Donald Trump is getting hammered over his new Iran deal from all directions—including by members of his own party—and his response has been about as predictable as it gets.
Instead of defending the details of an agreement that many conservatives are openly calling a giveaway to Tehran, Trump spent Saturday morning doing what he always does when things start going sideways: ranting about Barack Obama.
The president unleashed a Truth Social tirade attacking critics of his Iran memorandum of understanding, calling them “Radical Left fools” and “Dumocrats” while insisting that Iran had been “completely defeated militarily.”
But beneath the usual all-caps bravado was something harder to miss: Trump appears increasingly obsessed with relitigating his grievances against Obama at the very moment his own Iran deal is facing growing scrutiny.
“Obuma just kept giving them $Billions in cash,” Trump wrote, reviving one of his favorite decade-old attacks while portraying himself as the strongman who finally put Iran in its place.
There is just one problem. The deal Trump signed this week looks remarkably different from the tough-guy rhetoric he’s selling.
Under the agreement, the U.S. is reportedly moving to ease sanctions, allow Iran to resume oil sales, and potentially pave the way for hundreds of billions of dollars in reconstruction funding. The deal also leaves key questions about Iran’s nuclear program unresolved for future negotiations.
In other words, after months of war, billions in spending, economic turmoil, and countless promises about crushing Iran’s capabilities, the administration appears to have landed on a deal that even many Republicans are struggling to defend.
That reality may explain why Trump is suddenly talking more about Obama than about the actual contents of his own agreement.
Former President Barack Obama added fuel to the controversy Friday when he suggested the United States may have ended up in a worse position than before the conflict began.
“We’ve now fought a war, spent billions and billions of dollars, put an enormous strain on our military, a lot of people have died and it feels like we are back where we were before we started the war, except maybe a little worse off,” Obama said.
It’s a criticism that appears to have hit a nerve.
Trump’s response wasn’t to explain why lifting sanctions is suddenly a good idea after years of denouncing Obama’s diplomacy. Instead, he launched into another lengthy attack on the former president, accusing him of weakness and insisting that Iran only feared him.
The irony is difficult to miss.
Trump spent years calling Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran the “worst deal ever.” He withdrew from it during his first term, arguing that it was too generous to Tehran and gave away American leverage.
Now critics are pointing out that Trump’s own agreement appears to offer Iran major concessions up front while securing far less than the deal he once trashed.
And it’s not just Democrats making that argument.
Several Republican lawmakers have openly questioned the agreement. Senator Ted Cruz blasted the prospect of billions of dollars flowing to Iran, warning that “giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea.”
When Ted Cruz starts sounding like one of your critics, you know the messaging isn’t going according to plan.
That may be why Trump’s social media feed increasingly resembles a time machine back to 2016.
The more questions that emerge about the Iran deal, the more Trump seems determined to talk about Obama instead.
But Obama isn’t the one who negotiated this agreement. Obama isn’t the one defending sanctions relief. And Obama isn’t the one trying to convince skeptical Republicans that giving Iran economic breathing room somehow counts as a historic victory.
Trump promised a deal that would be tougher, stronger, and better than anything his predecessors could achieve.
Now that the details are finally coming into focus, even some of his loudest supporters see it as an embarrassing defeat.
