As much of the world started to come to terms with the purported framework to end the U.S. war in Iran, Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and made clear that he was unimpressed. Indeed, the Rhode Island senator made clear that the United States’ interests were far better served by the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Donald Trump abandoned in 2017.
“First of all, we’re in a much worse position than we were under the JCPOA. The breakout time, that is, the time it would take to assemble enough enriched uranium to develop a weapon, was 12 months during the JCPOA. Today, it’s a week,” Reed said of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
“We are negotiating against a country which its leadership has been eliminated. Now we have even more fanatical leadership who has much more invested and much more to leverage their position,” the senator added. “Abandoning the JCPOA was a bad mistake by the president.”
Trump, evidently, saw the interview and responded in a decidedly Trumpian way. The Hill reported:
President Trump on Sunday called for the impeachment of Democratic Sen. Jack Reed (R.I.), after the lawmaker criticized his decision to pull out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in his first term.
“Senator Jack Reed, a Dumocrat from R.I., lied when stating the the [sic] Deal we just made is not as good as the Obama disaster known as the JCPOA. Reed is either an outright fraud, or incompetent,” Trump wrote in a Sunday post on Truth Social.
The Republican’s missive, which referred to former President Barack Obama as “Obuma,” concluded, “Impeach Jack Reed!”
To be sure, Trump’s online tantrums have become the background noise of our civic lives and are, for the most part, worth ignoring. This one stood out for me, however, for a few reasons.
First, the idea that a U.S. official should be impeached for arguing one policy is preferable to another policy is ridiculous, even by 2026 standards.