Ben Rhodes

Setting aside, by the way, that the next target is Cuba, who I also negotiated normalization deal with.

Oh, yeah, we're coming to that.

There was something at the time that I found genuinely kind of insane and irrational, right?

For a while, you assume that maybe these people have a sincere good faith disagreement about how to reach a nuclear agreement.

But I think part of what happened is...

There was such a mania about the fact that Obama did this deal and it went through Congress.

And it was kind of the first chink in, I'm going to just be blunt, the kind of sense that AIPAC had to sign off on this.

things that went through Congress.

So we had this whole fight.

And I think they were genuinely surprised that like most Democrats, you know, over 40 Democrats in the Senate, which was enough to have the deal survive, supported the deal.

It went through.

Public opinion was kind of supportive of it.

And they needed to delegitimize not just the deal.

They needed to delegitimize the people who'd been the face of the deal.

And so it wasn't enough to say that, hey, we don't like this deal because the sunset provisions aren't long enough or what have you.

It said, I have to become evil and Hamas and a liar and a horrible human being.

And obviously, Barack Obama is part of the shady, you know, brown people that are, you know.

hate America and love the Ayatollahs.

And it was like a nastiness.

Valerie Jarrett.