President Donald Trump spoke more about Iran during an interview with Tony Dokoupil on CBS Evening News, spanning from promises of help to the endgame.
Trump reiterated his promise to Iranians that help is on the way as they battle the brutal regime:
DOKOUPIL: Americans woke up this morning and they saw that you said, Help is on the way. What do you mean by that?TRUMP: Well, there’s a lot of help on the way, and in different forms, including economic help from our standpoint, and not going to help Iran very much. And you know, we put Iran out of business with their nuclear capacity. And now, depending on what’s actually happening, nobody has been able to give us accurate numbers about how many people they’ve killed. Well, on that point, looks like it could be a pretty substantial number, and that’s going to be a lot of problems, a lot of problems
Trump first made the promise this morning, as Vijeta wrote.
(By the way, Vijeta has done a wonderful job covering Iran. Go read all of his articles!)
Dokoupil pushed on the number of protesters killed. Unfortunately, I doubt we will ever know the true number, but it shouldn’t shock anyone if it’s up in the tens of thousands.
But then, Dokoupil told Trump that CBS had heard that Iran plans to start hanging protesters tomorrow.
So, Dokoupil wanted to know if Iran had crossed Trump’s red line:
DOKOUPI: Well, now we’re hearing that they’re going to start hanging protesters tomorrow. So it comes back to the question, have they crossed your red line, or as the line moved?TRUMP: I haven’t heard about the hanging. If they hang them, you’re going to see some things that I don’t know, what you’re where you come from, and what your thought process is, but you’ll perhaps be very happy.DOKOUPI: What do you mean by that?TRUMP: We will take very strong action. If they do such a thing, we will take very strong action.
Dokoupi pressed Trump for more information, but the president did not elaborate:
DOKOUPI: And this strong action you’re talking about, what’s the end game?TRUMP: The end game is to win. I like winning.DOKOUPI: How do you define that in Iran?TRUMP: Well, let’s define it in Venezuela. Let’s define it with Al Baghdadi. He was wiped out. Let’s define it with Soleimani, and let’s define it in Iran, where we wiped out the Iran nuclear threat in a period of about 15 minutes. Once the B-2s got there, and that was a complete obliteration, as it turns out, which is what I said initially.Then some questioned it, and they said, you know, “Trump was right.” So we’ve been right about everything. We don’t want to see what’s happening in Iran happen. And you know, if they want to have protests, that’s one thing. When they start killing thousands of people, and now you’re telling me about hanging, we’ll see how that works out for them. It’s not going to work out good.
You can watch the entire interview below. It’s only 13 minutes long! Trump touches on other subjects, including the economy, Jerome Powell, jobs, and ICE.
I have to say…Dokoupi is a huge upgrade. Maybe Bari Weiss isn’t all talk at CBS News.
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