USA Today:

Chris Brennan

President Donald Trump has been warning Iran for weeks that an American "armada" of warships was on the way, trying to leverage the threat of military strikes into a deal for Iran to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons.

Trump casts the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to the Middle East. He's probably right about that.

But Trump also insists that his last military strikes on Iran, eight months ago, "obliterated" the country's nuclear program. And his White House team denounced as "fake news" reports that the June strikes on three sites only set back Iran's nuclear program "by a few months."

Just this past week, Trump twice spoke of Iran's nuclear program as a thing of the past, while also threatening new military strikes to destroy what he claims to have already destroyed.

Which Trump are we supposed to believe here? And – yes – I think not believing either version is an option.

The president used his Feb. 19 introductory speech at the first meeting of his ironically named new "Board of Peace" to brag about America's "magnificent" B-2 bombers, which were used in the June 21 strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities.

"It went into Iran and it totally decimated the nuclear potential," Trump said of the bombers. "When it decimated that, all of a sudden, we had peace in the Middle East."

Trump's White House also issued a Feb. 16 statement celebrating Presidents Day that lavishly praised his leadership on many issues, including "remarkable military actions, including destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons capability."

Trump on Feb. 16, while speaking to journalists on Air Force One, threatened to send B-2 bombers to Iran "to knock out their nuclear potential" if the country resisted his efforts at a deal.

So twice in one week, Trump has bragged about knocking out Iran's nuclear program while threatening to knock out Iran if it doesn't drop its nuclear program. This is startling cognitive dissonance from a politician threatening war.

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