Donald Trump spent Friday crowing on Truth Social that the Strait of Hormuz was “fully open and ready for full passage.” On Saturday, the IRGC (Iran’s military wing) closed it again and cited the ongoing blockade as the reason. Trump, predictably, is back to making the same threats all over again. By Sunday morning, Revolutionary Guard gunboats were firing on a British freighter and a French vessel transiting the strait. And by Sunday afternoon, Trump was back on Truth Social threatening to “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran,” signing off with “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY.” This is not a new threat. It is the same threat, recycled with escalating punctuation, that Trump has been lobbing at Tehran since the war began in late February. At this point, this whole saga reminds one of a chess game ending in stalemate, but instead of doing the mature thing and finding a way out, Trump is constantly moving his queen to attack, and then withdrawing since he knows he’ll lose the queen the moment he commits. The pattern is not difficult to identify. Trump issues a deadline, the deadline passes, Trump claims a deal or progress, the deal collapses or turns out to be less than advertised, and Trump issues a new, angrier deadline. As Time reported, he has repeatedly threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants “only to postpone or move deadlines after claiming progress in talks.” The speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has grown blunt about what he sees as the administration’s credibility problem, writing on X that Trump had made “seven claims in one hour, all seven of which were false.” Now he’s back to repeating himself, even though it clearly doesn’t work. “My Representatives are going to Islamabad, Pakistan — They will be there tomorrow evening, for Negotiations,” he wrote. “Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait, which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it.” Trump wasn’t done. Oh, he’s never done. “We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY! They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL.” The president who vowed to end wars and bring troops home finds himself on the cusp of threatening what legal experts describe as large-scale war crimes against Iranian civilians — not for the first time, and, given the trajectory, almost certainly not for the last.