might be some lip service paid to the notion, but asking the Netanyahu government to not level whatever blocks of Middle East real estate they want to level has historically been both futile and met with outrage from Israeli government hardliners.

If it were real, however, then a semi-permanent prohibition on Israeli attacks in Lebanon would represent a massive new American concession to Iran. If it were real, that is.

As for the "Nuclear 'Dust,'" which Donald seems to think was made extra dusty in previous U.S. bombing raids(?), Trump appears to be referring to a possible U.S. change of position reported today by Axios. The Trump administration is now floating the release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian assets in exchange for Iran giving up its current enriched uranium stockpiles.

That, too, is an enormous Trumpian concession; you might remember that Trump unilaterally withdraw the U.S. from the previous, Obama-era Iranian nuclear deal, whining that it was far too lenient, and Republicans attacked the very idea of offering sanctions relief, claiming Obama wanted to "pay" Iran for the uranium.

Now that same Donald is offering a whopping $20 billion to secure the stockpile, and it's not even clear what "secure" will really mean.

The latest number discussed by the U.S. and Iran is $20 billion, the sources said. One U.S. official said that was a U.S. proposal. The other U.S. official described the cash-for-uranium concept as "one of many discussions."

Meanwhile, the U.S. asked Iran to agree to ship all its nuclear material to the U.S., while the Iranians only agreed to "down-blend" it inside Iran.

Under a compromise proposal now under discussion, some of the highly enriched uranium would be shipped to a third country, not necessarily the U.S., and some of it would be down-blended in Iran under international monitoring.

As for any prohibition on Iran simply creating a new such stockpile, Axios reports that the two sides are negotiating a "voluntary" moratorium on doing that.

Trump, hallucinating again

So far, then, here's what appears to be going on. It appears that Trump was briefed on the latest negotiations between his administration and Iranian leaders, and Donald appears to have unilaterally announced that the deal has already been made, and that every point of disagreement has already been resolved entirely in his favor, and this seems yet another case of Trump brazenly bullshitting so that the stock market does not look down, Wile E. Coyote style, only to realize that it's been standing in thin air for several weeks now.

He's claiming the status quo is a great new victory, again, and again the markets are falling for it because ... I don't even know what to tell you, at this point?

While most of what Trump is announcing appears to be either aspirational or otherwise imaginary, there is some news to be gleaned in his latest social media cluster bomb. The main news is that even in Trump's most manic and bullshit-laden version of events, the United States will come out of the war with a massive strategic loss on its hands.

• Trump claims the Strait of Hormuz will "open," but the strait was open before. If Trump is trying to sell the current version of "open" as his victory, that's worse: It leaves Iran in more control of international shipping than it was before the war began.

• The United States will unfreeze $20 billion in previously frozen assets in a trade for some, but not all, of Iran's enriched uranium and a purely "voluntary" promise to pause future enrichment—a much worse nonproliferation deal for the U.S. than the one Trump tore up.

• There is no regime change. On the contrary, the Iranian regime has been reconstituted with hardliners who are even more hostile to the U.S. and its allies and even willing to inflict more brutality on its citizenry.

• Iranian counterattacks have inflicted severe damage to the civilian energy infrastructure of multiple U.S. allies. We don't know how much, because some of those regional "allies" have made it illegal to reveal the extent of the damage. But the scattered accounts we do have suggest that some plants will be out of commission for, potentially, many months. That'll keep prices of some commodities high no matter when the strait reopens.

• No new restrictions on Iranian missile and drone programs.

• No curtailment of Iranian funding to regional revolutionary and terrorist groups.

• A new "prohibition" against Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

That's what Trump himself is imagining victory to look like. He's blustering over an unclosed, theoretical, and partially-hallucinated deal that accomplishes none of his claimed objectives and forks over $20 billion to Iran to return to some worse approximation of the deal he tore up. That's what he now wants to sell as his supposed "win." (Or, rather, those are the Iranian conditions a humiliated Trump is willing to accept in order to extricate himself from a quagmire of his own stupid making.)

Well, that certainly clarifies how this is all going to end. It's going to end with a Trump surrender framed as glorious victory, just as we all predicted it would.

But again: As for this "deal" Trump is currently raving about, it seems to exist solely as Trumpian Friday-before-the-markets-close wishcasting. The strait is still "open" only in the same sense that Iran has declared it "open" since the ceasefire began. Whatever mines have been laid in the strait appear to be still there. And Iran has made it clear that even this tenuous arrangement depends on Israel ending military operations in Lebanon.

Once again, the markets are eager to be taken for rides by this man and his hour-by-hour delusions, and I've yet to hear a good explanation for it. The most plausible interpretation I've run across is that the markets know Trump will abandon his war sooner or later but probably sooner; the man's been telegraphing his desperation for weeks now.

So, investors figure, we might as well act like he already has. We'll be right eventually!