Apart from his craziest advisers and a few corporate giants who’ve been accused of gaming the system, it’s safe to say that no one likes Donald Trump’s tariffs. In fact, one might go so far as to say that people think they absolutely blow, likely because they’ve led to higher prices for consumers, increased costs for U.S. companies, losses and layoffs for manufacturers, and an effective punch in the gut for farmers, to say nothing of how they’ve alienated some of our closest international allies. What’s more, whatever benefits they’ve supposedly produced have been wildly exaggerated. Unfortunately, none of these dispiriting facts make for a very stirring speech at Trump’s patented Make America Great Again rallies. Which is why the former real-estate developer and fake-successful businessman has turned to Plan B: inventing a bunch of C.E.O. buddies who have nothing but glowing things to say about his trade policies.

Yes, like a pre-teen with a “girlfriend in Canada” who no one’s ever met, the president of the United States has taken to referencing a number of extremely powerful, unnamed executives who universally praise his ideas, according to Bloomberg. The White House hasn’t yet identified any of them, but rest assured they’re totally, 100 percent real. At a rally in Tampa last month, he referred to a “chief executive officer” of “one of the greatest companies in the world,” whose firm has been negatively affected by the president‘s use of tariffs, but who—unlike the company heads who’ve begged him to call off his trade wars—has nevertheless told Trump, “Mr. President, keep going. You’re doing the right thing.” (Presumably this mystery man is also the one encouraging him to keep it up with the Just for Men.)

These complimentary figures have cropped up in international negotiations, too. A day before European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker paid a visit to the White House, Trump claimed his Art of the Deal–style skills had forced Europe to come to the negotiating table with its tail between its legs. “They didn’t want to change. I said, ‘O.K. Good. We’re going to tariff your cars,”’ Trump said at a conference on July 24. “They said, ‘When can we show up? When can we be there? Would tomorrow be O.K.?”’ Only: a European official told Bloomberg that the meeting was agreed upon when Juncker and Trump met at the G7 summit, and that the administration invited Juncker to the White House. The president has also taken to citing a conversation he supposedly had with an unnamed official from the “highest echelons of China,” who apparently told him that the U.S. trade deficit with China skyrocketed because prior administrations didn’t put up a fight when the Chinese government put trade barriers in place (those unidentified officials really have it out for Trump’s predecessor). “One of the great people of China said, ‘There was never anybody to talk to in the United States,’” Trump told CNBC last month. “‘Nobody would ever complain until you came along.’ Me. And they said, ‘Now, you’re doing more than complaining.’”

Weirdly, though, not everyone is buying that the people in these anecdotes actually, y’know, exist. Trump has something of a track record for embellishment—on the campaign trail, he repeatedly mentioned his friend “Jim” to argue that immigration had hurt France. Jim is “a very, very substantial guy” who stopped taking yearly trips to Paris due to immigration-related terrorism and crime, Trump claimed during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year. Naturally, Trump didn’t provide a last name for his very substantial friend who was forced by those damn immigrants to give up fresh baguettes and authentic coq au vin, and the White House has declined to identify him. “Many of these anecdotes have either not been verified or they’re unverifiable,” Robert Rowland, a professor of presidential rhetoric at Kansas University, told Bloomberg. “When he doesn’t have hard data to cite, he goes to these kinds of anecdotes. When he doesn’t have real anecdotes, it appears that he finds his own.” Eric Altbach, a former deputy assistant U.S. trade Representative for China affairs during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, called outright bulls--t on Trump’s “highest echelons of China” official. “If China implemented a policy that harmed a U.S. exporter or a U.S. investor or U.S. farmers, the odds of nobody noticing and nobody saying anything about it and it sailing by unchallenged by senior U.S. officials are approximately zero,” he said.