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Trump has fallen for the same false Iran promises as Obama

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Less than three months ago, Donald Trump was mocking the 2015 deal Barack Obama made with Iran that cleared the regime’s path to a nuclear bomb.

“They sent Boeing 757s over there, loaded with cash, hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Trump, referring to the cash ransom Obama aides delivered directly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC, to bribe the Iranians to agree to the phony deal. “That’s not going to happen with Trump.”

And yet it seems that’s exactly what’s happening with Trump.

According to reports, the United Arab Emirates, a key US regional ally, is making $20 billion of frozen Iranian assets available to the Islamic Republic, with $3 billion of it having already been delivered to Tehran, perhaps by a Boeing 757 and maybe even on wooden pallets like those Obama stacked with cash to pay the terror state.

Emirati officials deny that they’re buying off Iran on behalf of the United States, but if Abu Dhabi thought Trump was going to put the clerical regime down for the count, it wouldn’t be giving money to a neighbor that since March has set fire to high-end real-estate properties with hundreds of missile and drone attacks.

Instead, the Emiratis are paying tribute to the side that looks like a winner.

Thus, it seems that what Trump has frequently called the worst deal ever negotiated, and has identified for more than a decade as Exhibit A in the case against American loserdom, has now become the pattern of his own Iran policy.

And, like Obama’s, the plan is to gorge the IRGC with money and pave the way to a nuclear bomb while restraining Israel from responding to missile attacks by Iran and its proxies for the sake of what it euphemistically calls regional order.

What seems to have held Trump back from green-lighting the memorandum of understanding (MOU) that Vice President JD Vance has negotiated with Iran is his fear that he can’t repackage Obama’s deal as his own big geopolitical win because his base will see through it and think him a loser.

And so, for nearly a month, Vance, leader of the White House’s “restrainer” faction, has been trying to convince Trump that MAGA is definitely dumb enough to be suckered into believing that the Iran deal his loyal deputy has captained is a historic win.

Vance is happy to be celebrated by his online friends as the man who stopped the neocon war for Israel, but he doesn’t want his name publicly attached to the deal in the event the Iranians or his boss blow it up. So he briefs the press on background, asking that journalists attribute the information regarding the MOU he’s been negotiating to a senior administration official.

Last week, the “senior administration official” held a call with reporters to say the deal is close at hand — or nearly, as he bragged in a May call with the same media cohort. Ninety-five percent done. He was short on details but assured his captive audience that Iran had committed to dismantling its nuclear facilities, destroying and shipping out its stockpiles of enriched uranium and giving up its regional terror proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis; in short, Iran was conceding to every US demand.

And, the vice president repeated frequently, the........

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