TOI correspondent from Washington: “I’m the boss,” US President Donald Trump joked as he entered the G-7 meeting in France on Wednesday amid widespread criticism in Washington that he is being pressured by Iran into a potential deal that reportedly lists many of the immediate US obligations while allowing Tehran to sidestep the key nuclear issue.The self-proclaimed master negotiator is set to sign an MoU that critics say is effectively a “surrender document” that trades US gains for vague assurances from Tehran. Determined to counter growing opposition at home over this, Trump said he is prepared to tear up the deal if it does not live up to his expectations and resume attacks on Iran. “This is a memorandum of understanding. And if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them… If they don’t behave, we’re going to drop a bomb right in the middle of their heads, OK?” Trump said during a meeting with Egyptian leader Mohammed al-Sisi, sparking a heated debate in Washington over whether Tehran had won over Trump. According to reports by Bloomberg and other outlets, the US-Iran memorandum of understanding offers “startling concessions” to Tehran according to several experts: the immediate end of all US and UN Security Council sanctions; freezing billions of dollars of Iran’s assets around the world; Immediate resumption of Iranian oil exports to stabilize global energy markets; and controversially, the creation of a $300 billion “rehabilitation and economic development” fund for Iran – backed by US Gulf partners. In return, it calls only for Iran’s stockpiles of bomb-grade uranium to be “adequately addressed”, leaving the fate of substantially enriched material largely unresolved. Analysts say the failure to secure this fuel, for a conflict launched to permanently neutralize Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, has thrown the strategic success of the entire military enterprise into doubt.This asymmetric arrangement has forced Trump to contend with a growing domestic perception that his agreement is, at best, “JCPOA-lite.” It’s a comparison the president hates, given his deep dislike of Barack Obama, whose original 2015 nuclear deal was famously torn up by Trump. “They took $1.7 billion… You know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and said he was a son of an idiot!”Still, policy experts point out that Obama’s deal actually mandated strict, verifiable limits, limiting Iran to 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, dismantling key centrifuges and imposing snap IAEA inspections. In contrast, Trump’s new memorandum of understanding relies almost entirely on a recycled, boilerplate promise that Tehran “will never produce a nuclear weapon,” balanced against immediate and massive US economic concessions.The political crossfire has revived long-standing partisan mythology, particularly Trump’s lie that the Obama administration “gave a lot of cash to Iran” as bribes. The reality of that January 2016 transaction is far more transactional: The $1.7 billion transfer originally included $400 million that the Shah’s Iran had paid into the U.S. Military Procurement Trust Fund before the 1979 Islamic Revolution; The remaining $1.3 billion was legally arbitrated interest accrued during nearly four decades of litigation in The Hague.While the first tranche of $400 million was actually physically delivered on cargo pallets in non-US currencies (including Swiss francs and euros) because settlement laws prohibited direct dollar transactions with Iran, it was a settlement of an old debt tied to the simultaneous release of US prisoners. Critics of Trump’s current package note this irony: While Obama returned Iran’s own historic funding, the new Trump memorandum of understanding outlines the path to a staggering $300 billion in fresh regional capital injections, via Gulf partners. To counter the growing narrative that Iran has outmaneuvered them and “sold out” Israel by pulling American power from the Middle East and rewarding a hostile regime on vague promises of good behavior, the White House has deployed a high-intensity media blitz. Over the past 12 hours, Vice President JD Vance has taken up the mantle of defender in chief, enlisting major news networks from Fox News to NBC to talk out the MOU against the JCPOA.“If you go back to the Obama JCPOA, what he did was he had an Iranian nuclear program that he accelerated. He basically bribed the Iranians to stop that program. Now, the Iranian nuclear program has been completely destroyed, and what we’re saying is: ‘Make a long-term commitment to never build it again, and you’ll get the benefits that come with it,'” Vance said. That belief is not shared in Congress, where a bipartisan insurgency is brewing as even Republican supporters, normally staunch in their defense of the president, are breaking ranks over concessions to Iran. “Unless you’ve been homeschooled by a day-drinking guy, no one has any confidence that Iran is going to do anything.” Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, a Trump ally, spoke in his traditional folksy manner, reflecting the growing perception in the US that the US president has been betrayed by Iran.