Donald Trump’s long-awaited deal with Iran is here. While the U.S. and Iran are essentially kicking the can down the road with an extension of the ceasefire agreement, the two sides are beginning to reveal what an eventual permanent agreement could look like.
A neoconservative, pro-Israel coalition of Washington Republicans and commentators in the media sphere has been some of Trump’s loudest defenders since the war with Iran began on February 28. In the House and Senate, many were eager to defend the objectives of Trump’s war with Iran even as those objectives shifted from their original lofty aims of ending Iran’s ballistic missile threat and potentially even toppling the government to reopening the Strait of Hormuz and eradicating Iran’s nuclear stockpile.
But now, the true extent of that shift is becoming apparent to the right’s faction of Iran hawks. And they are less than thrilled.
“This deal, and everything that we know about it, to the degree that it is being spun in public by this, you know, and behind the scenes by the administration, everything about this deal seems bad to me. It all seems bad,” said conservative commentator Ben Domenech Tuesday morning on Fox News. “It all seems like a setback. It doesn’t seem like it meets any of the measures that the president actually put out there of his goals when it came to this conflict.”
On Capitol Hill, Trump’s announcement of a deal Sunday was met with muted apprehension. The few apparent details came as that same faction was egging Trump on further, and was supportive of his threats in the days leading up to the deal’s signing to carry out a military invasion of Kharg Island, a hub of Iranian oil industry activity.
One of those voices was Sen. Lindsey Graham, long one of the loudest proponents of military action against Iran in Washington. Graham, who’d tweeted late last week that a military seizure of Kharg Island would be “the most consequential move President Trump could make,” cautioned on X that the Senate would have to approve any agreement between the U.S. and Iran — and noted his concern over the differing descriptions of the agreement between U.S. and Iranian officials.
“I am somewhat concerned that Iran’s view of the agreement seems different than what the American negotiating team is claiming,” wrote Graham.
Graham and the Iran war’s other supporters in Congress have largely abstained from commenting to reporters this week on the merits of the deal itself. Sen. Ted Cruz, another major booster of Israel and supporter of the war, told The Independent only that he’d have to see the deal to make a judgment about it when asked in the halls of the Senate on Tuesday.
Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, in typical flamboyant fashion, was more open to providing his cynical take on the matter: “Unless you were homeschooled by a day drinker, no one’s confident that Iran is going to do anything.”
But Graham took things a step further over the weekend, and trashed the idea of a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran — one of the deal’s rumored provisions. Like most in Washington, Graham plans to compare the emerging Trump agreement to the 2015 nuclear deal signed under Barack Obama, the JCPOA, which was maligned by conservatives for providing Iran with sanctions relief and freeing up frozen funds in U.S. banks.
Those same provisions are expected to be in the upcoming agreement, though administration officials have maintained that they will be contingent on reforms within Iran and long-term compliance with the arrangement.
“As to any potential deal, it must be compared to the JCPOA, and I am hopeful that it will be vastly different,” wrote Graham on Friday. “The idea of a $300 billion reconstruction fund, given who is in charge of Iran, seems to be tone deaf. It would be akin to a Marshall Plan for Germany with the Nazis still in charge. That wouldn’t have been a good idea then, and any reconstruction fund that benefits this terrorist regime wouldn’t be a good idea now.”
In the conservative media sphere, coverage of the ceasefire deal is already trending against the president’s favor as the war’s backers see more similarities than dissimilarities between the Trump deal’s reported provisions and the JCPOA.
Brit Hume, another Fox talking head, retweeted commentary from an Israeli commentator on the far-right Channel 12 network: There’s “not a lot of room for an American victory—especially once you fit in all those Iranian concessions.”
“Nothing we do in terms of a deal will change the behavior of this enemy. If you don’t believe that you do not know what we are dealing with. If you do believe that you know that for them deals are made to be broken,” posted Mark Levin, one of Trump’s favorite pro-war pundits, who attended the White House Hanukkah celebration last year. “There was a time, not long ago, when we never negotiated with terrorists or terror regimes. Today, we’ve dealt with intermediaries and now directly with terrorists.”
Even those projecting some optimism did so through gritted teeth.
“I suspect the MOU may be less awful than the administration’s disastrous sales pitch,” wrote Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Others speculated on what the deal could mean for the Republican coalition: “If the end of the war is perceived as damaging to that ally, President Trump will crack his base, perhaps badly,” wrote Hugh Hewitt.
The message is clear: While Trump has finally found his off-ramp, the end of the war could end up being more politically costly for a fractured MAGA coalition than starting it ever was.
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