U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during an event at The Villages Charter School at The Villages, Florida, U.S., May 1, 2026. REUTERS_Nathan Howard
Since it was announced on Sunday that the U.S. and Iran had struck a peace deal, experts have found no shortage of shortcomings in the agreement. Now, reporters and Republican lawmakers are pointing out that confusing aspects of the deal may not only provide Iran with a major gift, but represent a major betrayal of President Donald Trump’s own much-vaunted policies regarding the adversary.
This is according to Punchbowl News senior congressional reporter Andrew Desiderio in response to an assertion by Politico senior foreign affairs correspondent Nahl Toosi. After listening in on Trump officials’ call regarding the Iran deal, Toosi declared he was “in some ways more confused now than before.” He went on to list several aspects of the call that didn’t add up, but one point stood out in particular.
As he explained, “They do not seem to have a good grasp of U.S. sanctions law. They laid out the possibility of a $300 billion investment fund for Iran. And one said at one point that ‘the sanctions relief is not tied specifically to any particular conduct. It's tied generally to them behaving more appropriately, and obviously the thing that we care the most about is the nuclear program.’ But sanctions are specific to particular conduct.”
In other words, Trump officials claim that, in order to pay Iran $300 billion — the legality of which depends on the reduction of sanctions — it is going to relieve sanctions based on the vague concept of good behavior rather than specific actions. This is a problem, however, because the sanctions — which were set in place by Congress — are tied to specific actions. So the White House’s claims in this regard are either illegal or nonsensical.
And according to Desiderio, it gets even more muddled as “many Republicans have pointed out to me that this type of sanctions relief likely requires the IRGC to be de-listed as a terrorist organization under U.S. law. As someone who covered the Rob Malley-led Senate briefings in 2022, not even the [former President Joe] Biden admin was willing to do this.”
This refers to the Islamic Republican Guard Corps, the nation’s top military body, which has been listed as a terror group since Trump deemed it so in 2019. Such a designation raises restrictions on what kind of resources can be provided to it. For Trump to backtrack on this policy — a move his administration bragged about vocally at the time — not only suggests the failure of his foreign policy, but opens the Iranian regime to trade and support it’s been denied for nearly a decade while lending it greater political legitimacy.
The harms raised by de-listing the IRGC as a terror group are so widely understood that, as Desiderio noted, not even Biden — who overturned huge swaths of Trump’s foreign policy — would make the change. Furthermore, this move would not only clash with U.S. allies in the EU — which declared the IRGC a terrorist organization after it massacred somewhere between 6,000 and 35,000 protesters in January — but also contradict one of the administration’s other many suggested justifications for the war: protecting the Iranian people from its government.
And as Toosi noted, there were several other contradictions revealed in the White House call. As he explained, “They seemed to act as if the US had won this confrontation, whereas the Iranians seem to think they have the upper hand.” Officials asserted that troops would remain in the region en masse even though the deal calls for reductions. And they suggested that the new Iranian leadership was eager to give up nuclear capabilities, claiming that it was the previous Supreme Leader who had held up such a plan, which is the opposite of what most analysts believe. Then there was their seeming total ignorance regarding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, which Obama struck, then Trump tanked.
“They said ‘one of the really cool things and interesting things about this entire process is that we actually have a direct relationship with a number of people at the highest levels of the Iranian government. That really hasn't happened in 47 years of our relationship with Iran,'” posted Toosi. “This is not a huge thing, but it suggests they haven't really done their research on US-Iran relations. (See: JCPOA talks.)...Why do I suspect they haven't really studied the JCPOA and Iran-US history? Because of statements like this: ‘If you go back to the JCPOA, the Supreme Leader just doesn't sign these agreements.’ But nobody signed the JCPOA. It was a political arrangement, not a signed accord.”