Real estate mogul Donald Trump, who currently is the Republican presidential nominee, decided to launch his campaign due to the controversial Iran nuclear deal sealed last July, according to his son Eric.
“I think, honestly, the Iran nuclear deal was one of the things that made him jump into the race,” Eric Trump told the “Cats Roundtable” radio program on AM 970 in New York on Sunday, reports the Jewish Insider.
“I think that was a game-changer for him,” Trump told the show host John Catsimatidis. “That is when he finally said, ‘Kids, I am going to do it. I am going to give this a real shot.'”
Trump has repeatedly condemned US President Barack Obama for signing the nuclear deal, and that condemnation was also heard in his speech on June 16, 2015 kicking off his campaign.
“If he makes that deal, Israel maybe won’t exist very long. We have to protect Israel,” Trump stated then less than a month before the deal was made, noting on Tehran’s open threats to wipe the Jewish state off the map.
The Republican candidate also spoke about the deal in a rally in Wisconsin last month, when he said the Iranians abused US Secretary of State John Kerry “mentally” in the nuclear deal talks, quipping that they treated him “like a child.”
“They took advantage of him like he was a baby,” he added.
Trump also made clear the Iran deal was a key priority of his during a speech at AIPAC in march, when he said, “my number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”
Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State for Obama, has for her part promised to maintain the Iran nuclear deal.
Why is the deal bad?
There has been great criticism over the nuclear deal for a variety of issues, with many noting that a similar deal sealed by former President Bill Clinton with North Korea in 1994 paved the regime’s path to a nuclear arsenal. The country’s first nuclear test took place in 2006.
The deal allows Iran to wait until limitations on its nuclear program expire in 15 years, at which point it could race to building a nuclear arsenal.
Alternatively, it is feared Iran can easily breach the deal which has Tehran inspect its own covert nuclear facilities such as Parchin, requiring a notice of 24 days before international inspectors can access such sites.
Another aspect that has been criticized is how the nuclear deal does not address Iran’s role as the leading state sponsor of terrorism and grants it a massive windfall in sanctions kickbacks. Tehran has shown an increasingly hostile stance towards the US since the deal, breaching UN sanctions in ballistic missile tests and briefly holding US Navy sailors hostage.
Obama’s administration for its part was recently revealed by senior White House aide Ben Rhodes as having tricked the public on the nuclear deal, using an “echo chamber” of supportive groups to sell the deal and falsely claiming the talks were launched with “moderate” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani when he came into office in 2013, when in reality they were started with hardliners a year before.
Numerous groups were paid by the Obama administration to advocate for the deal – the group that received the most was the Jewish liberal group J Street, which took $576,000 to promote the nuclear deal.
