Jose Andrés

Donald Trump sells himself as the greatest dealmaker alive. With Iran, he built a negotiation designed to fail, then blamed Tehran when it did. 1- He mistook pressure for strategy. Trump treated unpredictability as leverage and intimidation as diplomacy, convinced that enough force would bring Iran to its knees. Some governments fold under threats. Iran never has. Its choices are shaped by a long memory of foreign interference, by national dignity, and by a refusal to bargain under duress that has outlasted every pressure campaign aimed at it. Trump never bothered to understand the country across the table. He didn't think he needed to. 2- He made clear he wanted to destroy his counterpart, not reach terms with it. He spoke openly of regime change, saying Washington wanted "to pick a president" for Iran. Asked whether Iran's borders would survive the war, he replied: "That I can't tell you. Probably not." He boasted of sending guns into the country and said "the Kurds took the guns." He threatened Iran's bridges and power plants. He posted that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." In August he promised Tehran "every last chance before decapitation" and declared that nothing would pass his blockade unless "a Deal, or Total Surrender" was accomplished. Tehran drew the obvious conclusion: the goal was Iran's dismemberment, not an agreement. Under those terms, every concession looks less like compromise and more like a down payment on its own destruction. 3- He destroyed what was left of American credibility. Iran watched him walk out of the JCPOA in 2018 while international inspectors were certifying Iranian compliance. It watched him slap tariffs on Canada in breach of the USMCA, an agreement bearing his own signature. It watched American bombs fall twice in the middle of negotiations, in June 2025 and again on February 28. And within weeks of signing the Islamabad MoU, it watched him declare the deal "over" and send the bombers back. The lesson was simple. Whatever Iran concedes, Trump pockets. Then he strikes anyway. 4- His demands looked like pretexts, not a genuine effort to address his stated concern. Trump told the world he had a single red line: Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. Iran offered concrete guarantees on exactly that point. Trump, meanwhile, boasted that his strikes had "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program. If the program was obliterated and the guarantees were on the table, what was left to negotiate? To Tehran, the answer was clear. The nuclear file was never the real objective, only the cover for a broader and far more hostile design. 5- He looked like a president taking orders from Benjamin Netanyahu. Every signal from Washington deepened Tehran's conviction that Israel was writing the agenda, and that an American president had subordinated his country's interests to a foreign government's war aims. What sealed it was the price Trump was willing to pay at home. He split his own MAGA movement: Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene broke with him, accusing him of fighting Israel's war. A president who burns his standing with his own base to wage a war it never voted for, Tehran reasoned, is serving someone else's agenda. Trump still poses as the ultimate dealmaker. His Iran record reads like an indictment. He shattered trust, made every concession politically suicidal for the other side, kept moving the goalposts, and threatened to annihilate the very country he expected to sign. That is not the art of the deal. It is the art of making a deal impossible.