Say what you will about Donald Trump, but the man can have unparalleled confidence right as the floor is falling from beneath him.
On Sunday, just as new details emerged about the new “Memorandum of Understanding” with Iran, the president took to Truth Social to do what he does best: insist that the disaster everybody can see coming, and has the evidence to prove, is actually very magnificent, and not at all like the Obama-era bargain he tore up in 2018.
“If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump wrote. “Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet. So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about. I don’t make bad deals!”
The only problem, Mr. President, is that people have already seen the outline, and it looks less like the “exact opposite” of the 2015 JCPOA and more like a softer version of it.
Reporting from both Axios and The Associated Press, not to mention numerous other regional outlets from the Middle East and beyond, describes a one-page, 14-point memorandum under which Iran accepts a moratorium on enrichment while the United States lifts sanctions and releases billions in frozen Iranian funds.
Iran would be permitted to enrich uranium to 3.67 percent, which is the exact ceiling Obama set in the JCPOA. The freeze itself would last roughly 12 to 15 years, then expire, leaving Iran free to expand. Obama’s sunset clauses, the very flaw Trump cited when he tore the deal up in 2018, are back.
“Massive amounts of CASH” and “a clear and open path” were Trump’s words for Obama’s bargain. And now, he’s agreeing to all of it and more.
The critics Trump is dismissing are actually not the nasty Democrats this time. They’re his own camp — like Mike Pompeo, Trump’s first-term Secretary of State, who said the framework is basically what we had before all of this mess.
The takeaway? What we knew from the very beginning: Trump only tore up the JCPOA because it was Obama’s achievement. He spent more than a decade trying to come up with something better, and even ended up going to war with Iran twice, and yet he now has no choice but to sign the same deal.
Thousands of people died and millions of people suffered just so the man-child in the White House could scribble his name where Obama’s once was.
Published: May 24, 2026 10:03 pm