What did Donald Trump do today?
He changed his position on Iranian nuclear bomb fuel to "why even bother?"
The contents of the "memorandum of understanding" (MOU) between the United States and Iran, scheduled to be signed on Friday, are still a secret—including to many of the Trump administration officials who were sent out to try to defend it. The reason they need to defend it is that Iran has published a detailed readout, and if that's accurate, it has the United States pledging tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars, and totally conceding Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz.
The explanation that Trump administration officials offered today was that the text of the agreement was simply a platform for the real, "backchannel" negotiations, where Trump would supposedly drive a much harder bargain. In the meantime, those officials claimed, Iran's government needed something it could spin as a victory for its domestic political purposes.
The problem with that explanation is that Iran's government doesn't need a PR win. The country is ruled by an authoritarian clerical-military junta that is now in much firmer control of the country on a day-to-day basis than it was before the war. And unlike Trump's executive branch, that regime is not facing elections that are likely to sweep its opposition into power in five months.
Trump, who is routinely kept out of the loop by his own staff about critical matters, probably knows what the actual text of the MOU says. And today, he offered his own hint about where things would be going, by starting to back down from the single justification he offered for the entire course of the war.
Trump is backing away from getting Iran's enriched material: "You could make the case, why even bother? It's not very valuable stuff."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 16, 2026 at 7:20 AM
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Trump believes, or claims to believe, that all of Iran's near-bomb-grade enriched uranium was kept in a single underground storage facility, and that this has been bombed to the point where it is unrecoverable by Iran.
That is not how physics works. Iran has construction equipment to excavate collapsed bunkers. Even if an entire mountain were brought down around the storage facility, the highly enriched uranium would still be there, and easily refined back to a usable state once it was dug up.
The reason that enriched uranium is difficult to produce is that it takes specialized equipment to separate out the fissile uranium isotopes from raw ore, but once that's done, it stays enriched. Chemically separating it out from contamination that might have occurred during an attack would be simple. Put another way, the fuel for a nuclear weapon cannot be bombed out of existence.
Trump justified the deaths of thirteen American servicemembers by saying that it was essential to end Iran's nuclear program. He excused atrocities and threatened more by pointing to the danger that Iran might develop a weapon. He literally said that he didn't think at all about the predictable economic pain the war would inflict on American households, because stopping the supposed Iranian nuclear threat was of paramount importance. Just a few days ago, he threatened his own nuclear attack on Iran.
And now, in desperate political need of an off-ramp from the war, Trump is walking back the nuclear justification. The reason, of course, is that in spite of 109 days of Trump claiming that Iran's government and military had been "ANNIHILATED," Iran will retain complete control over its nuclear stockpile, and will be able to resume using its capacity to further develop bomb-grade material as leverage.
Iran's own claims regarding the still-secret MOU are that it will voluntarily return to exactly the position it held before the war: it will "downblend" some of its highly-enriched uranium with non-fissile isotopes, and it will promise not to make a nuclear weapon. That is, roughly, the same agreement that was in place in 2018 as part of the Obama-era JCPOA, except that Trump's new agreement will not have any mechanism for enforcement or inspections.
Why does this matter?
- If this goes as expected, the only thing that will change for Iran's nuclear program is that its government will understand the value of a nuclear deterrent.
- Even by Trump standards, blundering the United States closer to a nuclear Iran, and paying its dictatorial government tens of billions of dollars for the privilege, is a catastrophe.