Clearly on the defensive as the war in Iran continues, Donald Trump turned his attention Tuesday to one of his favorite rhetorical targets: the 2015 international nuclear agreement with Iran, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. To hear the incumbent American president tell it, he has no regrets about his decision in 2017 to abandon the deal.

Trump: "If I didn't terminate Obama's horrible deal, the Iran nuclear deal, you would've had nuclear holocaust."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-17T16:05:56.853Z

“If I didn’t terminate Obama’s horrible deal, the Iran nuclear deal, you would’ve had nuclear holocaust,” the Republican said at a recent Oval Office event.

The rhetoric was familiar, but still wrong. A couple of weeks ago, the incumbent president similarly insisted that if he hadn’t abandoned the international agreement, Iran would have used a nuclear weapon against Israel. A day earlier, on his social media platform, Trump wrote, “If I didn’t terminate Obama’s horrendous Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), Iran would have had a Nuclear Weapon three years ago.”....

A few years ago, Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy for Iran at the time, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that after Trump’s decision, Iranian attacks on U.S. personnel in the region got worse, Iranian support for regional proxies got worse, and the pace of the Iranians’ nuclear research program got “much worse.”

White House officials have described Trump as a “visual learner,” so here’s a chart that might help him understand recent events.

Hell of a chart, this, from @financialtimes.com. Spot the JCPOA.

on.ft.com/4kSuQYO

— Jeremy Cliffe (@jeremycliffe.bsky.social) 2025-06-18T08:29:20.734Z

Iran’s nuclear program was, for all intents and purposes, on ice when the JCPOA was in place. Then Trump scrapped it, Iran’s nuclear program advanced, and the Republican president decided to go to war over a threat that he personally made worse through incompetent policymaking......

Soon after, he abandoned the JCPOA anyway — not because it was failing, but because Trump was indifferent to its success.

I know I’m a broken record on this, but all Trump had to do was nothing. He could have simply left the policy alone and allowed it to work. He did the opposite. The Republican was convinced his strategy would work — he even boasted at one point that he was prepared to be Iran’s “best friend” — but the entire gambit backfired.

If Trump wanted to apologize for having made the spectacularly wrong call, that would be a welcome development. But the idea that he prevented a “nuclear holocaust” by rejecting an international agreement that was doing exactly what it set out to do is utterly insane.