In August 2026, Iran’s government announced that it would only reopen the Strait of Hormuz if U.S. President Donald Trump admitted he lost the 2020 presidential election.
A rumor that Iran’s government announced that it would only reopen the Strait of Hormuz if U.S. President Donald Trump admitted he lost the 2020 presidential election spread in August 2026.
For example, a Facebook user claimed on Aug. 6, 2026 (archived), “In a major setback for Donald J. Trump, the government of Iran announced on Thursday that it would only reopen the Strait of Hormuz when he admits he lost the 2020 election.”
The story spread as Trump faced increasing pressure to reach an agreement with Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz amid a historically low approval rating. Some users seemed to interpret the rumor that Iran was forcing Trump to state that he lost the 2020 election — something Trump repeatedly denied before he admitted he lost — as true. Snopes readers contacted us to investigate its legitimacy.
To investigate the rumor’s legitimacy, we first used search engines such as DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Bing. If Iran had put such an offer on the negotiation table, journalists with reputable news outlets, such as The Associated Press or Reuters, would have widely reported on it, and those search inquiries would have uncovered such evidence.
That was not the case. We did not find any credible reporting about Iran saying they would only reopen the Strait of Hormuz if Trump admitted he lost the 2020 election.
We identified the rumor’s original source: The Borowitz Report, a satirical outlet that produces content that parodies political news. Andy Borowitz first shared the rumor on Aug. 5 and published the full satirical story on Aug. 6.
Borowitz’s About page reads:
I’ve been writing satirical news since I was eighteen. This represents either commitment to a genre or arrested development.
The New Yorker featured The Borowitz Report as a column for 25 years; Borowitz announced in 2023 that the magazine dropped his column for financial reasons.
Snopes has debunked other claims about Trump and Iran stemming from The Borowitz Report. For example, in July 2026, we alerted readers to a fake story about Trump saying his funeral crowd would be bigger than that of former Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated in a U.S.-Israeli strike on Feb. 28, 2026.
Sources
Borowitz, Andy. About – The Borowitz Report. https://www.borowitzreport.com/about. Accessed 9 July 2026.
Borowitz, Andy. Iran Says It Will Reopen Strait If Trump Admits He Lost in 2020. 6 Aug. 2026, https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/iran-says-it-will-reopen-strait-of.
Deng, Rae. ‘Did Trump Say His Funeral Crowd Would Be Bigger than Iranian Ayatollah’s? Don’t Be Fooled’. Snopes, 9 July 2026, https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/trump-funeral-ayatollah/.
Finley, Ben, and MATTHEW LEE Leer en español. ‘A Deal with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz May Require a Compromise from Trump’. AP News, 7 Aug. 2026, https://apnews.com/article/iran-trump-strait-hormuz-diplomacy-stockpiles-0220ceb7904e16c30869c8fe4cf2a3db.
Gracia, Shanay, and Jocelyn Kiley. ‘Trump’s Job Approval Rating Is Low by Historical Standards’. Pew Research Center, 6 Aug. 2026, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/08/06/trumps-job-approval-rating-is-low-by-historical-standards/.
News, A. B. C. ‘A Timeline of Donald Trump’s Election Denial Claims, Which Republican Politicians Increasingly Embrace’. ABC News, https://abcnews.com/Politics/timeline-donald-trumps-election-denial-claims-republican-politicians/story?id=89168408. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.
‘Trump Acknowledges Losing the 2020 Election “by a Whisker”‘. NBC News, 4 Sept. 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-acknowledges-lost-2020-election-whisker-rcna169526.
