Transcript of The Whiplash Over a Possible Peace Deal With Iran New

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From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. Over the weekend, we heard one message after another message about how a peace deal with Iran was coming. The framework was in place, we were told, and we were on the verge of it. And then suddenly, there was a new round of airstrikes and threats. And so today, I talked to my colleagues David Sanger and Tyler Pager about what happened and how to make sense of this dramatic reversal. It's Wednesday, May 27th. David, Tyler, welcome to The Daily.

Thanks, Rachael. Great to be here.

Thanks for having us.

It's very exciting to talk to both of you at the same time in the D.C. studio. You've been working furiously over a very long holiday weekend that I think a lot of people went into with some sense that there might be a deal to end the war with Iran. And then we all went off to our weekends, not you two, of course, but we come back and on Tuesday, not only is there no deal to end the war, but the United States, we learned, struck a bunch of targets in Iran on Monday night. So I think a lot of people are confused about the state of play and want to understand how did we go from a feeling that something might be imminent to where we are today, Tuesday afternoon. Tyler, you were with the president all weekend. Why don't we start with you?

Yeah, so we set out with this weekend thinking that there would be some significant development with the conflict with Iran. And really, it could have gone either way, that there was serious progress toward an agreement or a resumption of military action. Mm-hmm. And so—

Kind of two ends of the spectrum.

Exactly. So on Friday, I was part of the traveling pool of reporters with the president, and we had expected to travel to New York for a political event with Congressman Mike Lawler and then continue on to Bedminster, New Jersey, where the president was expected to spend the weekend at his golf club, as he does many spring and summer weekends. So early Friday morning, I drop off my suitcase at the White House and come back around noon. And just before we leave, we're told the president will be returning to Washington directly, and he will not be spending the weekend at his golf club in New Jersey.

Or at his son's— Don Jr.'s wedding in the Bahamas. I think that's when a lot of people realized that there might be something going on this weekend when Trump announced that he was quite busy and might not be able to make it.

Correct. So he was doing neither of those two things. He was coming back to the White House. And they didn't explicitly give us a reason. And at that moment, I asked a White House official, "What should we expect for this weekend?" And the White House official told me, "50/50. 50/50 we're restarting the war, 50/50 we have a nuclear deal, or at least progress toward that." So on Saturday morning, the president posts on Truth Social about a call he had just had with a collection of leaders from the Arab world to discuss a peace deal that they are encouraging him to take. And he strikes quite an optimistic tone about what is developing.

He says, if I recall correctly, that the final details of a deal are being discussed. They're going to be announced shortly.

Yeah. And he doesn't give a lot of details. All that he says is, in addition to many other elements of the agreement, the Strait of Hormuz will be opened. Mm-hmm.

And can I just pause here? Because at this point, I think people might be a little bit confused what we're talking about when we say a deal, when we refer to Trump saying a deal is gonna be announced. David, when it comes to Iran, what are we talking about exactly when we say deal?

Well, the president uses that phrase obviously to cover a wide range of things, but he wasn't talking about a nuclear deal. He wasn't talking about a missile deal.

Mm-hmm.

He wasn't talking about a deal that would actually get to any of the substantive issues that led him to attack Iran, along with Israel joining in with him on February 28th. What he was talking about really was a sort of memorandum of understanding, to put it in the real estate— business terms, right? Business terms of Donald Trump— that basically said that they would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a process that would probably take 30 days or so by the time you demine it and figure it out, and then use the time— Secretary of State Rubio said up to 60 days— to negotiate on the real issues of substance. So this deal was really just a way to get back to the status quo at the time the war started, not really to go solve any of the fundamental questions.

Can you just explain that a little bit? When you say status quo, remind us sort of what the state of play was when this war started.

Well, when the war started, there was free commerce rolling through the Strait of Hormuz. The closing of the strait was a result of the war. It was not a cause of the war. The Iranians had never closed the strait before. And what did they discover, Rachel? Well, they discovered this was an enormously powerful weapon that they had that they had never flexed before.

Leverage. They discovered that they had massive leverage.

They discovered that even facing the world's biggest military force, one they clearly couldn't compete with on the battlefield, they had an enormous ability to disrupt the world economy.

Mm-hmm.

