COLUMN: Trump, Pinocchio, and Poker — When Tehran Laughs in Washington’s Face

How Prices Moved Over 48 Hours

There’s one thing the Pinocchio cartoons don’t show: the price chart for a barrel of crude oil. On Monday evening, following the announcement of the “talks,” prices briefly dipped. On Tuesday morning, after Iran’s denial, they began to rise again—higher than before the announcement. The daily newspaper Javan noted this with a trader’s precision: “Oil and gas prices have risen again.” The conclusion is implicit but devastating: the markets don’t believe Trump.

The unspoken accusation of market manipulation

Behind the mockery, Javan points to a more serious suspicion. If the U.S. president announces fictitious talks, prices fall. If insiders sold before the announcement and bought back after the denial, someone has profited from a state-sanctioned lie. The newspaper doesn’t use the term “insider trading.” It doesn’t need to. The HuffPost and several Western media outlets have already raised the question openly. And yet, no official investigation has been announced in Washington.

A metaphor that sticks

Javan compares Trump to “a player stuck in a quagmire” in a war he thought he could win like a poker hand—quickly, brutally, with a bluff big enough to force his opponent to fold. The metaphor is powerful because it’s accurate. Since February 28, 2026—the date Israel and the United States launched hostilities against Iran—every week has brought its share of awkward course corrections and premature declarations of victory.

When Bluffing Becomes Doctrine

The problem with poker is that it only works once. Bluffing an opponent who has already seen you fold a weak hand is amateurish. The Iranian regime has survived forty-seven years of sanctions, an eight-year war with Iraq, and the targeted assassination of Qassem Soleimani. It doesn’t back down at the sight of a tweet. And it knows it. And it wants the whole world to know it too—hence these cartoons distributed with the generosity of a campaign flyer.

The Tasnim News Agency and the Calculated Caricature

The Tasnim News Agency—linked to the Revolutionary Guards—has published its own caricature: Trump with disheveled hair, a dejected look, and a defeated posture. This is not spontaneous satirical art. It is meticulously calculated strategic communication. Every pencil stroke is a message intended for three audiences simultaneously: the Iranian people, the regime’s regional allies, and the Western foreign ministries watching from the sidelines.

The newspaper Sobh-e No drives the point home

“The Politics of Lies,” headlines Sobh-e No—literally, “New Morning.” The newspaper’s name itself becomes a rhetorical weapon: whose new morning, exactly? Iran’s, which refuses to bow? Or America’s, which is discovering that its threats aren’t having the desired effect? Armed Forces spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari openly mocks the situation. In a country where the military speaks only on orders, this public irony is a message in and of itself. And yet, the West continues to treat these signals as mere background noise.

The Silence on the Actual Strikes

The cartoons are loud. But the silence is louder still. The Iranian press, so verbose about Trump’s lies, remains remarkably discreet about the actual damage caused by the Israeli-American strikes since February 28. What infrastructure has been hit? What is the actual status of the nuclear program? How many civilian casualties? On these questions, the curtain remains drawn. The war of images is a war of selection—we show Pinocchio’s nose, we hide the craters.

The Absence of Dissenting Voices

There is a cruel irony in seeing a regime that imprisons its own journalists—and that bloodily suppressed the 2022 protests—pose as the arbiter of truth in the face of Trump. Both lie. Both manipulate. The difference? One does so in a system where the press can still ask questions—even if it doesn’t do so often enough. The other does so in a system where the very act of asking a question is a crime.

When Words Replace Missiles

Since February 28, the Iran-U.S.-Israel war has been playing out on three simultaneous fronts: the military front, the economic front (oil, sanctions, the Strait of Hormuz), and the information front. The latter may be the most decisive. For in a war where both sides lie about the status of negotiations, whoever controls the narrative controls the perception of victory. And in modern wars, the perception of victory often precedes actual victory—or renders it meaningless.

The Strait of Hormuz as a Narrative Weapon

The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a maritime passage through which one-fifth of the world’s oil flows. It is a symbol. For Iran, closing it (or threatening to close it) is the ultimate proof of its capacity to cause disruption. For the United States, reopening it is the ultimate proof of its projected power. And yet, to date, neither side has succeeded in imposing its version of events. The strait remains in a strategic limbo that benefits speculators and terrifies importers.

The Oil Shock That No One Wants to Call by Name

In France, the Minister of the Economy spoke of a “new oil shock” before “regretting his remarks” a few hours later. This semantic backtracking is more revealing than a 200-page report. If a minister accidentally speaks the truth and immediately retracts it, it’s because the truth is deemed too dangerous to be spoken. Prices at the pump are rising. Energy bills are following suit. But the word “shock” is banned from official vocabulary.

The Absence of European Mediation

Where is Europe in this standoff? Nowhere. It is a stunned spectator to a standoff between Washington and Tehran, suffering the economic consequences without having the slightest influence over the decisions. The European Union, which prided itself on having saved the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, no longer has any leverage, any channels of communication, or any credibility with either side. And yet, it is the EU that will foot the heaviest energy bill.

