Trump blinked — and even conservatives are calling it a disaster

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at Paris Orly airport, following the G7 Summit, in Orly, France, June 17, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Donald Trump claimed an Iran deal was coming—for literally the 40th time—on the weekend of his 80th birthday as he turned the White House lawn into a circus of rage and vulgarity all backed with ads for crypto companies and Trump coins.

He hoped the UFC fights would overshadow how bad the so-called deal was, as he was heading to Europe to claim a victory over Iran while not having an actual copy of anything with details of it. He would just tell the G7 leaders at the summit how great it is—as if they’re going to believe him after all he’s put them through from tariffs to Greenland—while the written details conveniently wouldn’t be ready until the end of the week.

But those details of the “memorandum of understanding” (hardly a deal) have been coming out, and it’s pretty simple: Trump settled for getting the Strait of Hormuz possibly opened in return for Iran getting 300 billion dollars. On my SiriusXM program, retired U.S. Army General Randy Manner told me this was an “unconditional surrender” and will go down in history as a terrible military defeat.

Trump tried to kick the details down the road, hoping against all hope that people will forget. There’s nothing concrete being stated about the nuclear material being secured and Trump is already preparing for that, actually pondering at the G7 summit, “Why even bother” to get it? His reasoning is that his bombing of the nuclear facility last year has so buried the material that it’s not usable.

Then why did we need to go to war and cost lives?

Trump says the strait will be “permanently toll-free,” but Iran says it will have “fees.”

There is a technical, legal difference, which Trump is trying to hide behind, but there’s no tangible difference between the two. Iran’s foreign ministry said that Iran was “not seeking to levy transit tolls; however, fees will be charged in exchange for the services that are provided.”

In other words, Trump is getting snookered.

Trump and JD Vance have also been adamant that the $300 billion to rebuild Iran is not coming from U.S. dollars but from a fund set up by the Gulf states—the very nations Iran attacked throughout the war.

But, as retired general Jack Keane said on Fox, “The $300 billion is real. Who cares where it comes from? The Iranians are still in charge. They’re going to take that money and recover everything.”

Keane compared it to allowing Nazi Germany access to billions for reconstruction while the Nazis were still in charge, no matter who’s giving them the money.

And with the Gulf states themselves looking for bailouts from the US for the damage they incurred—and the Trump administration indicated back in April that it was open to it—it’s not clear to me that US dollars are not going to Iran.

It’s also been reported, however, that the money won’t come from governments of the Gulf states but from “investors,” and not just from the Gulf.

Reuters reports:

“The new fund is a private investment vehicle, not a reconstruction or reparations program and will not include any ⁠government money or grants, the source said, adding that companies based in the U.S., the Gulf Arab states, Asia, South America and Africa have agreed to commit financing.” Investments pledged span energy, logistics, manufacturing and transport, the source said.

So this looks like another way for global corporations and real estate development companies—including those owned by the Trump family and their buddies—to make a lot of money. You better believe Trump is getting the oil companies all revved up, as he tried to do with Venezuela.

Plus, the U.S. will be unfreezing $24 billion in Iranian assets. This is the same crowd that criticized President Obama for unfreezing far less and getting far more in the Iran deal he negotiated. At least it was clear under Obama’s deal there would be—and were—inspections. But that’s not clear in anything Trump has said. And if he doesn’t get a way, way better deal than Obama did, why were the lives of American soldiers and thousands of civilians in Iran and throughout the region sacrificed?

Let’s not forget that this began as “regime change,” in which Trump spent weeks telling the protesters in Iran he was going to save them—then told them to come out and take power after the bombing began. When that delusional plan—cooked up by Benjamin Netenyahu and sold to a gullible Trump even as people in the White House thought it was not going to happen—fell apart, Trump claimed the war was about getting the nuclear material.

But now he’s saying that’s a goal down the road, if even that, because “Why bother?”

Iran is declaring full victory. And though it has suffered terrible losses of its military infrastructure and leadership, it has won in terms of the geopolitics of this war, simply by surviving and now having a huge weapon. It controls the strait and can get ransom for it. Iran is blaring on state media that it is victorious. Acknowledging Iran’s loses, the Financial Times puts it in context:

Within the highest ranks of the Islamic republic, nobody would deny Iran is nursing devastating losses. US and Israeli strikes destroyed crucial infrastructure, took the lives of about 3,500 civilians, and killed supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several senior military commanders.
But regime insiders, Iranian analysts and western diplomats in Tehran agree on one thing: the war failed to bring the radical transformation sought by Iran’s enemies. In fact, the regime, which at the start of the year appeared to be at its most vulnerable, seems more confident than before the war began in February.
“The US made a big mistake. It awakened the sleeping dragon,” said a regime insider. “We paid a huge price, but we activated capacities that we had previously hesitated to use.”

The extremist religious leaders in Tehran are feeling omnipotent, and they will repress the Iranian people even further. Prominent Republicans are already speaking out, and more will follow once the details are public.

Marc Thiessen, the odious former George W. Bush aide who reportedly advised Trump, warned on Fox News that this deal was “no better” than Obama’s.

After Vance confirmed the $300 billion payout, Thiessen called the deal a “disaster.”

The far-right Wall Street Journal editorial page states, “There’s no denying that Mr. Trump is retreating from his main goals as political pressure has built at home, and finishing the job requires greater military risk.”

“The deal also includes no Iranian commitments on its missiles and terror proxies,” the WSJ stated. “These will be put off to ‘regional discussions’ from which no one expects much.”

In other words, Trump caused thousands of deaths, including those of American service members; cost U.S. taxpayers billions; depleted munitions; and sent gas prices soaring, which in turn had inflation on all other goods surging. And in the end he completely caved to the Iranian regime.

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