And this has been the largest disruption of energy supply in modern history. So suddenly the question came, why would they reopen this in a deal with the president over the weekend? And the answer is that really both sides are suffering right now. The Iranians are suffering because the president imposed a blockade that kept ships from going in and out of Iranian ports. And the US was suffering because gas prices have gone so high. And so this deal is really just about opening the strait again, getting the oil flowing, bringing down the gas prices. It kicks down the road all of the harder issues about Iran's nuclear program, their missile program, that the president was saying until last week had to be resolved in this negotiation. And now what they're saying is now On second thought, let's get the oil flowing again and we'll worry about that all later.

I, I wanna pause here, David, 'cause I wanna remind people where we are in the story of the US versus Iran's nuclear program, which you mentioned is one of the issues at hand here. People might remember that last summer the administration said that the United States had destroyed Iran's nuclear program. That's obviously not the case. As we see now. So what is each side asking for as it relates to the Iranian nuclear program?

So his phrase was that the US had obliterated it, and that made you think that it was gone forever. What he really did was bury it. The United States sent B-2 bombers in June of 2025. They used deep penetrating bombs to hit 3 major nuclear sites. And from all accounts we've gotten since, they did a pretty good job. They collapsed those sites, and including one in Isfahan, where there are 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium. This is the stuff that in a few days or a few weeks you could turn into the kind of fuel you would use in a nuclear weapon. It would take you longer to build the weapon itself. So what do they want? The US wants to get that near bomb-grade uranium out of the country.

The idea is to dig it up and give it up.

That's right. So the Iranians, of course, say, hey, look, it's our right as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to produce nuclear fuel. So we don't want to give up everything. So there's been a lot of back and forth on that issue. And the arguments over the weekend were highly focused on just that wording.

Well, let's talk about those arguments. Tyler, as these updates are trickling out, what kinds of reactions are you seeing and what are these arguments over specifically?

Yeah, I mean, this is getting right at the heart of what has been dividing much of Trump's base since the war began, which is those who think Trump should continue bombing Iran and in their parlance, finish the job, and those who are opposed to the war and see the economic costs of it and worried about the politics of the war and want Trump to figure out a way out. So for those who want the war to continue, those so-called Iran hawks—

I think we had a wall on deal-making—

like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close ally of President Trump, are quite concerned about the contours of the deal.

Hurt them more Maybe they'll make a deal if you hurt them enough. But right now, I think they're trying to wait us out. I think they're playing games. And in the words of the president, I think they're crazy. I think he's right.

He was quite worried that Iran was playing the United States and delaying negotiations over the most contentious issues in a way that would just kick the can down the road and be detrimental to the United States and to the region more broadly.

Mm-hmm.

There were other Republicans similarly raising concerns. There were Israelis who are raising concerns. They fear that the outlines of this deal is problematic and that Trump should not let up on the military action until he gets more concessions. Mm-hmm. There are many in the president's coalition who do not think the war is won yet, and any negotiated settlement is too soon.

Mm-hmm.

You know, Rachel, what's interesting when you talk to those in the Republican Party, including like Roger Wicker, the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who have been arguing for finishing the job. It's essentially an acknowledgement that the president has achieved none of the political objectives that he laid out in the opening hours of the war. And they don't want to go back to a situation where you might get the strait opened, although there'll be some degree of Iranian control, presumably. But you still have a nuclear program, you still have a missile program, and that the president fundamentally will have conducted 38 days of combat operations and have nothing to show for it from his original objectives. And when I asked the president about this on the way back from China— You did it for 38 days. Well, no, we did, and you did not get the political changes in a Wrong. I got— I had a total military victory. But the fake news guys like you write incorrectly. You're a fake guy. That's when he blew up at me and described the New York Times's coverage as treasonous. I actually think it's sort of treasonous what you write, but you and the New York Times and CNN, I would say, are the worst.

I believe he called you treasonous.

He did, and the Times. We both got to share in it. You should know better. Your editors tell you What you're right, and you're right, and you should be ashamed of this. It's really fascinating because it tells you how sensitive he is on this subject, because I think he fears if the history of this war is written, if we're in a situation where Iran has once again managed to drag this out and hold on to a threshold capability to build a bomb, he will have failed. Which is why I think you've seen, Rachel, that in the last couple of days, he started to take a very different tone.

