President Donald Trump on Wednesday spent nearly an hour attempting to offer multiple justifications of his decision to go to war with Iran and defended the deal his negotiators struck to end the fighting after more than 100 days.
Speaking at the end of his trip to France for this year’s Group of Seven summit, the president opened his remarks by touting the 60-day memorandum of understanding as one that “achieves everything we set out to accomplish, everything and much more.”
“Ending the current conflict, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon, that’s what was all about. That was about 99% Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, they can’t develop it, buy it, they can never have a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Trump then briefly pivoted to bragging about stock market gains in the days since the White House announced the tentative agreement with Tehran before claiming that the agreement was “years in the making” because he had ordered the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who he praised as a “mad genius” who Tehran was never fully able to replace.
“When I hit Soleimani, people thought that was the biggest thing to happen in the Middle East for 50 years. That was the biggest event. He was the, he was the boss of Iran and respected, but, but he was a mad genius. He was a genius, the father of the roadside bomb. When you see young men, and in some cases women, mostly men, walking around without legs, without arms, with a face that’s been blown to smithereens, it’s Soleimani,” he said.
“He did it, he happened to come from Iran, and I blew him up.”
The president called the assassination of the Iranian general nearly seven years ago “one of the biggest events to happen, the Middle East, maybe ever” before changing the subject to the comprehensive nuclear agreement that had been in place before he withdrew the United States from that deal during his first term.
He complained that former president Barack Obama had not been willing to assassinate the Iranian general
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