Trump Keeps Claiming Iran Is Desperate For A Deal Weeks After Telling The World Why It Is Not

WASHINGTON — While President Donald Trump continues to claim on a nearly daily basis that Iranian leaders are desperate to end the war he is waging against their country, the self-branded “dealmaker” explained to the world just weeks ago why they actually are not, and in fact continue to hold the upper hand.

“We’re talking right now. Their people, they wanted to talk,” Trump said on Monday en route to a taxpayer-funded political rally in Michigan.

Frequently, Trump suggests that the country’s leaders or their emissaries are calling him directly. “They want to make a deal so badly. They called a little while ago. They want to make a deal so badly,” he told reporters traveling back to the United States with him from the NATO summit aboard the luxury 747 he solicited from Qatar.

Tuesday morning, Trump was pressed in a call-in interview with Fox News about who, exactly, Trump was speaking with in Iran. Trump evaded the question. “We’ve had some very good talks,” he said instead.

For Americans, the bottom line is that a full five months into a war that Trump said would last “four to five” weeks and which thus far has left 18 US service members dead and more than 600 injured, the public still has no reliable information about when it might end.

John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first term and a longtime proponent of attacking Iran, said the country no longer has a coherent government to negotiate with and, in any event, that Trump has no coherent strategy.

“The part of the regime that really matters, the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], has zero interest in a deal,” Bolton said. “Trump has got himself in over his head and has no plan. He is just floundering around.”

(Bolton is among the Trump critics targeted for prosecution by his Justice Department and last month agreed to plead guilty to a single count of illegally retaining classified documents for a book he wrote. He will pay a fine of $2.25 million and serve 100 hours of community service.)

Trump’s White House did not respond to HuffPost queries about why the president believes Iran “badly” wants to “make a deal.”

Just six weeks ago, Trump told the whole world exactly why Iran, which controls high ground on three sides of the upside-down “V”-shaped Strait of Hormuz, still holds the upper hand in Trump’s war. Countries and oil companies the world over continue to eat through their reserves as tanker traffic through the strait has dropped to a trickle since Trump and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu launched the war on Feb. 28.

“We run out of reserves in about four weeks,” Trump said at the close of the G7 summit in France on June 17. “There are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there would be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it. And you want to see bedlam?”

Trump added that if he had not signed a ceasefire agreement then, as he did, an economic depression would have followed. “The one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover,” he said.

That agreement, ironically signed at Versailles, the same place where Germany formalized its surrender to end World War I, barely lasted a few weeks before Iran attacked ships that were using a channel in the Strait of Hormuz that Iran did not approve of. The ceasefire disintegrated further, and the US military hit Iranian targets for two straight weeks while Iran’s military — which Trump had repeatedly claimed had been eliminated — retaliated with strikes against US troops in the region.

A missile attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan on July 17 killed three Army soldiers and injured dozens. Iran again launched missiles against bases hosting US troops in the region on Tuesday, and Trump on Wednesday vowed to retaliate.

Robert Kagan, a top State Department official during the Reagan administration, said Iran has no incentive to give up de facto control of the strait. “Folks need to remember that control of the strait is not a luxury for Iran. It’s not just a power grab. It’s a vital interest,” he said. “Iran has every reason to believe that either Trump or Israel or both will attack again in the future. Control of the strait, at least as long as it remains a vital waterway, remains Iran’s best deterrent.”

Claiming that Iran badly wants to “make a deal” with him is not new for Trump. He has been stating that — without any evidence — pretty much from the moment in May 2018 when he withdrew from the agreement negotiated by his predecessor Barack Obama that limited Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, which Iran had been abiding by.

In fact, all of the highly enriched uranium currently in Iran’s possession — which Trump, for reasons unclear, calls “nuclear dust” — was created after Trump’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as it was formally known.

During the reelection campaign he lost in 2020, Trump would tell his followers that Iran was eager to make a new agreement with him but was waiting for the start of his second term.

“You know, the first call I get ― after we win, the first call I get will be from Iran. They’re going to want to make a deal because their country has been devastated,” he told his audience at a rally in Tampa on Oct. 29, 2020.

“The first call I’m going to get are the people, the leaders in Iran: ‘Let’s make a deal, let’s make a deal,’” he said two days later in Reading, Pennsylvania.

It is unclear why Iran would insist on waiting until the start of a second term to make such a deal. Iran has never confirmed any such interest.

Regardless, Trump kept right on claiming Iran wanted to make a deal with him, even after his reelection loss and the failure of his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.

“I would have had a deal. You know, Iran was broke when I was president. They wanted to make a deal,” he said on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton talk radio show in May 2024.

The claims continued after Trump returned to office in January 2025. At times he asserted that negotiations were in their final stages.

“The Iran deal is coming along very well. We’re dealing at the highest levels of Iran, and I think they want to make a deal, and we want to make a deal,” he told reporters on Air Force One on April 28, 2025.

“They want to make a deal, but got to make a deal that’s meaningful,” he said in a Feb. 27 speech in Texas — just hours before he began his war against Iran.

Jim Townsend, a former Defense Department official in the Obama administration, said he also does not understand why Trump thinks Iran wants to negotiate with him.

“Over years of being under sanctions, their economy seems to work around U.S. sanctions and blockades. So that’s not enough pressure on them either. I just don’t see a pressure and pain campaign on Iran being sufficient to drive them to the table,” he said.