Daily Kos84%
Trump has no clue what he’s doing in the Saudi nuclear deal 98%
By Lisa Needham97%
7/24/2026, 3:02:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Hasty Generalization, and Confirmation Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 57.6% saturation with 307 hits. Analysis detected 1,826 faulty-reasoning hits from 533 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 97.4% and a BS Rank of 98% (490 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 97.80% of the article peer group.
The weirdly out-of-the-blue, ill-timed announcement of a sweeping, decades-long, multibillion-dollar nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia just keeps getting more haphazard and nonsensical the more we learn about it.
Finding out that the Trump family negotiated a lucrative private development deal alongside the diplomatic one illuminated things a bit, because President Donald Trump isn’t going to do anything where he doesn’t personally get paid, but it looks like the whole thing is just sort of a shambolic mess.
Is it good when the White House apparently asked the Department of Energy not to announce the Saudi deal on Wednesday, but Energy Secretary Chris Wright went ahead and did it anyway?
Is it good when Trump then decided the best way to deal with this was to add a new condition after the fact, requiring Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries?
Did other presidents just have huge foreign policy agreements announced as a sort of “oopsie,” followed by the on-the-fly invention of a new requirement for the deal?
Of course, per the White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers, this is actually what peak performance looks like:
President Trump’s energy team is fully aligned, and always has been: the civil nuclear deal being brokered between the United States and Saudi Arabia is contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the successful Abraham Accords, which will help bring true peace to the Middle East.
Now, we are not big fancy dealmakers like Trump, but we feel pretty confident in saying that usually when a deal is contingent on something, it’s written in as part of the agreement, not something grandpa pops up and demands after it is signed.
But according to the White House, this is actually truly magnificent message discipline at work: “The Department of Energy has closely coordinated the negotiations and then announcement of these agreements with the White House and the State Department.”
What it really looks like, per CNN’s reporting, is that Trump got sad when people criticized the deal, particularly conservative commentators.
Having Fox’s Brian Kilmeade trash the deal, along with the entire Wall Street Journal editorial board, probably had far more to do with Trump’s on-the-fly changes to the deal than anything else.
He probably cares far less about the outcry from nuclear nonproliferation experts who explained they are a tad bit worried this looks like it may kick off a full-fledged Middle East nuclear arms race.
The deal appears to allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel, things which are usually excluded in nuclear cooperation agreements.
Why?
Because those things make it much easier to covertly turn a domestic nuclear power program into a nuclear weapons one.
What’s clear here is that some portion of the administration saw announcing the agreement as some sort of easy win, hoping to grab some favorable headlines while the war in Iran continues to spiral out of control, showing that President Deals is unbeatable, without really thinking the whole thing through.
Turns out when the default behavior of the entire administration is not really thinking things through, this is what you get.
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100%flagged-word coverageTaylor Rogers
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