Trump Is Losing the Hawks Who Once Defended the Iran War

What a load of crap. We just went in, took out two levels of the nation's leadship, blew up 85% of it's weaponry, put it's nuclear program back years and managed to avoid civilian casualties. We did this without asking China and established our military supremacy not to mention our control over the world supply of oil.

We can go back there anytime we want and bomb the sheet out of them again. Go ahead and complain if you want. I put this one in the win column. Both sides of the mainstream press are FOS and a bunch of crybabies.

The economy will start cranking, inflation will go down and the Dark Lord will squeeze by oin the midterms. Then again, they don't call him the Dark Lord for nothing.

Trump Is Losing the Hawks Who Once Defended the Iran War

Many of the conservatives who cheered on the president worry that the peace agreement doesn’t go far enough to deter Iran

By Philip Wegmann and Lindsay Wise, WSJ

Updated June 16, 2026

Hawkish conservatives fear President Trump’s preliminary peace deal with Iran will embolden Tehran and undermine U.S.-Israeli interests.

WASHINGTON—Many of the hawkish conservatives who rushed to President Trump’s defense at the beginning of the war with Iran now fear he is at risk of losing at the negotiating table, emboldening Tehran and setting back joint U.S.-Israeli interests in the process.

Early details, such as reports that a preliminary peace deal eventually could unlock billions of dollars in frozen Iranian funds, have turned once loyal allies into critics. They worry the deal doesn’t do enough to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and offers economic relief to Tehran that could allow the regime to rebuild its missile arsenal. Some Trump allies have expressed frustration in recent days that the administration hadn’t yet released the text of the agreement the president announced Sunday.

Two influential voices who have privately advised Trump throughout the war—retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, a Fox News contributor, and Marc Thiessen, a onetime chief speechwriter for former President George W. Bush—have raised pointed concerns about the deal.

“I can’t square some of the things that are coming out of the administration from reliable sources. That’s what I find so disturbing,” Keane told Fox News on Monday night. Thiessen called early reports about the agreement “utterly disastrous.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), another hawkish adviser to Trump, has said he is eager to see the text of the deal.

Senior Trump administration officials said the U.S. and Iran have discussed sanctions relief, restoring Tehran’s access to some of its estimated $100 billion in frozen funds and a $300 billion fund to facilitate reconstruction and repair of war damage. Officials have said Iran won’t receive taxpayer money.

A U.S. official said Iran will only get access to frozen funds if it can demonstrate that it will abide by the terms of the agreement, including by neutralizing its highly enriched uranium and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The official pushed back on criticism from conservative hawks, arguing that the deal meets the president’s objectives and ensures that Iran won’t obtain a nuclear weapon.

Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill have stopped short of openly criticizing the deal, but have said they need more information. Under federal law, Congress has the power to review any Iran nuclear deal and potentially vote on it.

“I want to see it myself,” Graham said of the preliminary agreement. “The way Iran describes it is awful. The way we describe it makes sense to me,” he said. “Let’s look at it and see what it actually is.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) said Tuesday that Senate Republicans had requested the text of the agreement along with briefings from the administration. “They’ve got to, you know, get this in front of us, and hopefully this will happen sooner rather than later,” Thune said.

While details remain murky, a more concrete picture of the preliminary agreement is starting to emerge. The memorandum of understanding includes an extended pause in the fighting, lifts the U.S. and Iranian blockades in the Strait of Hormuz and sets the stage for extended talks on Iran’s nuclear program. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Tuesday that the deal allows Iran to immediately begin selling oil and fuel.

Vice President JD Vance did a round of television interviews this week to sell the agreement and push back on the criticism. “Iranians don’t get a dime unless they behave and change their behavior,” Vance said Monday evening during a Fox News interview. He stressed that the reconstruction fund would come from Gulf states in the region, not the U.S.

Tensions among Trump’s outside advisers over the deal have spilled into public view.

When Mark Levin, a Trump ally, called on the administration to release the text of the deal, former Trump campaign aide Alex Bruesewitz chastised the Fox News host on social media, accusing him of panicking unnecessarily. Levin, whom Trump previously praised for his analysis of the Iran war, replied that Bruesewitz was “a fool.”

“If the president signed a bad deal, many of us who cheered and stood by him and thought that his action in Iran was heroic, will be extraordinarily disappointed,” Ben Shapiro, the popular conservative commentator, said in an interview. “It is not enough to win the first half of the basketball game.” he said, “You have to close it out.”

The unpopular war has dragged down Trump’s approval ratings and fractured part of the coalition that catapulted him to the presidency a second time. Both Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, influential conservative podcasters who campaigned on his behalf, earned a Trump rebuke and MAGA exile after they blasted the Iran war as a betrayal of an America-first foreign policy inspired by Israel. Now, the path to peace threatens to alienate the more hawkish conservatives who stuck with the president during the conflict.

“If the only people who end up liking this deal are the people who have spent months screaming at Trump for taking on a 47-year enemy of the U.S.…. then it will be, definitionally, a bad deal,” Shapiro said.

At issue for hawkish conservatives is whether enough of Trump’s stated war aims have been achieved. While Trump regularly argues the Iranian regime has been downgraded and its military destroyed, critics of the deal contend that the “unconditional surrender” the president promised to force on the Iranians at the beginning of the conflict hasn’t arrived. Conservative talk-radio host Erick Erickson opened his program Monday by condemning the deal as “an American surrender.”

Erickson predicted that Tehran would ultimately emerge emboldened by its ability to choke off global oil supplies in the Strait of Hormuz and by reconstruction dollars that come from a peace deal. “They beat Iran militarily and are now going to surrender at the negotiating table,” he said of the administration in an interview.

A phalanx of pro-Israel columnists and podcasters had fended off attacks on Trump’s right flank for months. But their private group chats began to light up over the weekend as the president prepared to celebrate his 80th birthday with an Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on the South Lawn of the White House. The concern communicated over calls and texts was that Trump only had an appetite for a winning headline, not the kind of enduring peace in the Middle East they think can only be achieved by permanently cowing Iran.

“The cardinal sin of American foreign policy for decades is not finishing what we started,” Josh Hammer, a conservative Newsweek columnist, said, adding, “Trump has earned enough credibility on Iran to continue to earn the benefit of the doubt for at least a smidgen longer.”

Not all pro-Israel conservatives have expressed concerns about the deal. Former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, who chairs the Republican Jewish Coalition, said he was waiting to see what was in the deal, but wouldn’t “at this point be second-guessing the president, who has been the best friend that the Jewish state has had in the White House.”

Vance, one of the administration’s most prominent skeptics of foreign wars, is scheduled to travel Friday to Switzerland to sign the deal that he helped negotiate. It could be both a crowning achievement of his time in office—and, potentially, a political liability as he mulls his own White House ambitions.

“The American people don’t like war, they like even less losing wars,” cautioned Shapiro. “If this deal is perceived as an American loss, and the vice president brokered that deal then the political consequences will be significant.”

Vance has dismissed the “propagandists” who are worried that Iran is getting too much in the deal.

“The big print in the actual agreement,” the vice president told Fox News Tuesday morning, “is they don’t get any of that stuff unless they totally transform themselves as a country, and if they do, that’s a huge win for everybody.”