A foreign policy expert argued on Monday that President Donald Trump's "sham" deal with the Iranian regime reveals the president is really looking to "turn the page" on a war he started without resolving all of the hard problems he's left behind.

Over the weekend, Trump and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced that the U.S. and Iran had reached an "agreement" that could end their 106-day conflict. The agreement stipulated that the two sides would sign it on Friday, and that tougher discussion about Iran's nuclear weapons program and the Strait of Hormuz would be put off for another day.

David Rothkopf, a columnist for The Daily Beast and the former editor at large of Foreign Policy Magazine, said during a new podcast episode that the deal Trump and the Pakistani's announced isn't a deal at all. Instead, he described it as a "sham."

“So, it’s not a deal; it’s not even a framework of a deal,” Rothkopf said. “It’s a sham. If you launch a war against somebody and the other side comes out better than you do, and then you have to sue for peace and pay them money to get you back to the status quo, in military or in diplomatic terms, you know what we call that?”

Reports indicate that the U.S. has approved a $300 billion reconstruction package for Iran to access at some point in the future. Some reports indicate that the money could be sent by the Qatari government, while Vice President JD Vance told Sean Hannity of Fox News that it would likely come from investments in the region.

Rothkopf argued that no matter who pays the money, one thing is clear: Trump lost the war with Iran.

“We call that a loss. We call that surrender,” he said. “And what Trump is doing is he is surrendering to a weaker ally because a war we shouldn’t have started was blundered through, contained many mistakes, and he just wants to turn the page.”

President Donald Trump was flattered by Middle East leaders into agreeing to a framework to end the war with Iran in a simple and very egotistical way, MS NOW's Chris Hayes agreed in a conversation with Iranian political analyst Trita Parsi.

Specifically, Trump was persuaded into believing that he had persuaded Iran to take a deal better than the former Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the multilateral nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama — even though many aspects of the deal are considerably more conciliatory to Iran.

"I think the one thing that does seem the north star for him ... when the Omani foreign minister flew to the U.S. to appear on the Sunday shows in a last-ditch effort to stop this war from happening right when there were negotiations going on," said Hayes. "He understood it, too, because it's not a very complicated psychology. He's basically on TV the weekend before the war starts being like, it's better than Obama, it's better than Obama."

The bottom line, said Hayes, is that "that benchmark [to end the war] can be whatever it means for the old man's ego," even if it's not a meaningful policy accomplishment.

Parsi agreed, saying that Trump "will create his own reality here."

Additionally, he said, it's not all a bad thing, as there are genuinely some parts of what Trump is pursuing that are stronger than JCPOA was.

"For instance, in the Obama deal, the Iranians would only have a stockpile of 300 kilos of low-enriched uranium on their soil. At any point," said Parsi. "You need 1,200 for a bomb. Whenever they reach the 300 level, it would be shipped out. That was a very good deal." By contrast, he said, in the February agreement Trump wants to base the current framework on, "they would have zero stockpile. Whatever they produce, they would immediately turn into fuel [rods]. They would never keep a stockpile at all."

That said, he added, "Was it worth all of this? Absolutely not. In fact, that was already achieved before the war."

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A legal expert was taken aback on Monday by reporting that revealed how Trump administration insiders pushed back on an extreme attempt to suspend habeas corpus.

Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor, argued in a new Substack essay that new reporting from Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times about an administration lawyer named Will Scharf who drafted a confidential memo outlining reasons why suspending habeas corpus would be problematic provides "detailed support for understanding this administration as a threat to democratic ideals."

"What follows is an outrageous attempt, even though it ultimately failed, at least for now, to shatter firmly established constitutional rights and protections," Vance wrote.

On Monday, the NYT published a report about Scharf's memo to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, warning that Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller's attempt to suspend habeas corpus to speed up the Trump administration's deportation scheme would raise significant constitutional issues

Vance explained in the essay that habeas corpus "prevents government from locking people up indefinitely without sufficient reason."

"It’s a foundational protection against 'disappearing people.' Habeas is the heart of due process," she wrote.

"And it is the law—something this administration and this president have shown casual disregard for at times, frequently with impunity, so the fact that this instance drew high-level concern signifies how truly shocking the ideas were."