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Yeah, so the president is a voracious consumer of media and is clearly aware of the criticism from some of his own allies and supporters about the status of the negotiations and the progress toward a deal that they are not happy with.

Mm-hmm.

And so on Sunday morning, the White House organizes a call with a senior US official to walk reporters through what's actually in the deal. What's interesting is the official, who only spoke on the condition of background to discuss the negotiations, really just goes on a rant uninterrupted for quite some time blaming the media.

And I'm sorry, blaming the media for what exactly? What are they saying that you guys are getting wrong?

They're saying that the media is reporting things that are inaccurate from various officials in Iran or in the Arab world who are trying to tank the deal for any number of reasons, and saying that the US media is not reporting accurately on the progress the negotiators are making.

Got it. Okay. So what happens next?

So then the official starts to walk through what's actually in the deal. And in fact, we learn that there's not a whole lot that's been agreed upon. The official makes it very clear that there's no deal that's going to be signed that day or even in the next few days, talking about how difficult it is to reach the Supreme Leader because he's in hiding and that they need his sign-off, but there wasn't even a document at that point Sunday morning for the Supreme Leader to sign. Mm-hmm. And another important thing that the official reveals on this call is that one of the most important sticking points for the US, which is the disposal of this highly enriched uranium, there was no agreed-upon mechanism by which that would be disposed of, whether the US would take it, whether the Iranians would give it to a third party, whether the Iranians would destroy it in the presence of international observers? Key questions about a key part of this memorandum of understanding had not yet been figured out, let alone all the other contentious issues that were being punted down the road.

So basically, despite what the president has posted online just a few days ago, there is no imminent deal to end the war.

Right. And the president then starts lashing out at his critics. On Sunday afternoon on Truth Social, where he says, "Don't listen to the losers who are critical about something they know nothing about," and says it isn't even fully negotiated yet. So both conceding that they're still working through the negotiations and hitting back at critics who are concerned about the direction in which these negotiations are headed. Mm-hmm. And Trump adds a whole nother wrinkle to these already complicated negotiations. On Monday morning, the president says that he's mandatorily requesting that all countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords. So these are agreements that started in the president's first term in which several Arab countries signed on to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. But in this particular moment, it throws a wrench into already complicated negotiations between several Arab countries, the United States, and Iran. And the president is asking Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan to sign on to these agreements that many of them have no interest in doing, and others that were in conversations about signing them in earlier phases lost interest after October 7th and Israel's response in Gaza. So this is basically a nonstarter for many of these countries, but for Trump, it serves two purposes.

One, it is helping to mollify some of his Republican critics like Lindsey Graham, who see this as a way to get out of the war and remake the Middle East. And for Trump, it is a way to try to suggest that he has this grander project at hand to remake the Middle East in the aftermath of this war.

So just going back to our timeline, I think at this point in the storytelling, it is Monday evening, and word comes out that not only is there no deal, but that the United States has actually launched strikes against targets in Iran. This feels like it comes out of nowhere, perhaps, given the fact that we've been hearing about dealmaking all weekend. So David, where do these strikes fit into the negotiations?

Well, first, Rachel, it certainly illustrates how fragile this ceasefire is. And there's a fair bit of evidence that what the military was doing was sending a reminder to the Iranians that if the deal doesn't come together, and even if it does, they expect a certain level of behavior in the strait. Now, in this case, the military tells us they'd seen 3 things. They had seen some activity around missile sites that could be a threat to American ships that are just offshore in the strait. They'd seen a fair bit of drone activity being conducted there, and they had also seen some laying of mines, or what they thought was laying of mines, from small boats that the Iranians controlled. So they blew some of these up and then they went away and they carefully referred to it as a self-defense action. Now, whether the Iranians viewed it that way, we don't know, but it tells you that this is all at a pretty delicate moment where there is this strange mix of incentive and force to try to get the agreement.

We're negotiating with you, but this is a reminder to do what we want or else. And also it was all defensive, so we can keep negotiating.

That's right.

I think it is fair to say that at this point there is a collective sense of whiplash after several days of news about deal being on, deal being off, strikes happening.

Tyler and I certainly feel that.

That makes sense given that you guys were probably more meshed in it than most other people. Tyler, do we have any sense at this point on Tuesday afternoon of what our timeline looks like? Like, are we close to having an answer one way or another about whether there will be a deal or, as you said, a resumption of full-blown war?

