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Prior to heading into a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, US President Donald Trump took some time out in front of cameras to answer a variety of different questions from the waiting media.
Trump joked with invited guest Merz about tariffs, saying: “How are we going to treat Germany? I think you should hit them very hard,” noting that they were on the same page in terms of getting this “terrible regime in Tehran away” and they will be talking about the day after too.
Iran in general:
Turning to the Iran situation, Trump said “It’s coming along well as you see very well, they have no navy, they have no air force, they have no air detection, their radars were knocked out – their radar has been knocked out and just about everything’s been knocked out – we’ll see how we do, but we’re doing very well.”
When asked by a reporter whether Israel and Netanyahu had forced Trump’s hand to attack Iran, the President replied: “No, I might’ve forced their hand – it was my opinion that these lunatics were going to attack first.”
Trump continued: “If I didn’t terminate Obama’s nuclear deal, Iran would be sitting with a massive nuclear weapon three years ago, which would have been used already on Israel and other countries also.”
Evacuation Plan?
When a reporter asked why thousands of Americans were stranded and why there wasn’t an evacuation plan, Trump responded: “Well, we thought – and I thought maybe more so than most, I could ask Marco – but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked, they were getting ready to attack Israel and they were getting ready to attack others.”
Chagos Islands?
In relation to the Chagos Islands, Trump commented: “I will say the UK has been very, very uncooperative with that stupid island that they have, that they gave away and took a hundred-year lease, having to do with perhaps indigenous people claiming the island, that never even saw the island before – what’s that all about?”
Ukraine-Russia?
“As far as Russia-Ukraine, where is it on my priority list? Very high,” commented Trump: “Tremendous hatred between President Putin and President Zelensky, tremendous hatred, I’ve seen a lot of hatred in my life, but I think this is about top scale – sometimes I blame one, sometimes I blame the other – I think it’s going to happen.”
Iranians wanting to give up?
Making claims about the Iranians wanting to give up, Trump said: “A lot of the people you would least suspect want to quit, they want to have immunity, they’re asking for immunity, and probably at some point they’ll be dropping, as you would say, laying down their guns – we’ll see what happens.
“The worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who is as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen, we don’t want it to happen – most of the people we had in mind are dead, so you know, we had some in mind from that group that is dead, and now we have another group, they may be dead also, based on reports – So I guess you have a third wave coming in, pretty sure we’re not going to know anybody.”
Would Pahlavi make a good candidate?
Asked about whether Reza Pahlavi would be the ideal leader to take over Iran, Trump said: “Some people like him, and we haven’t been thinking about too much about that, he looks like a very nice person, but it would seem to me that somebody that’s there, that’s currently popular, if there’s such a person – but we have people like that, we have people that were more than moderate.”
Spain?
Having had to move US planes from Spain following demands by the Spaniards not to use their airspace or bases to attack Iran, Trump said: “Spain has been terrible – I told Bessent to cut off all dealings with Spain.
“Spain said that we can’t use their bases and that is alright, we don’t need them, if we want, we can just fly in and use it – nobody is going to tell us not to use it, but we are going to cut off all trade with Spain, we don’t want anything to do with Spain.”
Starmer?
Trump then turned his attention to the British Prime Minister too: “By the way, I’m not happy with the UK either, that island that you read about, the lease – he made it for whatever reason, he made a lease of the land – somebody came and took it away from him, and it’s taken three, four days for us to work out where we can land – this is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with.”
Back to Iran:
“We have unlimited middle and upper ammunition, which is really what we’re using in this war, we have really an unlimited supply,” Trump claimed about the arsenal available to the United States.
In terms of Trump’s last term, he said: “If we didn’t lill Soleimani last term it might have been a different story today, they would have been much stronger and much smarter.”
Turning to the rise in prices, Trump said: “If we have a little high oil prices for a little while, but as soon as this ends those prices are gonna drop – I believe lower than before.”
Speaking about the regime, Trump concluded: “Look, they’re just evil – I thought it was 32,000, now it turns out it’s much more than 35,000 people, and in some cases, using machine guns against people that have no weapons.
“They have no weapon, and they’re being machine-gunned, they’re being sniped from buildings, they’re hitting the people with snipers right through the eyes – it’s just a very evil ideology.
“Virtually everything they have has been knocked out now, their missile count is going way down – amazingly, they’re hitting countries that were, you know, let’s call them neutral, right? They lived together for a long time.
“I think they were surprised, I was surprised, I think it and now those countries are all fighting against them and fighting strongly against them – someday they’ll write a story and they’ll say why they did that.”
Trump continued: “They’re hitting only civilian places, hotels and apartment buildings, and we’re hitting them where it is much more appropriate – we’re hitting them hard, they no longer have air protection, they no longer have any detection facilities at all.
“They’re gonna be in for a lot of hurt, these people are bad people – these people killed, I guess it’s 35,000 over the last three weeks.”
