For a couple of days this week, it looked like the war Donald Trump started might actually end on something resembling amicable terms, but the president has developed a habit of jettisoning diplomacy whenever his aides are close to finalizing a deal with Iran.
Per the latest reports by WSJ and Axios, the U.S. was closing in on a 14-point memorandum of understanding with Tehran, a framework that would declare an end to the war, open a 30-day window to negotiate the details, and, in its most ambitious provision, see Iran ship its 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium out of the country entirely.
This Sunday, even before he’d reviewed Iran’s response, Trump took to Truth Social to deliver a fan fiction account of the last 47 years in politics, especially in regards to Iran.
The Middle Eastern country, he wrote, had been “playing games” with America for half a century — “DELAY, DELAY, DELAY!” — until it finally hit “pay dirt” with the election of Barack Obama.
He then went on about the $1.7 billion that Obama gave the Iranians. Yes, the figure is real, but what Trump deliberately omits every time, is that the settlement was Iran’s own money to begin with, resolving a decade-old Hague tribunal claim over what the country had paid for American military hardware it never received.
Trump then called Obama “weak and stupid” while also taking a swipe at “Sleepy Joe.” He said the Iranians had been laughing at our “now GREAT AGAIN Country” and that “they will be laughing no longer.”
There is a thing Trump does, and has always done, which is to wait until the people working under him have nearly finished a piece of careful, technical work, and then to walk in and pour gasoline on it. Sometimes the gasoline is a tariff. Sometimes it is a cabinet firing. Sunday night, it was a 380-word screed about money planes and the man who hasn’t been president for nine years.
Trump has done this half a dozen times, at least. Back in June 2025, in the middle of negotiations with Iran, he gave the go-ahead to Israel to bomb and kill the country’s top military brass and nuclear scientists. He pulled the same move again in February 2026, but this time directly involved the U.S. military in the operation.
And now, he’s managed to torpedo several rounds of serious talks amid this fragile ceasefire, all because he can’t fight the impulse to log on to Truth Social and rant like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. Bloomberg reported on April 23, citing two U.S. officials, that Trump’s Truth posts “have been detrimental to ongoing negotiations.”
It turns out, to give peace a chance, all we need do is lock the president out of his account for a week.
Published: May 10, 2026 05:16 pm