As fighters warmed up inside the White House and guests began to stream toward the hulking canopy set up for cage fights on the lawn, President Trump sat in the residence shortly after 5 p.m. on Sunday and added his digital signature to a document meant to wind down the four-month war with Iran.
The president had spent his 80th birthday toggling between congratulatory calls and urgent conversations with senior aides and foreign leaders as he raced to lock in the fragile preliminary peace agreement.
Trump’s declaration that he had completed a “great deal” that would “bring Peace and Security to the whole Region” came as a surprise to some of his own top aides, who thought the terms were still under discussion. The full text—which senior U.S. officials say is a page and a half long—hasn’t been made public.
In the final hours before the announcement, he sought to keep his closest Middle East ally from blowing up the deal. He vented his frustration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Israeli strikes in Lebanon.
“They have to fire back, then he’ll fire back, then the whole thing never stops in the Middle East,” he told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday afternoon after getting off the phone with Netanyahu. “Bibi shouldn’t have done that,” he added.
The agreement the president ultimately signed emerged after a frantic weekend in which he veered from the brink of a new military escalation—warning Tehran of an “ultimate alternative” if talks failed—to celebrating a breakthrough with what he called “the most rational” group of Iranian leaders.
But Trump’s announcement of the deal was met with uncertainty over what exactly he had agreed to, including among some allies on Capitol Hill and Iran hawks worried that the terms could give Tehran economic relief without resolving the nuclear issue.
“We all have questions. No one’s seen it,” said Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.). Other Republicans said they wanted to be briefed on the terms and read the text.
Trump’s sudden declaration of victory followed 15 weeks of a costly and unpopular war that has consumed his second term. Since launching the military assault on Iran in late February, he has claimed to be close to a deal with Iran nearly 40 times, only for a final agreement to fall through.
In his public posts on Sunday, Trump sought to turn a still-unreleased memorandum into a public victory as aides worked to keep Israel, Iran and hard-liners in his own party from upending it.
As he fielded calls on Sunday, Trump told people on the other end of the line—including allies, journalists and Russian President Vladimir Putin —that the deal was imminent. In other calls, he expressed excitement about that evening’s spectacle at the White House and asked various people if they were attending.
One senior administration official said Trump had been clamoring for days to announce a deal and move on from the conflict.
U.S. officials say the deal entails Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. lifting its blockade on Iranian ports and shipping. The ceasefire will be extended for 60 days, during which time the U.S. and Iran will conduct talks over Tehran’s nuclear program. Iranian state media says the deal includes Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and preserves Tehran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz without committing to new restrictions on its nuclear program.
Neither side has publicized the text of the agreement, though U.S. officials said the administration would do so in the coming days.
A White House document with talking points distributed to political allies obtained by The Journal describes the preliminary agreement as a win for ordinary Americans that will make them safer, lower gas prices by reopening the Strait of Hormuz and avoid another “forever war.”
Trump’s “military and economic campaign shattered the regime” and left Iran’s nuclear program “in ruins,” the document said.
A senior administration official said Iran knows the U.S. is unwilling to return to war, raising the possibility that Tehran could close the Strait again for its own diplomatic leverage. Short of getting concrete commitments to limit or end its nuclear work, the official said the emerging agreement is likely to be less restrictive than the 2015 deal brokered by former President Barack Obama .
While the agreement is expected to be formally signed in Geneva on Friday, Trump insisted on adding his digital signature along with Vice President JD Vance to show his commitment to seeing the process through, according to a senior U.S. official.
The known terms of the framework appear to be far narrower than the “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” the president demanded after launching the military assault on Iran on Feb. 28.
On Sunday, Trump described those aims in more limited terms. As he prepared to sign the agreement, he told The Journal he “never cared about regime change” despite calling on Iranians to take back their country when he first launched the war, promising “we’ll be there to help” and “America is with you.” He also insisted the “nuclear dust” in Iran was “harmless,” even after he previously had said the U.S. needed to seize and destroy it immediately. He said he was ready for the war to be over, and so were the Iranians.
The announcement of the agreement capped a five-day scramble that began with a U.S. Apache helicopter that went down near the Strait of Hormuz after colliding with an Iranian drone, pushing the president toward a new round of retaliatory strikes.
In previous weeks, Trump had repeatedly pressed advisers on whether Iran’s offer would actually close its path to a nuclear weapon. Told that the concessions fell short, he chose to keep pressure on rather than settle, a senior official said.
But when Qatari mediators returned from Tehran with new language for a draft agreement on Wednesday, administration officials acknowledged that the agreement on the table, while imperfect, was the best feasible outcome. The terms echoed a proposal that Secretary of State Marco Rubio said had been under discussion in May.
Trump then said he had canceled planned strikes on Iran and claimed Tehran’s leadership had approved a draft that would extend the ceasefire, reopen the strait and launch 60 days of nuclear negotiations. On Thursday evening, he called Netanyahu and told him he expected to sign a deal with Iran within days.
Senior administration officials griped that hard-liners, including Trump allies, were criticizing the reported terms of the deal before the details had been made public.
On Saturday, he said the deal would be signed the next day—and warned that if it didn’t work out, “we have the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again!” The ominous phrase raised alarm that he was invoking the threat of using nuclear weapons, although U.S. officials insisted he was only reminding the regime the U.S. could continue bombing Iran.
Even as Trump sought to make the deal appear inevitable, Israel intensified its military campaign against the Iran-backed Hezbollah group. On Sunday morning—the day Trump promised the deal would finally be signed—Israeli forces hit Dahiyeh, the Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Lebanese officials said the attack killed three and wounded 15 others.
The strikes threatened to upend the fledgling agreement in its final hours. Iranian officials seized on the attack as evidence that Washington either couldn’t or wouldn’t restrain its closest ally and threatened imminent retaliation.
Senior Qatari officials rushed to Tehran to meet with Iranian officials and try to salvage the deal in marathon 16-hour negotiations, according to an official familiar with the matter.
As staff set up locker rooms for UFC fighters at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Sunday morning, Trump and his top aides sought to force the deal over the finish line. The Israeli attack “should not have happened,” he posted on Truth Social in an unusually blunt and public rebuke of Netanyahu. “Let’s not blow it!” he urged both sides.
While hard-line factions within the Iranian government opposed the deal, they had no other solutions to offer, according to a senior U.S. official.
Iran ultimately agreed to sign on to the terms. Iranian Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf joined Trump and Vance in signing the memorandum electronically and is expected to travel to Geneva on Friday for the ceremony with the U.S.
Three hours after signing the deal, Trump walked out of the Oval Office with UFC Chief Executive Dana White to cheers from the more than 4,000 spectators. In the crowd, Vance and Steve Witkoff, two of the deal’s main negotiators, shared a hug.
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