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It All Boils Down to Trusting Trump – HotAir

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June 17, 2026
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It All Boils Down to Trusting Trump – HotAir

The political firestorm that J.D. Vance ignited, and that the leaked versions of the Memorandum of Understanding have fueled, is not going away any time soon. 





Even if and when the MOU is released (it is being held back due to “sensitivities” expressed by Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar), the furor is unlikely to die down, because everyone knows that such agreements have secret annexes that no one is supposed to see.  

I point the finger at Vance not so much as a criticism of him in particular, since he is clearly doing a fine job of projecting sunny optimism; it’s that most of what he has said has fueled the suspicions people have that this deal amounts to a capitulation on the part of the Trump administration, giving Iran what it demanded all along, including $300 billion in reparations by another name. 

We also don’t know to what extent the Strait of Hormuz will be open without “fees.” Iran claims that it retains sovereignty over the Strait, shares it with Oman, and has the right to collect fees. The US says it will remain fee-free. 

Trump calls the $300 billion “investments,” and says that none of the money comes from American taxpayers, which of course is not the point. The point is that the US is lifting sanctions and opening the money flow to Iran to pay for reconstruction of what we intentionally destroyed, with reason. Call it what you like, but Trump’s critics right now see the money flowing in to replenish Iran’s coffers. 

Trump is arguing that Iran has undergone something akin to regime change, and that the current leadership of Iran is comprised of people we can deal with. 





J.D. Vance went even further, suggesting that Iranian leaders are interested in cooperating with the United States, realizing that the whole “Death to America” thing was a mistake. 

“The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even IRGC officials say, ‘You know what? We may have some animosity. We may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for forty-seven years is a mistake. Let’s try something else.’

As he says, that would be “the coolest thing.” If true. 

Of course, it is within the realm of possibility that Trump and Vance are misreading the Iranians and that they have not had a change of heart. There are reports that Iran has promised Hezbollah that the money will start flowing again, and that the “Axis of Resistance,” which has been battered down quite a bit in the past few years, will reconstitute. 

The question then is, what will Trump do about it? Will he see that as a betrayal of the terms of the MOU? As an indication that the Iranians, in fact, cannot be trusted? And will he, as he says, start raining down bombs again? Ed has that story. 





BREAKING: “If I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head.”

President Trump warns Iran that any change to the peace agreement or failure to comply could bring an immediate military response.

“If they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head,” Trump said.

Trump contrasted the deal with the Obama-era JCPOA, arguing the previous administration tried to “bribe their way out of it.”

“You know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and they said, ‘he’s a stupid son of a b****.'”

A lot of Trump’s critics on the deal doubt that Trump would follow through. The argument against them is obvious: Trump did it before, so he could do it again. That’s a compelling argument. 

The counter-argument, though, is that Trump has, both before and after the so-called “cease-fire,” also made a lot of threats about conducting far more devastating strikes on Iran. Remember the “bridge and power plant” threats, made multiple times? The “wipe their civilization off the map” threats?

Those threats were made in April. The MOU didn’t come until June, after months of “a deal is around the corner.” That has bred a lot of skepticism. This MOU, whatever it says, seems to them inconsistent with Trump’s earlier statements, leading them to wonder why this particular promise is real. 





Administration officials are preparing the public for what sounds like a less-than-impressive MOU, which in itself will not mollify critics:

The officials described the text of the agreement as incredibly vague, mainly intended to create a more favorable environment for the highly technical, in-person talks to come. They added that the framework is aimed at providing Iran the ability to sell it politically to their internal audience.

Additionally, the officials said that the text of the memorandum of understanding — which Vice President JD Vance told CNN Monday is one-and-a-half pages long — didn’t reflect critical back-channel commitments Iran has made to the US, which they argued gave them more confidence in signing on to the arrangement.

“People shouldn’t read too much into the language of the MOU,” one of the officials said, describing the agreement as a “political document.”

“What’s more important than the actual document is the understandings we have with each other, and that’s why it’s important to get it done, that we can create the environment to go and talk about all these things, because it basically says we will release sanctions, we will do a deal with nuclear, we will unfreeze funds,” the same official said. “But we’ll release sanctions when, you know, based on progress. We’ll release funds once we’ve agreed on the mechanisms to do so.”

The official added that the president’s team of negotiators “came up with language that allows (Iran) to say what they need to say for their domestic politics.”

But that dynamic risks severe backlash to the Trump administration back home. Officials have worked for months to come to an agreement with Iran, looking to end a deeply unpopular war without a clear endgame that has sent gas prices skyrocketing. Already, conservative hawks have been demanding to see the framework, suspicious that President Donald Trump and his administration gave away too much in the name of ending the war.

The text of the agreement does not describe in specific detail what commitments Iran has made on its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, according to a person who saw the text and described it to CNN, even though Trump and other officials have insisted the US will oversee its destruction. Instead, the agreement states in broad terms that Iran “reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons,” a commitment Tehran also made in the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration.

However, US officials argued that Iran has “backchanneled” to the US that they will offer the concessions the Trump administration is looking for. That includes US involvement in the destruction of the enriched materials on site in coordination with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The officials said such a concession is not stated explicitly in the document.

By contrast, the text does spell out in some detail what financial relief Iran can expect if it fulfills its commitments, including the ability to tap into a $300 billion development fund in the future, according to the officials. Both Trump and Vance have been adamant that the fund will not be financed by American dollars.





Perhaps this is one reason that the MOU has yet to be released. It doesn’t, in itself, come close to resolving the big issues that drove us to war. The backbone of the deal, it seems, is the assurances from backchannel conversations the US has had with the “rational” Iranian leaders. 

Also fueling skepticism is the Iranian assertion that the conclusion of this war is a prelude to the next. 

Of course, they could just be blowing smoke. You can’t expect the Iranians to admit that they got their butts kicked, and the Trump administration rightly points out that the Iranian military—save for its “mosquito navy,” which is still quite real, its drone force, which is still apparently capable and is likely being restocked, and its missile force, which is not destroyed—is gone. It has no Navy, a diminished Air Force, and a damaged (although reconstituting) air defense grid. 

Militarily, Iran is certainly not stronger than before the war, although it’s unclear to what extent the lack of Navy and Air Force actually matters, since neither was of any use during the conflict. Iran’s military strength was always in its asymmetric forces, which it, to some extent, retains. 





It seems, from what Trump and Vance are saying, as well as from what administration officials have leaked to news outlets, that the deal’s guarantee boils down to Trump’s willingness to continue bullying Iran into cutting a further deal within the next 60 days. Or more, since the deadline can be extended indefinitely at the agreement of both parties. 

If Trump is willing to go to war to get the “nuclear dust,” as he puts it, then the MOU has the teeth that Vance and others in the administration claim it does. If he is done with the war, as many suspect, then the skepticism is warranted.  

In other words, it all boils down to how you read Trump’s intentions. And the Iranians’. Some people are confident, while others are…not. 


Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.

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