Donald Trump (44:24)
Let's listen in and I'd like to wish everyone a very good evening. And over the weekend, the United States military and the Israeli Defense Forces continued Operation Epic Fury very successfully. Over the past nine days, we've carried out some of the most powerful and complex military strikes and maneuvers the world has ever seen. Now, you add that up to all of the other things. Midnight Hammer, getting rid of the nuclear threat from Iran, which was a big moment in history, in my opinion, and the great success we've had in Venezuela and all other places. Every place we've gone, we've had tremendous success. But while we're doing all of these things, we're achieving major strides toward completing our military objective. And some people could say they're pretty well complete. We've wiped every single force in Iran out very completely. Most of Iran's naval power has been sunk. It's on the bottom of the sea. It's almost 50 ships. I was just notified it's 51 ships. I didn't know they had that many. Didn't last very long. And these are fighting vessels. They're meant to fight, but they're not meant to fight against us. We continue to target Iran's drone and missile capabilities. Their drones are way down. Their drone manufacturing has been hit. Starting today, we know all of the places they manufacture the drones, and they're being hit one after another. Their missile capability is down to about 10%, maybe less. We're also hitting where they make missiles and where they deliver missiles. We've struck over 5,000 targets to date, some of them very major targets. And we've left some of the most important targets for later in case we need to do it. If we hit them, it's going to take many years for them to be rebuilt, having to do with electricity production and many other things. So we're not looking to do that if we don't have to. But they're the kind of things that are very easy to hit but very devastating if they are hit. We are waiting to see what happens before we hit them. We could take them all out in one day, but it's all resulting in a 90% decline in various things, but in particular Iranian missile launchers and 83% drop in drone launchers. As you know, the drone launches are pretty well shot, but we're at over 90% decline in the Iranian missile launchers, which is very hard to reproduce and very hard to get. And usually what we were able to do through great equipment and a lot of smart people, as soon as they sent a missile up from a launcher, we were able to knock out that launcher within a period of 5 minutes or less accurately, right on the noggin. So now we have low cost interceptors effectively combating Iranian drones. And our B2 bombers recently dropped dozens of 2,000 pound bombs to destroy missile launchers all over Iran and buried deep under Iranian soil. In many cases, the soil was no match. And we're also annihilating the manufacturing base that the regime uses to build drones and missiles at a rate that nobody thought was possible. We're knocking them out. We know where they all are. We're knocking them out very quickly. We're ahead of our initial timeline by a lot. I would say that we probably would not have thought after a month we'd be here. In addition to the fact that we've taken out the leadership twice and maybe three times. And we, as you know, we want to be involved. We don't want another president that maybe wouldn't be willing to do what I'm willing to do for the good of the world, for the good of our nation to be stuck with the situation in five years or ten years from now. So we think they should put a president in or the head of the country in that's going to, to be able to do something peacefully for a change. They've been doing this for 47 years, killing people for 47 years. Whether it's the barracks or even the SS Cole, where they were involved very strongly, they always denied it, but they were very strongly involved. And all of the people that died through the roadside bombs died and are right now walking around with no legs, no arms, a face that's been so badly damaged. The Iranian regime has been attacking Americans and spreading terror for 47 years. And despite these countless opportunities to renounce their nuclear ambitions, which they had just a short while ago, they told Mr. Witkoff, who is standing right over here, they said, they actually said, we want to keep building. Essentially, in a real nutshell, we want to continue to build nuclear weapons. If we didn't knock out Midnight Hammer, if we didn't knock out their Iranian potential, if we didn't do that with Midnight Hammer, they would have had a nuclear weapon, they would have used it long before now, and at a minimum, Israel would have been annihilated. I was very lucky that we had the courage to do that, that we had the talented pilots and the great equipment. The B2 bombers are unbelievable. We ordered 25 more, by the way, the newer, better version. It's, we have the greatest military in the world. We have the greatest equipment in the world by far. You see that no matter where we go, you still need the people, though, to operate it and to use it. And those are the people that we cherish. Even after we obliterated their key nuclear sites in Operation Midnight Hammer, they. They never negotiated into good faith. They still continued to say, we want to build nuclear. We want enrichment at levels that were unacceptable. And they even turned down an offer for unlimited free nuclear fuel forever for civilian purposes. We had people offering them free nuclear fuel. They weren't interested in that because they wanted to build a nuclear weapon. So instead, the regime was trying to reconstitute its weapons program at a different site. They couldn't go back to where they were, the three sites that we obliterated. But they were starting work at another site, a different site, different kind of a site. And that was protected by granite. They wanted it protected. Granite's pretty good. But they wanted it protected by a lot deeper. They wanted to go a lot deeper. And they started the process while rapidly building conventional ballistic missiles. They were going to do it all at the same time. That threatened our overseas bases and soon could have reached even our homeland. The regime's intention was to use this exponentially growing ballistic missile threat to make it virtually impossible