Trump privately panics as Iran deal is revealed to be worse than one he tore up

President Donald Trump is panicking, The Atlantic's Vivian Salama, Jonathan Lemire and Nancy Youssef wrote on Wednesday.

According to the report, talks between the U.S. and Iran are on hold while Trump tries to build up to a kind of war "grand finale."

Trump decided that he wanted to combine the Iran deal with the Abraham Accords, a set of agreements between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries to normalize relations.

Trump wanted "those countries that hadn’t yet joined the Abraham Accords [to] get on board." The various leaders gave him a "less than lukewarm response."

One U.S. official told the reporters that a leader spoke up, calling the idea interesting, but then there was silence. During the 90-minute call, there were several times that Trump asked, “Hello? Hello? Anyone there?”

The story explains why there have been so many reports of an agreement with Iran, only for nothing to come to light. Trump reportedly became "irritated" about those comparing his deal to the one established under former President Barack Obama. Trump's was being mocked as "weaker." He wanted to find a way to make his agreement better than Obama's.

There was also the matter of Iran's demand for sanctions relief. Trump has spent years claiming that Obama sent "pallets of cash" to Iran. Fact-checkers have made clear that none of the money was from the U.S. It was Iran's own money that was inaccessible due to sanctions.

The deal from last month would "usher in the first 60-day negotiating period," the report said. "Iran would relinquish its highly enriched uranium stockpile. Sanctions relief would arrive gradually. Commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz would reopen in phases."

Instead, all Trump could accomplish now is a ceasefire. As of Monday, Iran has walked away from the talks altogether.

"Critics of Trump’s decision to go to war contend that his impulse to go big masks the weakness of his negotiating position despite the U.S. military’s dominance," the report said. Still, Iran managed to survive. It gained further power by taking control of the Strait of Hormuz.

"None of his original war goals has been met, and the pressure to get a deal done is arguably now greater for Trump than it is for Iran, given the war’s broad unpopularity in the United States and the approaching midterm elections," said the report.

The report also noted that Israel's bombing of Lebanon, targeting Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants, has made any expansion of the Abraham Accords "unlikely."

Trump later had a private call with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who said he was open to normalizing relations with Israel but only if there were the formation of a Palestinian state.

Last week, Trump spent a lot of time in intelligence meetings. "Behind the scenes, administration officials were signaling that a breakthrough was at hand. A tentative agreement was ready and all that remained, they suggested, was Trump’s sign-off," The Atlantic reports.

Several reports revealed that Trump assumed the war would be over in a few weeks and would be an easy "win" for him.

"That explains Trump’s impatience," the report said.

The president is now complaining to CNBC that the war has "started to get very boring." When he was quoted as saying that to someone who leaked it to the press, Trump denied it, saying, "I don't get bored. There's nothing boring about this."

"Privately, Trump has grown eager to move on" because he has other issues to deal with and still wants to shift focus to Cuba.

The report closed, saying that while Trump is desperate for a deal, he's also content to "wimply wait rather than do a deal that invites unflattering comparisons to one that already existed — and which didn’t come at the cost of 13 U.S. service members and at least 1,700 Iranian civilians, tens of billions of dollars, the depletion of U.S. munitions stockpiles and a global energy crisis."

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