It seems right now the Trump administration wants to continue to give diplomacy a chance to end this conflict, but it doesn't seem that's going to happen imminently. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is traveling back from India, told reporters that it could take a few more days to finalize the deal. It seems the administration is willing to give the mediating partners— Qatar, Pakistan, and other Arab countries— a few more days and hopefully, in their view, wrap up the conflict.

I wanna pull back just for a second here and talk more broadly about the way that this administration approaches dealmaking when it comes to war. Right now, when it comes to Iran, the most urgent issues, as you have explained, are reopening the strait and some kind of ceasefire. But again, there are these bigger issues that seem to be getting punted. And that sounds a lot like the kind of phased dealmaking that we saw with Gaza, where the easiest things were negotiated upfront, and then the more difficult things like disarming Hamas and rebuilding Gaza and whether there would be a Palestinian state, all of those things remain unresolved months and months later. So I guess what I'm getting at is that even if a deal is announced to end the war with Iran, that if it kicks a bunch of cans down the road, how much stock should we put into any such announcement?

I think you have to be pretty skeptical. I mean, Rachel, you and I were both in Israel during the time period when the agreement was announced with Hamas.

That's right.

And the president at the time said, Well, in just a few weeks, Hamas will disarm and we'll have a fuller agreement and we'll start rebuilding Gaza. And as you suggested, none of that has happened yet. Mm-hmm. So imagine a world now where you move forward to the Iran deal. It was only 11 weeks ago that the president said, this war ends only one way, with Iran's unconditional surrender. He has now moved toward Well, maybe we can get a deal to reopen the strait, which was open the day the war started.

Right.

And then resume negotiations, which were underway before the war started.

The goalposts keep moving, I think is what you're saying.

Yeah, they do keep moving. And, you know, I've covered Iranian negotiations mostly on the nuclear program for 20 years, and they are masters of dragging this out. The deal with President Obama, whether you liked it or hated it, took 2 years to negotiate.

Mm-hmm.

And I think the Iranians are looking at President Trump and saying, look, this is all part of a 47-year-long conflict with the United States. If we can wait Donald Trump out for 2 and a half years here, we're on to the next president, and all we need to do is be able to hold on to enough of our nuclear capability in that interim that we can then figure out what to do with it next.

You know, I think by now in Trump's second term, we have seen this playbook from the president a number of times where basically it feels as though he announces a deal in order to claim a victory, but the details haven't quite been worked out yet. And perhaps there is hope from the administration that by the time the deal doesn't quite look like what was announced, people might not be paying a lot of attention. But with this war specifically, I think that for most Americans, the number one thing they care about is gas prices. And so Tyler, I wonder if gas prices don't go down, will that tactic of announcing something and hoping people don't pay enough attention actually work?

It's very unlikely. And we know that Republicans in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the country are deeply concerned about how these high gas prices are going to hurt them when voters go to the ballot box in November for the midterm elections. And so if the strait is not reopened soon, we could see gas prices eclipsing $5 a gallon. Mm-hmm. And that is an extremely dangerous position for Republicans to be in, in a competitive midterm election cycle. And so there is a lot of pressure for the president to get this strait reopened. Unlike other conflicts that don't affect Americans on a daily basis, this one does.

David, Tyler, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who received President Trump's endorsement last week, won the Republican primary for Senate. Scrambling the upcoming midterm battle in the state. Paxton, who had been marred by scandals including an impeachment 3 years ago, defeated Senator John Cornyn, a 4-term Republican who had not faced a close general election in his more than 20 years in the Senate.

Tonight, we just made history. Yeah!

In his victory speech, Paxton thanked the president for backing him over the objections of most other Republicans.

When everyone in Washington told him to abandon me and abandon the people of Texas, he didn't listen. Instead, he gave his complete and total endorsement.

Cornyn, who had called Paxton an embarrassment, said he would back him in November.

I've said throughout this race that I trust the voters of Texas, and they've made their And I must respect it.

Paxton will face off against Democrat James Tallarico, a race that could affect control of the United States Senate. Today's episode was produced by Clare Toeniskoetter and Jessica Chung. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Patricia Willans. It contains music by Marian Lozano. Our theme music is by Wonderly, and this episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.