The Daily Blast: Trump’s Dimwitted Tirade on Iran Deal Accidentally Reveals It’s a Sham

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[Music] This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent. [Music] Donald Trump has signed a deal with Iran to cease hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

We still haven't seen the document, but all of the reporting suggests a very simple story. Trump lost. He got nothing of any significance. Trump himself, plainly, has no idea what happened as he revealed in a strange ramble to reporters. But JD Vance does know what happened, even though he's trying very hard to sugarcoat it in a pretty revealing way. We're really lucky to be talking about all of this with Tom Nichols, a staff writer for the Atlantic who has a good piece,

arguing that Trump capitulated to Iran. Tom, great to have you on, man. Good to see you, Greg. So let's just sum up where we are. We haven't seen the document, but all the reporting suggests that while the Strait of Hormuz will reopen,

all that does is return us to where we were before Trump's war. Meanwhile, they've punted the discussion over Iran's nuclear program until later. And the Iranian regime has survived.

So basically, Trump's tens of billions of dollars in bombing didn't compel Iran to do what he said he'd make them do.

Tom, is that basically the size of things? I think it's worse than that. The bigger problem is that he counted on regime change. This was what the war was really about. So the, when that wasn't going to happen, when it became clear a week or so in that this regime wasn't going to collapse.

“This outcome, I think, was more or less inevitable.”

And I think the people that are now waiting and saying, well, we need to see the details of this MOU. That's fine. But even without knowing the details of the MOU, the Americans have been defeated here. And that pains me to say it as an American because the regime is still intact. Their nuclear material is still in their country.

They're actually politically more powerful now that they've flexed muscle and done some serious harm to the other Gulf States as a warning not to cooperate with the United States.

There's going to be some money going back into Iran, whether it comes through third party or not. I mean, none of these things. I think if you had said any of this Donald Trump on the first night of the war, he would have said that's impossible. We're going to get unconditional surrender. Well, we didn't, and all of these things are going to happen.

What, without even knowing what's in the MOU, you, you can know at least this much. Right. Trump absolutely did expect unconditional surrender, even though he was told by lots and lots of different people within his administration including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs that that wouldn't happen. He was told that the straight would be closed by Iran and that that would exercise leverage over the global economy and over us. Trump couldn't fathom that possibility because he's strong. But it's just that simple, right? He's strong. He wins. He's a winner. He's strong. So there's no way that things won't go exactly the way he says they will.

Yeah, this is, you know, it's it's bitten him before and caused him problems before, but there's this kind of weird quirk and Trump's personality where he really believes that saying things makes them real. That that like a child, he can sort of wish cast things into existence and, you know, that you can play that game with domestic politics and terror of syntaxes and, you know, do some, you know, kind of fancy dancing around where the money is in terms of things like revenue. And you can bully other Republicans to agree with you. What you can't do is do that with a war where the enemy gets a vote and, you know, every day the Trump said that you're going to make a deal. There's going to be a deal deal is imminent.

That seems beyond clear. So Trump talked to the media about his deal today. He blasted Obama's 2015 nuclear deal, which unfrozened tens of billions of dollars that Iran could then access in foreign accounts. Listen to Trump.

“It was a horrible deal for the United States. It was a deal where billions of dollars was given to Iran. It was a deal where 1.7 billion in cash was put on a Boeing 777. Well, not a 7757, I guess, right?”

But it was put on a big, beautiful Boeing 757. It needed a Boeing 747 to be honest with you because it was a lot of cash. 1.7 billion was taken out of the banks and given to Iran.

And on top of that tens of billions of dollars was spent. So they tried to bribe them to make a deal and that didn't work. It never works.

Tom, as far as we know now, Iran will also be able to access a huge tranche of funds under Trump's deal too, right? Can you explain that? How do you respond to what Trump said there? Well, I was a critic of the JCPOA because I didn't like how much of it was front loaded. But I also have to be honest and say that in the years that followed the deal seemed more or less to work. Now, Trump has kind of wandered into a kind of crappier version of the JCPOA, starting all over again.

And with the argument that they'll get access to this money if they clear certain gates and engage in certain things. And you know, the Iranians are just better at this than he is.

And I think that that money is going to start coming to them.

“Again, through third parties. And I think that's why you keep hearing Trump advance, both being careful to say, well, we're not just going to give them cash. No, you're going to open up the ability to have cash get to them.”

And I suspect that once people are tired of this whole process, which will be very soon, once Trump has no longer paying any attention to it, the Iranians are going to get what they want. That's just a matter of working out the details. Remember, in the end, this was supposed to be giving the Iranian government back to its people who would then dismantle the nuclear program and terror, support for terrorism, restrain their proxies blah, blah, blah, blah. None of that's going to happen. They're going to get the money one way or another.

