Trump is presenting his most brazen set of ‘alternative facts’ to date

There is a vulgar phrase that Americans like to use when someone is trying to fool them: “Don’t piss on my boots and tell me it’s raining.”

Now, Donald Trump is putting that vivid aphorism to its most strenuous test. Amid tumbling approval ratings , he needs to persuade Americans that his war on Iran has been worth it, despite copious evidence to prove that it has not.

When he promotes the ceasefire extension that he claims will imminently be signed with Iran, he invariably compares it to the internationally brokered Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015, more colloquially known as the Iran nuclear deal .

Trump controversially withdrew the US from that agreement during his first term in office. Now, less than five months before crucial midterm elections that will determine the balance of power on Capitol Hill, it is vital for Trump that American voters believe his new deal with Iran is better than the old one.

“[Former US president] Barack Hussein Obama’s Deal with Iran, the JCPOA, was an easy, beautiful road to a Nuclear Weapon. My Agreement with Iran is the exact opposite,” Trump posted on his social media account on Saturday. The fact that in its very first paragraph , the text of the JCPOA (still accessible on the State Department’s website) states that “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons” is always overlooked in Trump’s telling of the situation.

Claiming without evidence that under that deal, Iran would have developed a nuclear weapon “six years ago, and would have used it long before now”, the US President called his agreement “A WALL TO NO NUCLEAR WEAPON! In fact, they no longer want a Nuclear Weapon, nor will they have one, either through purchase, development or any other form of procurement.”

The cadences sound eerily familiar to the 2015 agreement’s preface.

While the devil will be in the details, US officials claim the new deal will kick-start a 60-day process to work out technical mechanisms for the destruction of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium (which Trump falsely claimed had been “obliterated” during Operation Midnight Hammer last July).

Tunnel construction activity and road infrastructure near the Natanz nuclear facility in the mountainous area around Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain last year (Photo: Vantor/Getty)

Trump likes to refer to that uranium as “nuclear dust”, but – as Scientific American magazine reported in April – it is not “dust” at all. Rather, it’s an estimated 972 pounds of gas that the International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran stockpiled in cylinders, after enriching it to levels of up to 60 per cent.

The cylinders are believed to be sealed within enormous containers buried deep underground, beneath the rubble of Iran’s nuclear sites that were targeted by last year’s US and Israeli bombing campaign. Heavy, earth-moving equipment will be needed to access the cylinders. Whether Iran co-operates with the recovery effort or not, US military forces participating will have no way of knowing the disposition of the toxic and highly corrosive gas until they start digging. Defence officials have expressed serious safety concerns.

Trump claimed on Saturday that the operation will begin “at the appropriate time, when all is calm”. That presupposes that a period of calm is approaching, and that Iran will make none of its traditional efforts to kick the nuclear issue further down the road.

The American public will eventually realise the dangers of a military operation that has nothing to do with vacuuming up “dust” and will be placing US lives in fresh jeopardy – and see how brazen Trump’s “alternative facts” really are.

The biggest short-term test of the proposed agreement may be financial. Trump regularly fumes over the $400m (£300m) that Obama ordered to be flown to Iran in January 2017 after the signing of the JCPOA. The money (which Trump falsely claimed on Saturday amounted to “1.7 Billion dollars in green, cold cash”) was owed to Iran under the terms of a 1979 memorandum signed by the two countries over military equipment the US never delivered.

This time, Trump insists “no money will exchange hands”, a claim that may be contradicted whenever the full text of the agreement is published. Iran continues to insist publicly that billions of dollars in assets must be unfrozen to help the country rebuild, a move that Trump was considering earlier in the negotiating process. Democrats will leap on any provision of funding, with reports already indicating that as much as $24bn (£18bn) could eventually be placed at the regime’s disposal.

Justifying the costs of his war on Iran, which include not only the deaths of 13 US service members but also the depletion of America’s arsenal of Tomahawk missiles and other munitions, will challenge Trump for the rest of this year.

Americans may struggle to understand the details of any agreement that he strikes with Iran. But Democrats will be out in f…