US President Donald Trump declared on Friday that Washington needs a guarantee Iran will never obtain a nuclear weapon. Speaking to Kansas City radio station KCMO, he also predicted that what he called the war with Iran would soon be over.
"It's going to get wrapped up soon," Trump said in the interview, days before the November 3 midterm congressional elections. "We need a guarantee there'll never be a nuclear weapon." According to The Jerusalem Post, the president did not explain how the conflict would be brought to an end.
The radio remarks repeated a theme Trump has pressed on the campaign trail all week. At a rally at the Port of Corpus Christi in Texas on Tuesday, Arutz Sheva reported, he told supporters he would attack Iran again without hesitation. He called the decision "one of the greatest things I ever did."
At the same rally, Trump insisted that the timing of the war's end is his to decide. "Somebody asked me before, when will the war in Iran end? I said, whenever I want it to end. It'll be very quick, but we have to have it end properly," he said, adding that Iran "will never have a nuclear weapon."
He described the economic cost to Americans as "short-term pain" and promised a sharp drop in fuel costs. "You're going to see very soon, 'What the hell happened to gasoline? It's so cheap,'" Trump said.
At a rally in Mississippi on Monday, Trump argued that Iran's increasingly advanced missiles, combined with its nuclear ambitions, made American military intervention unavoidable. He warned that Iranian missiles could one day hit San Diego and Los Angeles. "We didn't start the war with Iran. Iran started the war with us," he said. He also dismissed an earlier ceasefire as "just a waste of time."
Speaking to reporters on Saturday, Trump declined to say whether another strike was imminent but kept diplomacy on the table. "There's also a possibility we'll have a nice, big, beautiful agreement. They want to make a deal. But the problem is, will they hold the deal?" he said.
Trump denied directing Vice President JD Vance to open talks with Iran after The Wall Street Journal reported that Vance had written to Iranian hard-liner Mohsen Rezaei.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on X on October 25 that the country faces a "real and tangible existential danger."
