President Donald Trump opened a televised cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday by declaring that Iran is "negotiating on fumes," a phrase he repeated three times in the space of an hour as he sought to project leverage in the most fragile stretch of the talks that are supposed to end the three-month war. The conflict began on February 28 with US and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and the ceasefire that has held since late April is now the only thing standing between the negotiators and a return to bombing.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, sitting opposite the president, told the room that talks over reopening the Strait of Hormuz and extending the ceasefire would need "several more days" before a memorandum of understanding could be signed. The current US-Iran framework would convert the temporary ceasefire into a settlement that gradually restores commercial shipping through the strait, releases a portion of frozen Iranian assets and begins a sixty-day window for negotiations on Iran's uranium stockpile, which the International Atomic Energy Agency still places at 440.9 kilograms enriched to sixty per cent.
Trump said he was "not satisfied" with the current Iranian draft and warned that further strikes were "always on the table," language that came two days after US forces hit missile launch sites and mine-laying boats in southern Iran in what the Pentagon described as defensive action. Tehran called those strikes "bad faith and unreliability," and Iran's foreign ministry said on Wednesday that uranium would not be discussed until the war-ending memorandum was final.
The president also poured cold water on suggestions from inside his own coalition that the midterm calendar might tempt him into a faster, looser deal. "I don't care about November, I care about getting this right," he said, an unusually direct rebuke of allies who have spent the past month arguing publicly that an Iran settlement before Labor Day would shore up the Republican majority. His approval rating slipped below forty-three per cent in the most recent Washington Post-Ipsos survey, the lowest reading of his second term.
A second front loomed over the room: Iranian negotiators have insisted that any ceasefire framework must also cover Israel's expanding campaign against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, where the Israel Defense Forces issued an evacuation order for the coastal city of Tyre on Wednesday morning. US officials say privately they have no intention of folding Lebanon into the Iran memorandum, but Trump dodged the question when asked, saying only that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "knows what he's doing."
Cabinet members offered notably restrained takes on the talks. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration was monitoring oil markets "with care," after Brent briefly spiked above one hundred dollars a barrel earlier in May and then collapsed back toward eighty-eight dollars on Iranian signals about reopening the strait. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said US carrier groups remain in the Gulf of Oman and would stay there "for as long as it takes."
Trump devoted a portion of the meeting to the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo, which the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on May 17 and which has now produced 121 laboratory-confirmed cases and five known infections in Uganda. The president said the Centers for Disease Control would receive emergency funding to scale up airport screening but stopped short of restoring the global health aid programs his administration cut earlier in the year.
Negotiations are scheduled to resume in Muscat on Thursday with Witkoff's team and Iranian deputy foreign minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi. Mediators from Oman and Qatar have privately told both sides that the window for a workable memorandum closes around mid-June, when Israel is expected to ramp its Lebanon campaign and Iran's parliament reconvenes after its summer recess. Trump told reporters as the meeting broke that "we'll know either way pretty soon."