“The basic difference between what Obama did with the money and what Trump is doing with the money. Do we know?”

Well, without seeing the MOU hard to say, but I would say that Obama did it without completely disrupting the international economy. We're going to be following billions of dollars worth of expensive American weapons getting some Americans killed getting many hundreds more wounded. And then weakening the United States by forcing us to basically admit that yes, the Iranians on the straight-of-war moves.

Right. The bottom line here is that Trump is in some sense using the mechanism of Obama used, which is a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program.

Obama did this through negotiation. Trump did it through spending tens of billions of dollars committing massive war crimes, bombing an Iranian school filled with children, etc., etc., to practically melting down the global economy. That's the difference. Right. They're using more or less the same mechanism. Trump blew up a lot of things, expanded a lot of weapons, messed up the global economy, and now is doing it exactly the way Obama did it. And we'll probably not get as good a deal because now the Iranians have made sure to do things like booby trap the Iranian. You know, this even if international inspectors get in there, and whatever Pete Higgs says, you're not going to have Marines in there digging this stuff out, you know, getting inspectors in there is going to be a lot trickier than it was 10 years ago.

It was just, it was stupid and pointless.

Now it's time for all of you. I know you can use it, but I can't even test it. You can't even test it. Now it's time for all of you to test it. Now it's time for all of you to test it.

“I think there's actually another reason for that, that I want to get to in a second.”

But first, let's listen to JD Vance for a second. There's a bit of confusion about how Iran will get access to this money.

It's being described as $300 billion.

JD Vance was asked about this. Listen to this. The Iranians are saying that they're going to have access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund, true or false. Well, and that's the sort of thing they could have access to funded by the golf coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation. I think that one of the things you're going to see at and people have to be skeptical of this is that the hardliners in the Iranian system will over-emphasize the benefits that Iran gets while under-emphasizing all the things that they have to concede and all the things they have to provide in order to get these benefits.

So we absolutely are open to the golf coast countries investing in the reconstruction of Iran, but only if Iran ends their nuclear program ends their enriched stockpile of material.

And it was really open to an inspections and enforcement regime that gives the American people confidence they're never going to have a nuclear weapon.

So if I understand this correctly, the US will allow Iran to get access to this money if and only if Iran agrees to some kind of binding long-term constraints on its nuclear program. What you're saying is that once the nuts and bolts really hit when they really start to talk about this, probably Iran will be able to get, you know, get access to that money fairly quickly or at least before any final commitment is made. And when JD events says this money will come from other golf-coast countries investing, what's he referring to there and what's your overall reaction to what you heard from JD?

Well, I don't know how quickly they'll get it. This is where I will be cautious and say that until we see this MOU, you know, which for some reason the administration really doesn't want to release to the public, which should tell you something right there. That, you know, I don't know how quickly it'll get here, but basically we're committing to supporting the reconstruction of the country, we just blew to some other means after getting nothing. This, this notion, I mean, it's, it really is staggering to have the administration claiming, well, we finally got a commitment not to build nuclear weapons. Look, I, I considered myself. I was never in favor of attacking Iran, but I was real hawk on the issue of if they ever get close to nuclear weapon, that could actually be the trigger for war.

But they had, there was no evidence of this and there's been no evidence of it for 10 years since since the JCPOA. So again, we're back to this problem that they're going to get a lot of money. They're going to get reconstruction support from the Gulf States that they have pounded and inflicted punishment on for cooperating with us. How does this not leave Iran, even though Iran has temporarily militarily weakened, how does this not leave Iran in a strategically more powerful stance?

“And I think that's why you hear when you listen to that, that part, we just listened to it, Greg, where, you know, you asked J Advanced these questions and he kind of does the Jackie Gleason thing, right?”

I think that kind of ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, you know, where he's trying to explain his way out of it, but the reality is Trump wants out.

And he's willing to buy his way out if he couldn't bomb his way out. Right, Obama actually ended up getting more because he had an actual deal that laid out what oversight of the Iranian nuclear program would look like. Trump doesn't have that. He's just now doing what Obama did, which is using money to try to get it, right? And doing it without the support of the international community. And after spending tens and tens of billions of dollars committing more crime is destroying the global economy.

I'm not there on, I'm not there yet on war crimes.

“I think that that's, uh, waits for an investigation, but he started a preventive war.”

