Inside Trump’s mad dash to sign an agreement with Iran
By Kevin Liptak, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump was about to sit down for dinner at Versailles on Wednesday when he surprised both his host, French President Emmanuel Macron, and some of his own aides with a demand: he wanted to sign his agreement with Iran then and there.
Trump’s top diplomat had received word on the way to the palace that the document had been finalized. But there was already a signing ceremony scheduled for two days later at an ultra-exclusive mountainside retreat overlooking Lake Lucerne. Vice President JD Vance, the top American negotiator of the accord, was supposed to head to Switzerland to ink the memorandum of understanding and begin the next round of technical talks with Iran.
Trump, however, was adamant the agreement take effect immediately. He insisted he sign it that night. Macron advised them he could arrange it quickly, according to officials familiar with the events.
As the two presidents strolled the Hall of Mirrors, inspecting the frescoed ceilings glorifying the early reign of Louis XIV, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was with the French foreign minister, finding a printer to spit out the memo. If anyone had concerns over Versailles’ haunted history as the host of peace signings — namely the one that ended WWI but gave rise to another — they didn’t raise them.
As it turned out, Friday’s event in Lucerne never happened. Vance delayed his trip after Iran pulled out of the gathering amid a flareup in violence between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The parties had agreed to a renewed ceasefire as of Friday morning. But the Iran agreement, only days after Trump signed it, appeared more fragile than ever.
Trump and Vance have every reason to get started on the next phase of the agreement, which is intended to nail down commitments from Iran on curtailing its nuclear program. Each man has come under withering criticism even from their supporters, who see the agreement as a capitulation that offers concessions to Tehran while extracting little in return.
Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker, for example, said Thursday that a $300 billion reconstruction fund included in the sixth paragraph of the memo makes the payments in the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal “look like a pittance.”
Trump has grown defensive, insisting it was US military dominance that brought Iran to negotiations in the first place. “We didn’t meet out of desperation, Iran did. They are FINISHED!” he wrote on social media Friday. “We’ll play out the 60 days. They get no money, not ten cents!”
Still, after months of war, the 14-point memorandum of understanding clearly came as a relief to a president who’d long been ready for the conflict to end. Advisers had warned that global oil stockpiles were shrinking. Republican anxiety about the upcoming midterm elections was fevered.
Trump acknowledged himself this week that it was economic concerns that led him to sign the agreement, telling reporters he feared being compared to Herbert Hoover, the American president who presided over a market crash that began the Great Depression.
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe,” he said Wednesday at the Hôtel Royal in Évian-les-Bains as he concluded a Group of 7 summit.
A few hours later, just after 11 p.m., Trump was in the Lower Gallery of Versailles putting Sharpie to paper at a long banquet table, plates and glassware clinking in the background.
“This was not easy, I can tell you,” he told his dinner companions, which included Wall Street titans and the chairman of France’s largest luxury conglomerate. He lifted the memo to show them his signature.
“Bravo,” Macron offered. Someone snapped a photo of the document to send to Iran.
A chaotic rollout
The impromptu signing was the culmination of a mad dash to finalize the accord, peppered with myriad twists and near-collapses. At times, the process took on a sense of chaos, often fueled by Trump himself. For weeks, the president veered between signaling a deal was close and threatening to resume active hostilities if Iran didn’t submit to his red lines.
Even after the memorandum of understanding was struck, the actual text was kept hidden from public view for days, in part because Pakistani mediators told American officials the Iranians wanted to wait for their own internal purposes, according to Vance.
Once it was finally publicized — which only came by way of a senior US official reading it aloud to reporters — officials described “gentleman’s agreements” not contained in the actual text but reflecting back-channel understandings they said gave them confidence in the accord.
Vance, who has taken the lead in negotiations, told reporters on Thursday some of those side deals are written down, before adding: “The MOU, the gentleman’s agreements, the final deal — words don’t matter, ladies and gentlemen. We’re about verification.”
US negotiators released the MOU, without waiting for Iran’s senior leadership to sign off on the more detailed proposals, in part because they did not want to delay the next phase of negotiations, according to one source who is familiar with what Trump officials briefed to top congressional lawmakers. It would have required additional time to secure Iran’s formal sign off on those still-secret proposals.
But even the Versailles signing of the 14-point accord proved momentarily confusing, since US officials had already said Trump digitally signed the document earlier in the week.
