On Thursday night, a little over a month into the conflict in Iran, President Donald Trump took to the national airwaves to give an update on how things were going.
From his standpoint, good enough: “Tonight, Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them, terrorist regime they led, are now dead,” he said, according to The New York Times.
“Their command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is being decimated as we speak. Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed, and their weapons, factories and rocket launchers are being blown to pieces. Very few of them left,” Trump continued.
“Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks. Our enemies are losing, and America, as it has been for five years, under my presidency, is winning, and now winning bigger than ever before.”
Now, how that ends remains to be seen; Iran is battered but not fully broken, at least not to the point where it’s something more than a failed state. And forget about what we can negotiate for; it’s unclear at the moment who is left to negotiate with and whether they’re any better than the brutes we’ve eliminated.
But that’s where we are. And while he was at it, Trump reminded how we got here — not just his airstrikes, mind you, but the administration that emboldened a country into believing that it could resume its role as a regional power and negotiate its way into both the end of sanctions and an eventual path to nukes.
“This situation has been going on for 47 years and should have been handled long before I arrived in office. I did many things during my two terms in office to stop the quest for nuclear weapons by Iran. First, and perhaps most importantly, I killed Gen. Qassim Suleimani in my first term,” Trump said.
“And then, very importantly, I terminated Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, a disaster. Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash. Green, green cash. Took it out of banks from Virginia, D.C. and Maryland. All the cash they had, flew it by airplanes in an attempt to buy their respect and loyalty,” he continued.
“But it didn’t work. They laughed at our president and went on with their mission to have a nuclear bomb. His Iran deal would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran. They would have had them years ago, and they would have used them, would have been a different world.”
“There would have been no Middle East and no Israel right now, in my opinion, the opinion of a lot of great experts.”
🚨 HOLY CRAP! In front of MILLIONS of Americans President Trump exposes Barack Hussein Obama for giving Iran cash used to terrorize the world
“Hussein Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash, green, green cash! Took it out of banks from Virginia, D.C., and Maryland.”
“All the cash… pic.twitter.com/gc9L65gNh0
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 2, 2026
Fact check: Accurate.
Remember, during the early days of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the official name of what we call the Iran nuclear deal, negotiated by the Obama administration and its European allies — $1.7 billion was transferred to the Iranians, some of it on straight cash delivered on pallets via cargo planes.
As CNN noted, this was money frozen after diplomatic relations were severed between the United States and Iran in 1979. Obama gave this back to them along with sanctions relief and renewed legitimacy for the theocratic regime under the JCPOA.
And what did we get back in return? Well, Iran wouldn’t further enrich uranium — for, uh, 10 years, and its stockpile would be limited for 15 years. This also didn’t put any cap on its convention weapons programs. (This, given recent developments, might have been handy.)
Then, when Trump ripped up the plan because he realized (as anyone who wasn’t a sucker would have) that the plan only would have worked if we were dealing with rational actors and the Khamenei regime clearly wasn’t that, we were told this would just get Iran closer to a nuke. OK, then: Take out their nuclear capabilities. The left didn’t like this, either.
Now, we’re finding out just why handing $1.7 billion in cash to a regime that used it on terror proxies and offensive military weapons was a bad idea. And yet, we still have Obama’s surrogates defending that plan vigorously, pretending that we could have just reasoned with these people targeting hotels and airports and murdering their own civilians.
The world may have forgotten what Obama’s dim nuclear deal wrought – but Trump certainly made us all remember Thursday night.
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