He started a war of choice, which itself, you know, I mean, is was horrific because there was no, I mean, this wasn't, this didn't even have the rationale of the Iraq war behind it. You know, I, I said at the beginning of this, the Iraq war looks like it was, um, confidently lawyer it up compared to this. You know, I'm Bush went to the United Nations. He had allies on board with at least some of it. He made a case.

This was Trump just getting up one morning and saying, you know what, it's time to take out a run, which itself is a problem when you're talking about war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But, um, in the end, I will also say that had he toppled this regime, Greg. I would have been one of the people shrugging and saying, well, you got to, you do have to congratulate if he's, if he managed to get rid of one of the worst, most dangerous regimes on this planet, um, I may have not liked the way he went into it, but I would have had to certainly congratulate him on coming out of it. Now he's gotten the worst of all worlds. He's taken American on a discretionary war. Didn't get what he wants. He's going to have to pay off the bad guys so that he can get out of this, um, to, and basically he's going to paper over his own mistake here with, with dollars is what he's going to do.

“Right, and I think that that's basically the size of it. I just want to say one more thing about JD events, a strange ramble there.”

He's basically admitting that, that Trump is using the same mechanism that Obama used, a financial incentive to get a run to cooperate with oversight. It's nuclear program.

Doesn't JD just end up making Trump look like a complete moron given that it comes right after Trump compared his deal favorably to Obama's unfreeze. He funds to Iran. Yeah, no part. This administration does not communicate within itself. And I think what we're seeing here, you know, given the concerns about Trump's health is state of mind. JD advances answer was sort of stumbling and bumbling, but within the normal range of, you know, kind of political dissembling if that makes any sense. Trump, I think, just doesn't have any idea what's going on.

You know, the Trump, that there are Rubio and Trump and what, excuse me, that Whitkoff and Kushner are saying, okay, we've, you know, we've got it, but I don't get the sense that Trump himself, you know, really understands anything that's going on here.

So the idea that Trump and Vance are in on the same page doesn't isn't surprising at all. I really wonder how much Trump understands any of this at this point.

I just want to close on a point you make in your piece, which is really interesting. Trump is threatening to restart hostilities against Iran. If it doesn't agree to surrender as nuclear program, and you point out that Iran just won't believe that because Trump has shown that he wanted an exit from all this. I want to add to your point and get you to talk about this. As we get closer to the midterms, it becomes next to impossible for Trump to restart military action of any kind, let alone using any kind of ground invasion.

Republicans will just not allow that to happen because it'll utterly crush them in the midterms.

“So I think, Tom, what Trump has really done here is lock in a timeframe that actually weakens his leverage over Iran over time.”

It weakens his leverage over Iran's nuclear program over time, and Iran knows that. Am I right? I think so. And he's also made, you know, he's also alluded to using a nuclear weapon at one point. He said, I, we solved the ultimate, you know, but I, I just find it hard to believe, although, you know, with this administration, this president, you never know that, you know, right after Labor Day is everybody's going into the midterms. And he's still trying to, you know, wait for good news on the economy, because remember what he really cares about are the international markets.

And then he's going to say, okay, we're starting up the Oregon on, on what, on what pretext, and also that then he really will have to go to Congress or or do something. I mean, he, he, he surprised the country and the American people and the world by doing this when he did it. I don't think you can go to that well twice, and I just, I could be wrong. I just don't believe him. I don't, I, when he says, well, this doesn't work out. They don't behave. I'll just start up the Oregon. That's going to, that means he's willing to tie down huge numbers of US forces halfway around the world on a maybe while negotiators negotiated at some point.

You know, ships have to come home, so, you know, soldiers and sailors need to be cycled, you know, through so they can, you know, do the things they need to do. They can't just sit on ships for three or four months. I, I just don't buy it. So just to boil this down, we're now entering the really hard part, which is the part where we negotiate over the future of the Iranian nuclear program and the nuts and bolts of that have to be worked out. And Trump has weakened his leverage going into that.

“And Trump has also strengthened Iranian leverage because Iran knows it can hold the global economy hostage now. Is that the size of it?”

All right, and the Iranians get to appear like the grieved party now that, you know, that they're the ones that have lost thousands of people and been attacked.

Trying to negotiate a nuclear program after you've bombed it and put it under a lot of rubble, it takes a long time.

It's going to take even longer here. So the idea that some out in 60 days, you know, sometime again, or a labor day or something, Trump's going to say that's it. Everything's fixed. We've got it. None of that's going to happen. This is going to be a kind of long cold war with the Iranians, just like the one we've been in with them for 45 years, 47 years and, and I don't, you know, Trump made it worse.

“So I don't see any way out of this in a way that I think enhances American security anytime soon.”

Butter catastrophe all around. Tom Nichols, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me, Greg.