President Donald Trump bemoaned the Iranian government’s penchant for stalling after an alleged 11-hour meeting on Sunday.
Trump continued his descent into pessimism over the possibility of a deal with Iran on Monday morning. By the president’s own account, Iranian negotiators held an 11-hour meeting on Sunday to discuss details of the agreement under negotiation, much to the annoyance of the U.S. negotiators.
“So, something that nobody knows: Yesterday, they had an 11-hour meeting. Everything’s 11 hours with these guys. You know, you can’t settle one sentence in one hour and one minute — It should be one minute,” Trump said during a call to Fox News’s Fox and Friends.
“And everything was agreed to yesterday. And they leave the room, and they call back, and they say we had to make a couple of changes,” he added. “I said, ‘Changes? They got to make changes? We’re not going to make changes.’ Always changes.”
Trump noted the Iranians’ penchant for negotiating, but argued that their experience hadn’t made them any better.
“They’re professional negotiators. That’s all they are … I don’t even call them good at it. They haven’t gotten anything. They got nothing from me,” he said. “But if you look for 47 years, they’ve been tapping people along, presidents. Every president got tapped along, didn’t do anything, and they became more and more powerful. This should have been done 47 years ago.”
The president went on to deride the approaches to Iran of former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and most of all, Barack Obama. He cut former President Joe Biden some slack, because “he probably had nothing to say because he was such a stupid person.”
IRAN RETURNS TO NO-LIMITS GULF STATE TARGET LIST AFTER DECLARING STRAIT OF HORMUZ CLOSED
Iran’s fractured power structure after the assassination of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei can be partly credited for the agonizing pace of Iranian negotiators, who must get approval from several different power centers.
Trump definitively soured on Iran last week, declaring the memorandum of understanding with Iran “over” and launching several heavy waves of strikes against the country. Iran responded in kind, expanding its target list to include the whole gulf by Sunday. The U.S. strikes have focused on Iran’s coast, showcasing the new focus of the war on opening up the Strait of Hormuz.