Trump accused of 'catastrophic mistake' after report he empowered Iran's nuke program

Donald Trump was accused of making a "catastrophic mistake" after a New York Times report revealed how experts say Iran's nuclear powers grew under the current president.

William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, who advertise that that they have written about the Iranian nuclear program for more than two decades, wrote on Saturday:

"Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal. Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal. That is because Tehran lived up to its pledge to ship to Russia 12.5 tons of its overall stockpile, about 97 percent. Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb."

That story spurred alarm online, with a former Obama National Security Council staffer Tommy Vietor, saying, "Pulling out of the Iran nuclear was a catastrophic mistake."

Pod Save The World's Ben Rhodes added, "It's obvious that pulling out of the Iran Deal was a catastrophic decision by Trump. Yet that decision got far less media and political scrutiny than the Deal itself."

Public school teacher Justin Parmenter joked, "Art of the Deal."