Fox News cuts off Trump's speech to attack Iran deal as he's still speaking

Fox News cut away from President Donald Trump's live Pennsylvania speech Tuesday to let a conservative commentator tear apart his Iran deal, with Trump visible on the split-screen.

Trump was at a Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania — his first major event outside Washington since signing a 14-point memorandum of understanding with Iran last week.

Anchor Martha MacCallum pulled away from his remarks and brought in conservative commentator Noah Rothman of National Review.

"Some people support what's happening here," MacCallum said. "Some people are opposed to it."

"Certainly, nobody had been as tough on Iran as this president up to the MOU," Rothman said on the Fox News broadcast, "and then no president had been as lenient on Iran as this president has been."

Rothman zeroed in on Treasury Department waivers issued the day before, which he said allow Iran to sell oil on open markets at full price.

"Now they can do it in dollars, and now those dollars go directly into the Iranian Central Bank," he said. "Profits to the tune of several billion dollars a day — that's gonna help refill Iran's coffers. It's gonna go directly to support of terrorism, to building missiles, to rebuilding all that was destroyed."

"He's giving up quite a lot of leverage in exchange for what?" Rothman asked.

He then argued the deal's structure virtually guarantees Iran won't follow through on later stages.

"Here's the thing about multistage peace deals with Middle Eastern terrorists," Rothman said. "They rarely progress beyond stage one to stage two, three, four."

"Everything in the first stage of this deal is bad for us and great for Iran," he continued. "Why would Iran want to progress to stage two? They're getting everything they want from this."

MacCallum suggested the White House made a deliberate tradeoff for lower oil prices and the November midterm elections.

"What became most important to him was the U.S. economy," she said.

Fox News hosts, including Brian Kilmeade and Mark Levin, have also publicly broken with Trump over the MOU in recent days.