President promises peace in days, orders strikes the same night.

I keep a file. Old habit from the courthouse beat: when a man keeps telling you the verdict is coming any day now, you start writing down the dates.

Monday’s entry reads as follows. The President, leaving an NBA Finals game in New York, told reporters that a deal to end the war with Iran could be reached in “two or three days.” The Strait of Hormuz, currently closed and full of hardware, would reopen “immediately.” The agreement, he said, would be “a very, very good deal that will not in any way allow nuclear weapons.”

CNN keeps a file too. Theirs says this was at least the 38th time since late March that the President has announced an imminent deal. Thirty-eight. In April he said the two countries were “very far along.” That was more than 60 days ago. A man who is very far along for two months is not traveling. He is standing still and narrating.

The same day.

Here is where Monday’s entry gets interesting, because the peace forecast was not the only statement the President made that day.

He also announced that Iran had shot down an American Apache helicopter patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, and that “the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack.” The markets heard him. The Nasdaq dropped more than 3 percent intraday. The S&P gave up 2. Hours later, the military launched what it called self-defense strikes against Iran.

So the record for one calendar day reads: a peace deal in two or three days, a strait reopening immediately, and a fresh round of strikes ordered before dinner. Both statements cannot be the operative one. The traders who dumped tech stock at midday placed their bet on which.

What the count means.

I do not mock the strikes. A downed helicopter is a serious thing, and serious things deserve quiet. The pilots survived, the President says. Good.

What I mock is the file. A forecast you have issued 38 times is no longer a forecast. It is a tic. The first prediction was diplomacy. The tenth was salesmanship. The 38th, delivered on the way out of a basketball game, on the same day you ordered a military response, is something a man says the way other men say “we should grab lunch sometime.”

Somewhere in Tehran there is a negotiator with a file just like mine, and his version has the same 38 entries, and he draws the same conclusion from them that I do, that the courthouse drunk drew, that the traders drew by noon: the man at the podium does not know when the verdict is coming.

He just likes how the sentence sounds.

Day 39 starts tomorrow. I will have the file open.