How Sen. Sullivan helped set Trump up for failure

President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at a Crypto conference at the Mar-a-Lago Club. (Official photo from The White House)

By Rich Moniak

The surging price of gas caused by the war with Iran has become an inextricable problem for President Donald Trump. On Wednesday he reverted to insults. “Iran can’t get their act together,” he wrote in a social media post. “They don’t know how to sign a nonnuclear deal. They better get smart soon!”

But if Trump was smart, he wouldn’t have started the war. And he wouldn’t have unilaterally withdrawn from an agreement with Iran that he never understood. 

Sen. Dan Sullivan never liked the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between the U.S., the UK, France, Germany, the EU, China, Russia and Iran. It didn’t address Iran’s ballistic missile program or the terrorism they sponsored. And he believed it left a pathway for them to develop nuclear weapons within a decade. 

But months before the deal was finalized, he and 46 other Senate Republicans sent an open letter to Iran’s leaders (Sen. Lisa Murkowski didn’t sign it). They warned the regime that unless the agreement was approved by Congress, “the next president could revoke” it “with the stroke of a pen.” 

That’s exactly what Trump did in 2018.

“This was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” he said. “It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.”

Bombastic rhetoric isn’t a substitute for knowledge. And it’s a good bet Trump never studied the details of the highly technical 159-page agreement.

"I like bullets or I like as little as possible,” he said during an interview shortly before taking office in 2017. “I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.”

That explains why he was surprised by the complexity of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” he told the nation’s governors in 2017 as if they didn’t already know.  

Congressional Republicans knew it. But throughout the debate over the bill and long after it had been signed into law, they fed Fox News a frequent diet of anti-ACA rhetoric geared to invoke anger from its conservative audience. Four years later, they began delivering the same kind of easy-to-understand, one-sided criticisms and exaggerations of the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

The network had long been Trump’s primary source for news and political opinions. Like an armchair quarterback, he thought he was learning everything he needed to know about the ACA and the JCPOA.

Soon after taking office, he prioritized repealing the replacing the ACA. Years later he admitted he never had more than the concept of a plan to replace it.  

The UK, France, Germany, and the European Union tried to preserve the JCPOA after Trump ripped it up. But he unilaterally reimposed the U.S. sanctions that had been in place before it went into effect. And the following year Iran began accelerating uranium enrichment.

Now we’re at war. And Trump can’t understand why Iranians don’t trust him. Or how he handed them negotiating advantages.

It took almost two years for the Obama administration to negotiate the JCPOA. His team was led by people with years of diplomatic experience. They consulted with experts in nuclear technology. They had allies sitting at the table. 

In comparison, Trump has charged Vice-President JD Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner with resolving the conflict. He expects the three diplomatic little leaguers working alone to negotiate a better deal in a matter of weeks.  

And whereas congressional Republicans and conservative news outlets can keep Trump from appearing ignorant to voters about domestic issues like the ACA, they can’t fool foreigners. 

Iranians remember the caliber of Obama’s team. They know Trump invests little effort in studying complex issues. And they learned from his trade policies that he’s likely to back down at the slightest hint of economic trouble. 

Before the war, the average price of gas in America was $2.98 per gallon. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed it up to $4.30 per gallon.  

Sullivan wrongly blamed Biden after Russia’s war in Ukraine sent gas prices soaring in 2022. But he’s not talking about it now because he’s protecting Trump. And because he’s partly to blame for a costly war that could have been avoided.  

• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.