Republicans in Uproar Over Trump’s Deal With Iran: “Total Surrender”
President Trump’s deal with Iran is getting pushback from Republicans in Congress.
Senator Bill Cassidy, who lost a primary election to a Trump-backed opponent last month, said in a post on X Wednesday that “Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave.
“Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal,” Cassidy wrote. “Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
Senator Ted Cruz tried to thread the needle of bashing the deal while minimizing blame toward the president.
“What has been released so far suggests that, unfortunately, the president is getting, I think, very poor advice when it comes to this deal. History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea,” Cruz told Ben Domenech at the Daily Wire Wednesday. “Under the terms of what’s been released, somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion will flow to the ayatollah immediately before they make even a single nuclear concession.”
Retiring Senator Thom Tillis said to The Hill that the deal was not a good return for the costs of the war with Iran.
“You got to do the balance of accounts: A hundred billion roughly, maybe more, spent today, 13 dead, 365 wounded, injured, our partners in the Middle East bombed, they’ve had casualties. There’s got to be a lot of return on that,” Tillis said. “We set out by saying we were going to drive down to zero their nuclear capability. Now we’re equivocating on that. We said that we were not going to make the mistake that Obama did by sending them a plane full of cash. I got to reconcile the numbers there.”
Some Republicans in the House were more blunt when speaking anonymously. The terms of the deal contradicted the talking points that the White House asked its Republican allies to use, Republicans told Politico.
One House Republican said the Trump administration was “lying to some degree” about the peace deal.
“The president didn’t mean to, but he effectively acknowledged he lost the war. It’s no longer worth the economic price. This is the way out, as ugly as it is,” another House Republican told the publication.
“He promised total surrender. And here it is,” a third House Republican said.
With all of this pushback to the deal, one wonders if Republican-controlled Congress will try to pass legislation to constrain parts of it, such as preventing taxpayer funds from being part of the $300 billion reconstruction fund promised to Iran. But most of them will probably fall in line as the midterms approach.
