As the fighters warmed up inside the White House and guests began flocking to the hawking canopy set up for the cage fight on the lawn, President Trump sat down at the residence just after 5 p.m. Sunday and added his digital signature to a document. end the four month war With Iran.
The President spent his 80th birthday amid congratulatory calls and urgent talks with senior aides and foreign leaders as he raced to get to grips with the delicate situation. Preliminary peace agreement.
Trump’s announcement that he had struck a “big deal” that would “bring peace and security to the entire region” came as a surprise to some of his own top aides, who thought the terms were still being discussed. The full text – which senior US officials say is one and a half pages long – has not been made public.
In the final hours before the announcement, he tried to dissuade his closest Middle East ally from trumpeting the deal. After the Israeli attack in Lebanon, he vented his anger on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“He will have to retaliate, then he will retaliate, then the whole incident in the Middle East will never stop,” he told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday afternoon after speaking by phone with Netanyahu. He said, “Bibi should not have done this.”
The deal the president ultimately signed came after a frenetic weekend in which he stepped away from the brink of a new military escalation — warning Tehran of “last options” if talks failed — to celebrating what he called a breakthrough with the “most rational” group of Iranian leaders.
But after Trump’s announcement of the deal, there remained uncertainty about what exactly he had agreed to, with some Capitol Hill aides and Iran’s supporters worried that the terms could provide economic relief to Tehran without resolving the nuclear issue.
Senator James Lankford (R., Okla.) said, “We all have questions. No one has seen it.” Other Republicans said they wanted to be briefed on the terms and read the text.
Trump’s surprise victory announcement came after a costly and unpopular 15-week battle that ended his second term. Since launching a military attack on Iran in late February, he has claimed to be close to a deal with Iran nearly 40 times, only to fail to reach a final agreement.
In his public posts Sunday, Trump sought to turn the still-unpublished memo into a public victory, as aides worked to prevent Israel, Iran and hard-liners in his own party from overthrowing it.
As he called Sunday, Trump told people on the other end of the line — including aides, journalists and Russian President Vladimir Putin — that a deal was imminent. In other calls, he expressed excitement about that evening’s spectacle at the White House and asked various people if they were attending.
A senior administration official said Trump had been seeking for days to announce a deal and move on from the conflict.
US officials say The agreement includes reopening Iran The Strait of Hormuz and the US have lifted their blockade of Iranian ports and shipping. The ceasefire will be extended for 60 days, during which the US and Iran will negotiate on Tehran’s nuclear program. Iranian state media say the deal includes Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon and Tehran maintaining control over the Strait of Hormuz without imposing new restrictions on its nuclear program.
Neither side has publicized the text of the agreement, although US officials said the administration would do so in the coming days.
A White House document containing talking points distributed to political aides obtained by The Journal describes the preliminary agreement as a win for ordinary Americans that will make them safer, lower gas prices by reopening the Strait of Hormuz and avoid another “forever war.”
The document says Trump’s “military and economic campaign has collapsed the regime” and left Iran’s nuclear program “in ruins”.
A senior administration official said Iran knows the US is unwilling to return to war, raising the possibility that Tehran could again close the strait to its diplomatic advantage. Short of achieving concrete commitments to limit or end its nuclear work, the official said the emerging agreement was likely to be less restrictive than the 2015 deal brokered by former President Barack Obama.
While the agreement is expected to be formally signed in Geneva on Friday, Trump insisted on adding his digital signature to Vice President J.D. Vance to show his commitment to completing the process, according to a senior US official.
The known terms of the framework appear to be far narrower than the “unconditional surrender” demanded by the President after he launched a military attack on Iran on February 28.
On Sunday, Trump described those goals in more limited terms. As he prepared to sign the deal, he told The Journal that despite calling on the Iranians to take back their country when the war first started, he “never cared about regime change”, promising “we will be there to help” and “America is with you”. He also stressed that “nuclear dust” in Iran is “harmful”, even though he had previously said the US needed to immediately seize and destroy it. He said he was ready for the war to end and so were the Iranians.
The announcement of the deal ended a five-day standoff that began with a US Apache helicopter downed near the Strait of Hormuz after colliding with an Iranian drone, prompting the president to launch a new round of retaliatory strikes.
In previous weeks, Trump had repeatedly pressed advisers on whether Iran’s offer would actually close its path to a nuclear weapon. A senior official said that when he was told that the concessions had fallen short, he thought it better to keep up the pressure rather than compromise.
But when Qatari mediators returned from Tehran on Wednesday with new language for a draft agreement, administration officials acknowledged that the agreement on the table, while imperfect, was the best possible outcome. The terms mirror a proposal that Secretary of State Marco Rubio said was under discussion in May.
Trump then said he had canceled planned attacks on Iran and claimed that Tehran’s leadership had approved a draft that would extend the ceasefire, reopen the strait and begin 60 days of nuclear talks. On Thursday evening he called Netanyahu and told him that he hoped to sign an agreement with Iran within a few days.
Senior administration officials were upset that hard-liners, including Trump allies, were criticizing the reported terms of the deal before the details were made public.
On Saturday, he said the agreement would be signed the next day – and warned that if it didn’t work, “the last option we have is to hopefully never be used again!” This ominous phrase raised concerns that he was threatening the use of nuclear weapons, although US officials insisted that he was merely reminding the regime that the US could continue bombing Iran.
Even as Trump tried to portray the deal as inevitable, Israel stepped up its military campaign against the Iran-backed Hezbollah group. On Sunday morning – the day Trump promised the agreement would finally be signed – Israeli forces attacked Dahiyah, a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Lebanese officials said three people were killed and 15 others were injured in the attack.
The strikes threatened to overturn the nascent agreement in its final hours. Iranian officials took the attack as proof that Washington either could not or would not stop its closest ally and threatened imminent retaliation.
Senior Qatari officials arrived in Tehran to meet with Iranian officials and try to salvage the deal in 16-hour-long talks, according to an official familiar with the matter.
As workers set up locker rooms for UFC fighters at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building Sunday morning, Trump and his top aides tried to push the deal to the finish line. The Israeli attack “shouldn’t have happened,” he posted on Truth Social in an unusually frank and public rebuke of Netanyahu. “Come on don’t blow it!” He urged both sides.
According to a senior US official, although hard-line factions within the Iranian government opposed the deal, they had no other solution to offer.
Iran eventually agreed to sign the terms. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf joined Trump and Vance in signing the memorandum electronically and is expected to travel to Geneva on Friday for the ceremony with the US.
Three hours after signing the agreement, Trump walked out of the Oval Office with UFC chief executive Dana White to the cheers of more than 4,000 spectators. In the crowd, the two chief negotiators of the deal, Vance and Steve Witkoff, hugged each other.
