Transcript: Trumpworld Shivs JD Vance as Leaks Discredit Iran Deal

We’re talking about the global economy. We’re talking about potential trouble that they run into with getting Iran to constrain its nuke program. We’re talking about the money that’s going to start flowing to Iran, which when Obama did that, it was this huge betrayal of America according to Trump. How does Vance manage all this in, I don’t know, March or April of next year?

Heffernan: I mean, as you point out, there are Republicans who hate the Iran deal—or want to see it fail, like Lindsey Graham—because they’re hawks, because they are really invested in this idea of Iran as a rogue state in opposition to Israel as a democracy and an ally in the region, which has also shifted in popular imagination, and yet that’s something that a Lindsey Graham is going to hold on to. So you have old-school Republican hawks who are going to hate that there’s a deal at all.

And then you have people for whom the deal is bound to fail. At very least, even when you talk about this perfect deal idea—the first Iran deal was close, it was a B-plus, right, as a deal at least—it takes a while to bear out, to bear fruit. Well, you can call it a failure at any given time because you could say, well, they’ll have this breakout capacity in 10 years, 15 years, we should have gotten it in perpetuity. They can always be flexing. We can suddenly say, the uranium is enriched to 68 percent, so it’s a failure.