Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Sure. A couple of things I think were interesting, what Scott said, and I agree certainly with some of it. I mean, the first thing is I do believe President Trump has negotiated in good faith. I mean, he sent Steve Witkoff, he’s chief negotiator for five rounds of negotiations since he came in office. The second is, I mean, we can keep going around in circles, but the fact of the matter is I do believe that Iran and Iran-backed terrorist organizations have for since 1979 killed and tried to kill and maim Americans and taken them hostage. I think it’s important for me again to put that on the record, but where I agree with with Scott is, and it’s interesting, and I don’t know if Khamenei has changed. He’s 86 years old. He’s been in power since 1989. And there’s a little bit of history that I think is really interesting. It was 1988 and Iran and Iraq had fought this brutal eight-year war, a million people dead. And the United States accidentally shot down a Iranian passenger airline. United States offered to pay compensation and apologized. And the Iranians didn’t believe it. They didn’t believe we could accidentally do that. They thought we were going to be intervening militarily on behalf of Saddam. So Khamenei, who’s not the supreme leader at the time, he was the Iranian president. He and Rafsanjani, they go to Khomeini and they say, “Mr. Ayatollah, we got to sue for peace with the Iraqis because the Americans are intervening and we cannot fight the Americans. We fought this brutal war. We’ll continue with Saddam. We cannot fight the United States of America.” I think Scott’s right, that perception that there’s no way they can fight the United States of America because that’s regime ending potentially, even if we don’t intend to, that could actually happen. And there’s a famous line where Khomeini says, “All right, I agree. I will drink the poison chalice. I’ll drink the poison chalice and I will agree to a ceasefire on pretty tough terms for Iran.” It’s interesting, now, 36 years later or 37 years later, Khamenei is now got to decide to drink the poison chalice. Does he agree to a negotiated deal with the United States? Does he agree to deal that President Trump? And I mean, Scott criticizes me for it, but that’s president Trump’s position is no enrichment, full dismantlement, by the way, that’s backed up by 52 of 53 Republican senators and 177 House GOP members and backed by everybody in his administration, including JD Vance, who’s been emphatic about that. Does he agree to that deal or does he decide, “I’m not going to drink the poison chalice and I’m going to take other options.” Now, I agree with Scott, going after US military bases, except in a symbolic way, suicidal. hat deal or does he decide, “I’m not going to drink the poison chalice and I’m going to take other options. ” Now, I agree with Scott, going after US military bases, except in a symbolic way, suicidal. Closing the Straits of Hormuz, 40% of Chinese oil goes through there. The Chinese have been saying to Iranians, “Don’t you dare.” By the way, a hundred percent of Iranian oil goes from Iran in Karg Island through the Straits of Hormuz. So economically suicidal for the Iranians to do that. Terror attacks, absolutely. I mean that has been their modus operandi for years. So I would be concerned about terrorist attacks against US targets against civilians, potentially sleeper cells in the United States. So he’s used Tera cells around the world. He’s engaged in a decades long assassination campaign, including on American soil, by the way, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, including most recently, where he went after an Iranian American three times to try to assassinate her in New York, a woman named Masih Alinejad. And so he’s got to be calculating what is my play? So if I don’t do a deal, how can I actually squeeze the Americans? And Scott’s right. He must be thinking to himself, “You know what? I was literally on the 99 yard line with an entire nuclear weapons capability. I should have crossed the goal line. If I had had a warhead, a nuclear warhead, or multiple nuclear warheads as they had been trying to build since the Ahmad plan in early 2000s, there’s no way Israel and the United States would’ve hit me militarily if I had nuclear weapons, then I would’ve had the ultimate deterrence to prevent that. And then I would be like Kim Jong-un with nuclear weapons. I would then build ICBMs and then I’d have the ultimate deterrent to stop that.” So he’s got to be thinking “Maybe now,” and I can guarantee you the revolutionary guards- Do you think that that might have anything to do with the fact that America attacked Iraq and Libya when they did not have weapons of mass destruction programs?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.