In an interview with Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump once again tore into the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, saying that when he sees Obama talk about it, it "may have been the worst and dumbest deal I've ever seen." Trump claimed that Obama gave Iran "billions and billions of cash," that he tried to buy his way out of the problem, and that Iran used the money to try to create nuclear weapons and buy missiles. Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement in 2018, and he has made the criticism a regular part of his speeches on Iran, including his April address on the war. The comments come while U.S.-Iran tensions are still high after a war that began on February 28 and ended in a ceasefire in early April.

The cash Trump refers to is real but more complicated than "billions in cash." In January 2016, the Obama administration paid Iran $1.7 billion to settle a decades-old claim over an arms sale from before the 1979 revolution, including $400 million flown in as cash around the time American hostages were freed, which Obama officials acknowledged was used as leverage. Defenders say it was Iran's own money, and fact-checkers have noted that the deal lifted sanctions and unfroze Iranian assets held mostly in foreign banks instead of handing over huge piles of cash. Critics, including Trump, argue that the sanctions relief helped Iran's regime and its missile programs, and that the deal left Iran a path to a bomb once its limits expired. No finished Iranian nuclear weapon has been publicly confirmed, and after the U.S. and Israeli strikes the status of Iran's enriched uranium stockpile remains largely unverified. The big questions are how much of the money actually went to weapons, whether the 2018 withdrawal made Iran more or less dangerous, and what any new deal would look like.