Trump, it turned out, had only witnessed the earlier signing. On Wednesday, he wanted to make sure a hard copy was signed both by him and Iran’s president to ensure the agreement took effect.
“It’s signed,” Trump called out as he emerged from the palace just past 1 a.m. local time. “Signed it in Versailles.”
Trump’s desperation to get out of war
Advisers inside the White House once projected the conflict would be well over by the time a string of celebratory summer events rolled around: the start of the World Cup, a UFC fight on the South Lawn on Trump’s birthday, the nation’s 250th birthday.
Instead, the war had become the percolating backdrop to all of it. A drag on the global economy and Trump’s own popularity, his decision to launch strikes in February had come to shadow his presidency even as he tried to move on.
Inside the West Wing, many senior officials had long been pushing for an off-ramp. Members of Trump’s political team advocated for a way out to protect vulnerable Republicans ahead of the midterm elections and the president’s political legacy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shared concerns over the war’s economic impact. Energy Secretary Chris Wright was wary of the effects to the world’s energy industry, officials familiar with the matter said.
“There was broad acknowledgement that if this went on, it was going to get even worse,” said one source familiar with the talks.
During an internal meeting at the White House in early June, Trump and his aides decided to press for a general agreement with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and outline a broad framework on dismantling Iran’s nuclear program.
None of the president’s advisers ultimately opposed moving forward with that plan, an official involved in the talks said, with the group deciding to reassess where things stood over the course of a new, 60-day period for technical talks after the preliminary agreement to end the war was struck.
In the weeks afterward, Trump’s national security team met nearly every day to discuss the evolving agreement. Many were concerned that Tehran would not hold up its end of the bargain, administration officials directly involved in the negotiations said.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were among the “most pessimistic” about whether the Iranians would honor their commitments to make substantive concessions on their nuclear program, even if they agreed to negotiate on that issue, one of the officials said. But at various points, nearly every senior official — including Rubio, Vance and Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — raised serious reservations, the officials said.
But they ultimately reached consensus driven by Trump himself: “We want to get this thing over with,” an administration official directly involved in the talks told CNN.
A rocky road, complicated by tensions with Israel
Still, it quickly became clear that Trump and his team’s rush to conclude the war would face obstacles. Negotiating with the Iranians was a slow, pained process that involved lengthy delays in getting a response from Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who American officials believe is using couriers to conceal his location.
US officials were waiting for a response to their latest proposal when, on June 8, an American Apache helicopter collided with an Iranian drone, leading to a dramatic water rescue of the US pilots and setting off a new round of retaliatory strikes.
Over the course of several days, Trump grew furious — believing both Tehran and the media were not taking his response to the incident seriously enough. He fumed at the White House as he ordered up daily rounds of bombardments.
At the same time, a delegation of Qatari officials was in Tehran trying to extract a counteroffer from the Iranians that Trump could approve. As Trump was threatening another night of strikes, word arrived from the Qataris that some of the gaps in the two sides’ negotiating positions had narrowed.
Trump called off the strikes, and entered his birthday weekend under the belief an agreement was closer than ever.
It turned out another roadblock was looming. A deadly Israeli strike on a Beirut suburb on Sunday — Trump’s 80th — set off another scramble to salvage a deal Trump believed was nearly complete. Israel was responding to attacks by Hezbollah, but Trump and his advisers interpreted the action as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to stymie the agreement.
In an expletive-laden phone call, Trump excoriated Netanyahu. Meanwhile, his advisers worked to stave off an Iranian retaliation, which appeared imminent. In Tehran, Qatari negotiators held marathon talks to try and salvage the agreement, reporting back frequently to Witkoff, Kushner and other American officials on their progress.
After 17 hours of discussions, the Iranians stood down the ballistic missiles that had been placed in launchers to fire toward Israel. Demands that changes be made to the text of the agreement were rebuffed by the Qataris, who warned Trump’s patience was running thin.
Tehran did stick to one demand, however: Iran refused to have the agreement announced on Trump’s birthday.
Fearing any more delays, mediators arrived at a creative solution. The accord would be announced just after midnight in Tehran, seven-and-a-half hours ahead of Washington, where Trump was preparing for a birthday cage fight on the South Lawn.
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CNN’s Alayna Treene, Katie Bo Lillis, Zachary Cohen and Kristen Holmes contributed to this report.
