Jonathan Lemire: Maybe the Obama Team Got a Bad Deal with Iran, ‘But They Were Experts’

EXCERPT:

LEMIRE: “And President Trump is so clearly desperate for a deal that he and White House aides over the weekend, particularly Friday and Saturday, saying this is 95 percent done. Well, the 5 percent that was left, the Strait of Hormuz and the Iran’s uranium, the biggest stuff. And that’s why we don’t have a deal yet. And we may not get there unless, as you say, Joe, Trump takes a really bad deal. And there is a sense in Washington he might be willing to do that, though that would be humbling. He feels like he can sell it any way, that he can claim it’s better than what the Obama team got. And as our friend John Heilemann always says, with Trump, it’s either confession or projection. It was noteworthy over the weekend, he kept ripping the Obama negotiating team as, in his words, rank amateurs, where, as we just discussed, they were experts. Maybe they got a good deal, maybe they didn’t, but they were experts. What the Trump team now has are rank amateurs, and they have not been able to get a deal at all.”