Lying as a Method of Governance

To say that Trump lies is like saying that water is wet—it’s technically accurate but strategically pointless. The real question isn’t whether he lies. It’s understanding why he’s telling this particular lie at this particular moment. Announcing fictitious talks with Iran on the very day the ultimatum expires sends a message to three audiences: the markets (“calm down”), Congress (“I’m in control”), and the electorate (“I’m a dealmaker”). It doesn’t matter that it’s false. What matters is that it works for 24 hours.

Iran lies too—but in a different way

The Iranian regime isn’t lying about the existence of talks. It’s lying about everything else. About the state of its defenses. About the morale of its people. About its genuine willingness to negotiate. About the informal channels that may exist—via Oman, via China, via intermediaries whose names no one mentions in public. When Tehran cries “lie,” it is telling a partial truth to mask a broader truth. This is the nature of war diplomacy. And yet, the Western media continues to treat this conflict as a match between a liar and an honest man.

What Iranian Metaphors Reveal Despite Themselves

Pinocchio is the liar punished by his own body. The poker player is the strategist unmasked by his own incompetence. The two metaphors chosen by the Iranian press have one thing in common: they depict a ridiculous, harmless adversary. This is an editorial choice with far-reaching consequences. For to ridicule Trump is to deny the reality of the bombs falling. It is to turn a war into a comedy show. It is to offer the Iranian people a narrative of moral superiority that masks real suffering.

Propaganda as an anesthetic

The caricature of Trump as Pinocchio makes people laugh. That is exactly its purpose: to make people laugh so they don’t think. To show a grotesque enemy in order to avoid showing an enemy that is bombing. The Iranian regime knows that publicly humiliating its adversary is an effective substitute for military victory—at least in the short term. But in the long term, Pinocchio’s noses do not patch the holes in the infrastructure.

The Price of a Barrel as a Lie Detector

There is a lie detector more reliable than all the fact-checkers in the world: the price of a barrel of crude oil. When Trump announces talks, the price drops. When Iran denies it, the price rises. This fluctuation isn’t speculation—it’s a collective, real-time verdict on the credibility of political statements. And since Monday, that verdict has been final: the market believes Iran’s denial more than the U.S. announcement.

Speculators as the Real Winners

Amid this information chaos, one group thrives: those who know before everyone else. Before every announcement, before every denial, someone buys and someone sells at just the right moment. Suspicions of insider trading among the president’s inner circle are not a conspiracy theory—they are a matter of mathematics. When the same people consistently find themselves on the right side of market volatility, chance ceases to be a satisfactory explanation.

What Really Began on February 28

This conflict is being presented as a targeted operation against Iran’s nuclear program. That is one version of the facts. Another—less convenient—version is that this war serves to redraw the security architecture of the Middle East ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. A third version is that it serves to divert attention from the accumulated diplomatic failures in Ukraine, Gaza, and North Korea. These three versions are not mutually exclusive. They build upon one another.

The Strait as a Strategic Trap

If the Strait of Hormuz is closed, it is Iran that is holding the world hostage. If the Strait of Hormuz remains open under U.S. threat, Washington positions itself as the guarantor of global trade. In both cases, the strait is a trap. Whoever controls it wins the narrative. Whoever loses it—even temporarily—loses credibility. To date, neither side can claim to control it entirely. This means that the war continues, whether the talks are genuine or not.

The Death of the Joint Statement

There was a time when “talks” meant that two parties had sat down at the same table and issued a joint statement. In 2026, “talks” means that one president has posted a statement and the other party has denied it. There is no longer a table. There is no longer a joint statement. There are simultaneous monologues that the media exhaust themselves trying to turn into a dialogue. Diplomacy by unilateral statement has become the norm. And yet, we continue to use the vocabulary of traditional negotiation to describe something that is no longer negotiation.

The Age of Constant Denial

We live in a world where every announcement is followed by a denial within the hour. Where the truth is no longer what is said, but what survives the cycle of denials. In this world, the Pinocchio cartoon published by Javan is both propaganda and journalism—it states a truth (Trump announced talks that do not exist) with a manipulative intent (to ridicule the enemy in order to galvanize the people). Truth that is exploited remains truth. But it ceases to be innocent.

The Question No One Asks

The real question isn’t: Did Trump lie? The real question is: Why does this still work? Why do the markets react to every announcement as if it might be true? Why do the media cover every presidential statement as if it had diplomatic weight? Why do we still give the benefit of the doubt to a man whose relationship with the truth is, at best, experimental?

Because the alternative is terrifying

Because the alternative is to admit that the president of the world’s leading power can announce fictitious peace talks in the midst of a war, and that no one—not Congress, not allies, not international institutions—has a mechanism to contradict him in real time with any real consequences. The caricature of Pinocchio is funny. The reality it masks—an international system where state lies come at no cost—is anything but amusing.

Pinocchio’s nose points toward the Strait of Hormuz. But it also points toward us. Toward our collective inability to distinguish signal from noise, fact from bluff, war from theater. The Iranian press is laughing. The markets are trembling. Bombs are falling. And somewhere between Tehran and Washington, the truth—that fragile, uncomfortable, necessary thing—is still waiting to be sought out.

Signed, Jacques PJ Provost