President Trump maintains that the Iranians want to negotiate amid the conflict with Israel over their nuclear program, but says they have a lot of “trouble.”
“They want to negotiate. And I said, ’Why didn’t you negotiate with me before? All this death and destruction.’ I said to the people, ’Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago, you could’ve done fine, you would’ve had a country,’” Mr. Trump told reporters Wednesday at the White House as he put up new flag poles.
“It’s very sad to watch this. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
He said he kept telling the Iranians they needed to strike a deal to end their nuclear program, but then they said they wouldn’t.
When asked if the U.S. was moving closer to joining the missile strikes on Iran, Mr. Trump responded, “You don’t know that I’m going to even do it. You don’t know. I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.”
The president called the Iranians “bullies” with wicked aims for their nuclear program even though they say it’s peaceful.
“They had bad intentions. For forty years they’ve been saying ’death to America, death to Israel,’ death to anybody else they didn’t like,” he said. “They were bullies. They were schoolyard bullies. And now they’re not bullies anymore.”
The president on Tuesday said Iran should surrender, but its leader rejected that idea Wednesday.
Mr. Trump also said he knows where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is and wouldn’t kill him “at least for now.”
After Israel’s initial bombing of Iran on Friday, the president moved to distance the U.S. from Israel’s campaign. He seemed to have a change of heart Wednesday, using “we” when referring to plans to handle Iran.
