Inside Trump’s New Deal With Iran

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**Rachel Abrams** (0:37)
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.
After days of promising that a ceasefire was near, President Trump late Sunday announced that he had reached a deal with Iran. Today, David Sanger, who spoke to the president, explains what is and is not included in the agreement and how much closer it gets both sides to ending the war for good. It's Monday, June 15th. David Sanger, thank you so much for joining us.

**David Sanger** (1:22)
Rachel, great to be with you.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:24)
It is 8 p.m. in New York. It's after 1 a.m. in London, where you are right now. So thank you for making the time. Tell us what you know about this very late breaking deal with Iran.

**David Sanger** (1:36)
Well, Rachel, as you know, this deal has been brewing for a long time, and it's been subject to a lot of up and down negotiations between Iran and the United States, even as the war went from act of combat to a ceasefire, to that flare up that we saw just in the past week when the US resumed bombing of Iran for several days. And we thought for a while that that might kill any hope of having what they've just agreed to on Sunday night, which is a preliminary memorandum of understanding. That's really all they've done here. An agreement to reopen the Strait, to end the blockade of Iran, and to begin a serious conversation about the nuclear program.
And in the end, the United States and the Iranians all determined it was in their interest to do that, to end the fighting and get back to the talking.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:35)
And, David, you actually spoke with the president. Tell us about that conversation.

**David Sanger** (2:40)
I did, Rachel. It was a little bit of an unexpected call. I'm here in London, as you said, and around 4.3 in Washington, about 9.3 here, the president called to talk about the deal that he'd put together and to celebrate it, to argue that it was much better than what President Obama had negotiated in 2015, a negotiation that I followed closely at the time.

**Rachel Abrams** (3:06)
And a deal that the president ripped up in his first term, we should remind listeners.

**David Sanger** (3:10)
Ripped up in his first term, criticized harshly, and has criticized again even on Sunday because he's very sensitive about the argument that some Democrats have made, and many nuclear experts have made, that he hasn't gotten as much yet from the Iranians as President Obama did. And of course, President Obama did not resort to war.
So the call was mostly to make the argument that he'd gotten something big here, something that had remade the Middle East, and something that will make the entire region and Israel safe from an Iranian bomb in the future.

**Rachel Abrams** (3:54)
I should note, David, that one of the reasons this call, at least the surprising to me, a little bit, was that it was not that long ago that you were on Air Force One, and the president said that your reporting on the war was treasonous.

**David Sanger** (4:07)
Yeah, well, Rachel, what can I tell you? It's a hazard of White House reporting. He reacted badly to a series of news analyses that made the point that he had not yet accomplished his political objectives, including ending the Iranian nuclear program, and he still hasn't. But I think he wanted to try to make the case because I think he cares about what the Times reports, that he was on the road to something that he believes will be better than the Obama deal.
It will be a while before we know whether that's the case.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:40)
I think another takeaway from the fact that he called you despite how angry he was with you quite recently is that this deal really matters to him. We have talked on the show about how much the president has been looking for an off-ramp to this war, and I just sort of wonder, given all of that, if you could tell us a little bit about what his mood was like? Did he seem, I don't know, victorious at all?