President Donald Trump used a Tuesday night Fox News interview to unleash a scathing attack on former President Barack Obama’s handling of Iran, mocking the 2016 cash settlement at the heart of the Obama-era nuclear agreement even as Trump’s own administration works to finalize a new deal with Tehran that includes a proposed $300 billion reconstruction fund.
Speaking with Fox News anchor Trace Gallagher on “Special Report,” Trump was discussing what would happen if Iran backed out of current negotiations when he pivoted to a broader indictment of past presidents, singling out Obama by name. “It should have been done by many presidents over many years and it wasn’t. And I’m doing it,” Trump said. “Obama was taken to the cleaners. He thought he could bribe his way out.”
Trump was referring to a 2016 settlement in which the Obama administration transferred $1.7 billion to Iran to resolve a decades-old military sales dispute dating back to before the 1979 revolution. Roughly $400 million of that amount was flown into Iran in cash, on pallets, aboard an unmarked cargo plane, the same day Iran released several detained Americans — a sequence of events that became one of the most politically charged episodes of the Obama presidency.
“He gave them billions. Tens of billions of dollars, so stupidly. 1.7 billion in green cash, on a Boeing 757, an airplane loaded up with cash,” Trump said. “Probably, look, they said, you got to be kidding. No, you can’t bribe your way out. All you can do is fight your way out.”
The Obama administration and independent fact-checkers have long disputed the “bribe” characterization, noting the $1.7 billion figure represented a legal settlement of a Foreign Military Sales claim — $400 million in principal plus roughly $1.3 billion in accrued interest — rather than a payment made in exchange for the prisoner release, though administration officials later acknowledged the timing of the cash delivery was used as leverage during the negotiations over the Americans’ freedom.
The Deal Trump Is Now Referencing
The cash settlement was tied to the broader 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement Obama negotiated alongside the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China, in which Iran agreed to sharply limit its nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions. Trump withdrew the United States from that agreement unilaterally in 2018, calling it “defective at its core” and reimposing sweeping sanctions on Tehran, a decision that set the stage for years of escalating tension between Washington and Iran and that Trump has cited repeatedly as justification for the military campaign he launched against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure earlier this year.
A Deal That Looks Similar — or Worse, Critics Say
The irony embedded in Trump’s Tuesday remarks has not gone unnoticed. Since Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in June to end active hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, critics across the political spectrum have argued that the framework he is now pursuing resembles, or exceeds, the scale of the financial commitments he once mocked Obama for making. The MOU commits the United States to work with regional partners on a fund of “at least $300 billion” for Iran’s reconstruction and economic development, along with the unfreezing of Iranian assets that could amount to tens of billions of dollars more.
Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among the most pointed critics, writing on social media that the ceasefire’s only real achievement was reopening a strait that was already open before the war began, and that the U.S. would effectively pay Iran to do it. Trump has rejected the framing, insisting on social media that no American taxpayer money is involved in the reconstruction fund and that Gulf Arab nations, not Washington, would be the ones financing it. Vice President JD Vance has made the same argument publicly, saying “not a cent of American money goes to Iran.”
Analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations have noted that, unlike the Obama-era nuclear deal, the current agreement does not yet resolve the central question of Iran’s nuclear program at all — that issue was pushed into a separate 60-day negotiating track that has already been extended amid repeated breakdowns, including new Iranian attacks on shipping that collapsed an earlier phase of the ceasefire over the summer.
Unlike 2016, the current round of diplomacy also follows months of direct U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iran, a campaign that by the Pentagon’s own account has consumed nearly all of the Army’s long-range precision missile stockpile and a substantial share of its Patriot and THAAD interceptor inventory, according to a Reuters report published this week citing internal U.S. data. Critics have argued that the financial and military costs already absorbed during the war make the emerging deal harder to defend than the one Obama negotiated without a shot fired.
Trump’s Defense
Trump has consistently defended his approach as fundamentally different from Obama’s, framing his own willingness to launch military strikes as proof that his administration will not repeat what he described Tuesday as a failed strategy of financial appeasement. “And if they didn’t — they wouldn’t be talking. We weren’t doing what we’re doing. We hit them very, very hard,” Trump said, arguing that Iran’s willingness to negotiate now stems from military pressure rather than the kind of settlement Obama reached in 2016.
The president reiterated that his ultimate goal remains unchanged regardless of the financial terms under discussion: preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon. “They can’t have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “It’s very simple.”
An Unresolved Question
Whether the new agreement Trump is negotiating ultimately achieves more than the one he withdrew from in 2018 remains an open question, and one likely to feature heavily in the coming weeks as the 60-day nuclear negotiating window continues and lawmakers in both parties scrutinize the terms of the $300 billion reconstruction commitment. For now, Trump has offered no indication that the scale of the financial terms under discussion has altered his public assessment of the two deals — his own, and the one he spent Tuesday night’s interview criticizing.