Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Iran Edition

"President Trump knows that the deal negotiated between the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Iran to restrain Iran’s nuclear program is just terrible. As he said at the United Nations on Tuesday, 'The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into. Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don’t think you’ve heard the last of it — believe me.'

Now he says he has made a decision on whether to pull out of the deal, but he won’t tell us what it is. After all, you always want to leave the audience eager to tune in for next week’s episode.

But ask yourself this: What exactly is it that Trump thinks is so bad about the agreement? Does he even know?

There’s no evidence that he does. . .

At this point, we’ve stopped expecting that the president himself will have anything resembling well-thought-out reasons for the actions he takes, even those with potentially catastrophic consequences. But what about the less ignorant people who work for him? What do they have to say?

The critical context here is that all of Trump’s key advisers seem to disagree with him on the wisdom of abandoning the agreement [including Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff].

So what we have is a group of serious, informed national security aides practically begging their unserious, ignorant boss not to do something spectacularly stupid, a herculean effort that only succeeds temporarily. It’s important to remember that according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and virtually every informed observer, Iran is in fact complying with the agreement. It’s working. . .

We all know the real reason Trump wants to walk away from the nuclear accord. It isn’t because Iran is violating the terms, because it isn’t. It isn’t because the terms were terribly unfair to the United States, because they weren’t. It isn’t because Iran is doing things outside the agreement that we don’t like, because those actions exist outside the agreement. It’s because Trump is a petulant man-baby who believes that anything that has Barack Obama’s name on it has to be destroyed, no matter the consequences."

Read the Washington Post, Does Trump even know what he hates about the Iran nuclear deal?