Every road leads back to Obama as if he’s got “a blank space where my mind should be,” and it’s permanently occupied by Obama.
Jul 08, 2026 – Read the Full Article on Substack!
There is a piece of financial folklore that has been circulating in American politics for close to a decade now, repeated so often and with such confidence that plenty of otherwise careful people accept it as settled fact, that Barack Obama handed the Iranian government a fortune in American taxpayer money, either as a gift or, in the uglier version of the story, as a ransom payment. It shows up in speeches, in social media posts, in talk radio segments, always with a big number attached to make it land harder. And it has been wrong for as long as it’s been repeated. Read the Full Article on Substack!
President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met today at the NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey. During their joint press appearance, Trump said yet again that former President Obama made “the worst deal in the history of deals” with Iran. Every road leads back to Obama as if he’s got “a blank space where my mind should be,” and it’s permanently occupied by Obama.
I want to walk through exactly why it’s wrong, not because I think Iran deserves a defense, this Substack has never been in the business of carrying water for a regime that has spent decades funding proxy militias and crushing its own population, and current events have made that darker side of the ledger impossible to ignore, but because the myth matters for a much bigger reason than fact-checking a decade-old talking point. The same financial mechanism at the center of that myth is sitting at the center of the current administration’s own Iran deal today, in the middle of what is now an active, deadly war. If the mechanism was dishonest and dangerous under Obama, it doesn’t become honest and safe just because a different president is the one signing it. And if it wasn’t dishonest under Obama, then a lot of very loud people owe an apology they’re never going to give.
Where the $150 Billion Number Actually Came From. Start with the biggest, scariest number that gets thrown around: $150 billion. Critics have used that figure for years to suggest that Obama personally cut Iran a check nearly one-tenth the size of the entire federal discretionary budget.
Scratch that. Some people have pushed the idea that Obama loaded so much cash onto an airplane that money started coming through the seams, or that there was so much money packed onto the plane that when the door opened, cash literally fell out.
I heard that story repeated today by Trump during that press conference and his meeting with Zelenskyy.
The number is real, by the way, but the story attached to it isn’t.
Read the Full Article on Substack!