to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. So, as you probably saw, they had a tremendous number of missiles, most of which are now being used or destroyed and very unsuccessfully used because we have been able, for the most part, to shoot them all down. What incredible technology. The Patriots have been unbelievable and other things. And the laser technology that we have now is incredible. It's coming out pretty soon. We're literally. Lasers will do the work of. At a lot less cost. Do the work of what the Patriots are doing or what other things are doing. The situation was very quickly approaching the point of no return, and the United States found it intolerable, in my opinion, based on what Steve and Jared and Pete and others were telling me. Marco so involved that I thought that they were going to attack us. I thought they would if we didn't do this at the time we did it. I think they had in mind to attack us. And if you notice, they did something which was very foolish, very stupid, I would say they attacked their neighbors, and their neighbors were largely neutral, or at least weren't going to be involved. And they got attacked, and it had the reverse effect. The neighbors came onto our side and started attacking them, and actually quite successfully. If you look at Saudi Arabia, you look at uae, Qatar, and others, but they were strong and they were smart, but they got attacked. Nobody. When I first heard It. I said, no, somebody made a mistake. There was no mistake. UAE had over a thousand missiles shot at. It knocked them almost all down. On the very first day I came down the escalator in 2015, I said, I will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. And all I'm doing is keeping my promise. Think of that. That was in 2015. I said it. It was a threat then and a much bigger threat now, but no longer a threat. Not for a long time anyway. We want to keep it that way. As we continue Operation Epic Fury, we're also focused on keeping energy and oil flowing to the world. And I will not allow a terrorist regime to hold the world hostage and attempt to stop the globe's oil supply. And if Iran does anything to do that, they'll get hit at a much, much harder level. I will take out those targets that were easy and that I mentioned just before. We'll take them out so quickly, they'll never be able to recover, ever. If they want to play that game, they better not play that game. In the long run, oil supplies will be dramatically more secure without the threat of Iranian ships, drones, missiles, nuclear menace, or anything. So the Strait of Hormuz is going to remain safe. We have a lot of Navy ships there. We have the best equipment in the world inspecting for mines. Again, most of their ships are down at the bottom of the sea, but we will. We will hit them so hard that it will not be possible for them or anybody else helping them to ever recover that section of the world, if they do anything. In recent years, the regime and its terror proxies have launched attacks on hundreds of commercial vessels. We're putting an end to all of this threat once and for all. And the result will be lower oil prices, oil and gas prices for American families. We've done that. We've done it. We've brought it very low. This was just an excursion into something that had to be done. We're getting very close to finishing that, too. In the meantime, during this brief disruption, the United States is offering political risk insurance to any tankers operating in the Gulf. So we're putting up risk insurance. We'll perhaps go alongside of them for protection. We don't think it'll be necessary. If it is, and if they do anything, the price will be incalculable. It will be so great that they will have wished they never did it, because you have to keep the Straits flowing with all of that. It affects other countries much more than it does the United States. It doesn't really affect us. We have so much oil. We have tremendous oil and gas, much more than we need. We have Venezuela now as our new partner. Great partner. They've worked out so wonderful. We're working with the administration, the president and it's a massive source of oil, gas, everything. But we're in a very good position but very unfair to other parts of the world, like China as an example. I mean, we're doing this for the other parts of the world, including countries like China. They get a lot of their oil through the straits. So we're doing this. We have a very good relationship with President Xi in China. I'm going there in a short period of time and we're protecting the world from what these lunatics are trying to do and very successfully, I might add. We're also waiving certain oil related sanctions to reduce prices. So we have sanctions on some countries. We're going to take those sanctions off till this straightens out. Then who knows, maybe we won't have to put them on. There'll be so much peace. But when the time comes, the US Navy and its partners will escort tankers through the strait if needed. I hope it's not going to be needed, but if it's needed, we'll escort them right through. And we have the greatest minesweeping ability, we have the greatest ships and all of the. We know exactly where they're placed. We'll get them out of there very fast. But we hope we don't have any of that. And again, if they do that, if they play that game, we're going to hit them at a level that they have not seen before. So we're winning very decisively. We're way ahead of schedule. It's our military is the greatest in the world with the greatest equipment and the greatest people in the world. Nobody has ever seen anything like it. Iran is a very powerful country. They were going to take over the Middle east if we did not hit them. They were going to take over the Middle East. They had thousands and thousands since their last hit. They had thousands and thousands of missiles and everything else. Most are now destroyed. But they were going to take over the Middle East. Those weapons were aimed at Middle Eastern countries. That had nothing to do with this. They were going to take over the Middle east and they were going to try and destroy Israel. So we stopped it with good timing and we're very proud to be involved in this and it's going to be ended soon. And if it starts up again, they'll be hit even harder. Thank you very much for being Here. Go ahead. Any questions?
