Some members of the press accused President Trump on Tuesday of not understanding the Iran nuclear agreement he said the U.S. was ditching.
During remarks at the White House, Trump accused Iran of not being forthcoming about its past intentions to create a nuclear weapon, condemned the government for sponsoring terrorism and said the U.S. was shortchanged in the nuclear deal.
[FULL REMARKS: Trump’s announcement withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal]
Immediately after the announcement, CNN correspondent Dana Bash implied that the president’s dislike for the deal isn’t based on any policy detail.
“I interviewed then-candidate Trump the day that this deal was signed in July of 2015, about a month after he announced [his campaign] and from that minute, without even knowing the details, he said, ‘Bad idea, I should be president and I should rip it up and do it differently,” she said.
On Twitter, Politico magazine editor Blake Hounshell asked, “If you ran into Trump in the elevator, could he articulate what in particular the flaws of the Iran deal are?”
Josh Marshall, the liberal editor of the popular Talking Points Memo blog, also said on Twitter: “The biggest thing to realize about Trumps decision about the Iran Deal is that he doesn’t actually know what is even in it. This is all about what he said on the campaign, ego vs Obama. He doesn’t even know what it’s in the deal or how it works.”
Trump, however, frequently attacked the terms of the deal both during his campaign and throughout the first year of his presidency.
Citing the $400 million that the U.S. gave to the Iranian government as part of the deal, Trump during one of the presidential campaign debates in September 2016 called the deal “one of the great giveaways of all time.”
He also criticized some of the term expiration dates on the deal, including a cap on uranium development that ended after 10 years. “The deal with Iran will lead to nuclear problems,” he said. “All they have to do is sit back 10 years, and they don’t have to do much.”
During his remarks at the White House, Trump said the U.S. would be placing sanctions back on Iran as part of ending its commitment to the agreement.
“We will be instituting the highest level of economic sanction,”he said. “Any nation that helps Iran in its quest for nuclear weapons could also be strongly sanctioned by the United States.”
