Operation Epic Disaster: A multi-billion-dollar war for the deal Trump ripped up

Mr. President, you ripped up a deal that was working because you don’t like the guy who signed it (you know, Barack Hussein Obama). Now you’ll probably end up spending years and tens of billions of dollars, drag seven countries into a war, tank the global economy, and get people killed — all so you can get the same deal you ripped up.

If a screenwriter pitched your story, they’d be laughed out of the room for insulting the audience’s intelligence. Instead, this is your foreign policy.

In 2018, you pulled the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, (JCPOA) — commonly referred to as the Iran Nuclear Deal.

You called it “one-sided”.

The deal capped Iran’s uranium enrichment at 3.67%, slashed its centrifuges, blocked every pathway to weapons-grade material, and put the country under some of the most intrusive international inspections ever negotiated.

It was, using the “did it work” system of measurement — working.

Fast forward to February 28, 2026, when you and Benjamin Netanyahu launched Operation Epic Fury, a war your administration tried to justify by scaring people with the idea of a “nuclear-armed Iran.” 🫣

Mr. Trump, did you get that idea from Bibi? He spent over three decades claiming that Iran was days, weeks, or a month away from a nuclear weapon.

Like you, he claimed Americans were in danger of a nuclear strike on the U.S. from Iran.

What now? After the bombs, after the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, after the smoke cleared, you were at the NBA Finals telling reporters you are days away from a deal that “will not in any way allow nuclear weapons.”

Congratulations, Mr. President. We already had that deal. It only took years of intense negotiations between the Iran and the U.S. We sent our best diplomats, Iranian government/culture experts, and scientists who knew everything there was to know about nuclear weapons, the uranium enrichment process, uranium storage protocols, and how to safely transport it out of Iran.

There were times when the negotiating team stayed in hotels so they could continue negotiatiating until they reached a deal that Iran was happy with while giving the U.S. everything it wanted.

Doesn’t that sound incredible, Mr. President?

War crimes, shamelessness, and empathically-challenged fascists

There’s more, President Trump. The first deal was negotiated without squandering billions of taxpayer dollars. Fourteen service members didn’t have to make the ultimate sacrifice to get that deal.

We didn’t have to destroy the global economy, hurt the American people, or kill roughly 173 students and teachers at a girls’ elementary school.

The U.S. murdered over 160 children, Mr. President. Have you apologized to their parents? To the Iranian people? Are you just going to show the world that the United States can commit war crimes with impunity?

It wasn’t that many at first. After the first Tomaha k missile hit the school, teachers ushered the surviving students to another building to hide. Then we bombed the hiding spot and killed the survivors. It’s called a “double-tap” strike and it’s a war crime.

Don’t even get me started on the hundreds of people you murdered for no reason. Is Pete Hegseth just having fun treating the military like a video game? Does he think it’s fun to bomb people in boats when he doesn’t even know their names?

They deserved to have the opportunity to defend themselves in a court of law.

The amount of drugs that come into the country didn’t even go down, by the way, President Trump. You murdered people for “sport.”

Also, you were right when you told reporters you weren’t going to get into heaven.

Intelligent people spent years negotiating the first deal with our allies. Uranium was stored outside of Iran. The IAEA sent inspectors into the country on a regular basis to ensure they weren’t trying to enrich uranium without our knowledge.

The bottom line: the deal meant Iran would never have a nuclear weapon. That’s the deal you’re desperately trying to get, isn’t it, President Trump?

We had that deal.

But you tore it up.

Good job.

You have announced that a deal was “close” at least 38 times since the war began, with negotiations stuck on enrichment, sanctions relief, and Iran’s uranium stockpile — the very things the original agreement already controlled.

Your own “special envoy” has sketched terms “far tougher than” the JCPOA, which is a fancy way of saying we set the house on fire so we could renegotiate the lease.

Here’s the cost of that renegotiation: One running tracker puts the modeled price tag around $33.7 billion over roughly 100 days, with the Pentagon’s own comptroller logging $29 billion by mid-May and internal estimates of a future funding ask ranging into the hundreds of billions.

Your war blocked the Strait of Hormuz, spiking oil prices and war-risk insurance and forcing ships to reroute around Africa — a tax on every economy on earth, including ours.

And rather than collapsing, Iran’s regime survived, replacing an 80-something leader who wouldn’t have lived much longer, and who was against building a nuclear weapon with a younger, harder-line successor pulled straight from the Revolutionary Guard.

So: more expensive, more dangerous, more dead — and a more radical Iran on the other end. Peace through strength, you call it?

The American people would call it “paying full price twice for the same sandwich,” except this sandwich is on fire and someone died while making it.

Point Two: They Weren’t Close, Couldn’t Reach us, and Our Own Spies Said so

Strip away the war drums, and this is the part your administration would rather Americans forget: Iran was not on the cusp of a nuclear weapon, and people in power who claimed they were, knew that.

Mr. President, your own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified to Congress in 2025 that the U.S. intelligence community continued to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and that its leadership had not reauthorized the weapons program it suspended back in 2003.

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said that inspectors had no evidence Iran was building a bomb in March of 2026.

When you claimed Iran was “two weeks” away from a weapon, you were contradicting your own DNI — who later confirmed Iran had not even rebuilt the enrichment program you said was “obliterated” in 2025.

Even setting the intelligence aside: a bomb that can’t be delivered is not a threat to Topeka.

Iran’s missile arsenal, as large as it is, has no intercontinental weapon capable of reaching the homeland. The idea of a mushroom cloud over Main Street has always been a lie, hasn’t it?

Then there’s the religious edict. Iran’s leadership long pointed to a fatwa from Ali Khamenei — first issued orally in 2003 and repeated for years — declaring the production and use of nuclear weapons forbidden under Islamic law.

Skeptics fairly argue the fatwa was flexible and convenient. But it was cited at the IAEA and repeated by Iranian presidents as official policy for two decades.

And about those inspections you said were worthless: after you walked away in 2018, the deal didn’t vanish.

The other signatories — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the EU — stayed in it.

The IAEA continued the inspections and kept confirming Iran’s compliance, reporting that its inspectors had access to every site they needed.

Iran only began exceeding the limits of the deal in 2019 — after you withdrew the U.S. and blew up the sanctions relief Iran had been promised.

The unraveling you like to point to as justification for war was a mess you created.

What it Actually Cost

It’s easy to turn this into a math problem — billions in, a worse deal out. But that leaves out the part that matters most.

Wars are not abstractions. Bombs land on homes and families in Tehran and Beirut and on U.S. service members deployed into a fight that intelligence said was unnecessary. Your war spread to seven countries in 48 hours and left casualties that no “victory” press release can put back together.

There was a deal. It limited the program, it allowed inspections, and it cost 0 human lives.

We had it. You ripped it up.

And now, billions of dollars and an unknowable number of lives later, the grand prize your administration is chasing is a piece of paper saying the same thing the first piece of paper said.

If your goal all along was simply a deal, Mr. President, here’s a thought from a radical, Left-wing lunatic: we could have just kept the one we had.