(CNN) — As President Donald Trump has tried to sell the Iran war to a skeptical public, he has repeatedly returned to one particular talking point: that Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal was a disaster, and he’s going to produce something much better.
In fact, Trump has mentioned Obama’s nuclear deal more than three dozen times since the war began, according to a CNN review of Roll Call’s Factbase transcripts.
A new Washington Post-Ipsos poll has some very bad news for Trump on that front.
It finds just 23% of Americans think Trump will be able to unveil a better Iran deal than Obama did back in 2015. And 37% — a 14-point split — wagered that Trump would produce a worse deal.
Another 12% expected the deals to be “about the same,” while the rest didn’t offer a view.
Even among Republicans, only a little more than half (54%) thought Trump will bring about a better agreement.
And that came overwhelmingly from his most devoted backers: 70% of MAGA Republicans said Trump would produce a better deal. Non-MAGA Republicans were about evenly split; while 27% of them thought Trump would get a better accord, 23% thought Obama’s would be better.
Just 13% of independents thought the president would produce a better deal.
The finding in many ways epitomizes Trump’s failure to build the case for a war that’s becoming an increasing political liability.
How many of those people truly understand what was in the Obama nuclear deal inked in 2015, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)? It’s a fair question. Trump ripped that deal up nine years ago, and it was a very complicated agreement.
But that’s kind of beside the point.
For one, the JCPOA was pretty unpopular in real time. While some early polls showed people were open to it, a Pew Research Center poll in September 2015 showed Americans disapproved of it 49%-21%. By early 2016, a Gallup poll showed Americans disapproved of it 57%-30%.
That what Trump is pursuing inspires even less confidence is saying something.
Second, Trump has spent the last four and half months bashing that deal at every turn. He has routinely cast it as a complete sell-out to Iran that put the country on course to have a nuclear weapon.
“You know what the Iranians did?” Trump said a month ago alongside Egypt’s president. “They laughed at Obama and they said he’s a stupid son of a bitch.”
During a Monday appearance on Fox News, Trump called it “the worst agreement that has been signed by this country,” and even seemed to baselessly hint at something much more nefarious about Obama’s motivations for it.
Another key point: Few people think Trump will get a better deal even as he objectively invested much more in obtaining it. Trump went to war, costing more than a dozen American lives, quickly spending tens of billions of dollars and rocking the global economy. And there’s still no end in sight for the war, given Iran’s takeover of the Strait of Hormuz has created a huge problem that didn’t exist pre-war.
Yet the American people seem to prefer the agreement that Obama was able to strike using only diplomatic efforts.
In some ways, the finding isn’t surprising. Previous polls have shown around two-thirds of Americans don’t think the war will actually do much to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon — despite Trump saying his goal was to prevent that outcome forevermore.
And the new poll also suggests that, if anything, Trump’s political problem in Iran has gotten worse. The Post-Ipsos poll indicates 68% of Americans said the Iran war wasn’t worth fighting, which is more than ever said that for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump’s disapproval on Iran is now up to 69% as the midterm election tick ever closer.
But the new poll distills the crux of his problem: Based on the precise standard Trump has set for himself, the war seems like a failure.
The-CNN-Wire
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