There have been merely a handful of trade deals announced, none of which have been reduced to serious writings and most of which are characterized by the other side as conceptual frameworks rather than actual deals. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from announcing that he’s made fabulous deals, including the one with the European Union which includes, according to him, $600,000,000,000 to be spent anyway he wants.

There might be a problem or two with Trump’s grasp of the deal.

The European Union has admitted it doesn’t have the power to deliver on a promise to invest $600 billion in the United States economy, only hours after making the pledge at landmark trade talks in Scotland.

That’s because the cash would come entirely from private sector investment over which Brussels has no authority, two EU officials said.

On Sunday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen struck a deal with U.S. President Donald Trump to avoid an all-out EU-U.S. trade war. The deal included a pledge to invest an extra $600 billion of EU money into the U.S. over the coming years.

In other words, there is neither a deal that $600 billion would be spent, nor that it would be spent as Trump wants, whether that would be on White House ballrooms, $Trump meme coins or golf courses in New Jersey.

“It is not something that the EU as a public authority can guarantee. It is something which is based on the intentions of the private companies,” said one of the senior Commission officials. The Commission has not said it will introduce any incentives to ensure the private sector meets that $600 billion target, nor given a precise timeframe for the investment.

And unlike Trump’s grasp of the scope of his authority, the EU president does not claim the power to dictate to either the Union, European nations or companies what it must do with its money.

“This part of the deal is largely performative,” Nils Redeker from the Jacques Delors Centre think tank told POLITICO. “[The EU] is not China, right? So nobody can tell private companies how much they invest in the U.S.”

Putting aside the open question of whether Trump has any authority to unilaterally impose tariffs at all, the claims of trade deals are not only grossly premature, but largely malarky. There is no deal for the EU to give Trump a gift of $600 billion to spend as he will, as if it wasn’t supposed to be Congress holding the purse strings and the president doing as Congress instructs.

There was a time when credulous people expected their president to tell them plausible truth rather than just make up stupid stuff out of whole cloth and have the faithful suck it up no matter how outlandish or ridiculous or flagrantly false it might be. No longer. There is no $600 billion for Trump to spend as he wants. Even if there is money invested by companies from the EU in the United States, however much that turns out to be, it will be at the companies’ discretion and Trump has nothing to say about it, except to the extent he might abuse his authority and coerce investments by threatening to do damage to their businesses or use regulatory powers to control what the businesses are able to do.

What has to happen for the people who blindly adore him to be even a little bit skeptical of his clownish pronouncements? When the $600 billion doesn’t show, will they finally realize they’ve been lied to or will they manufacture yet another set of nonsensical excuses to explain away yet another failure? What will it take?