President Trump speaks to reporters during a news conference at Trump National Doral Miami on March 9 in Doral, Fla. Trump spoke on his administration’s strikes on Iran.
Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images
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Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images
President Trump on Monday touted the success of the military as the U.S. enters its second week of strikes in Iran but didn’t cite a firm endpoint for the conflict.
“We’re achieving major strides toward completing our military objective. And some people could say they’re pretty well complete,” he said at a press conference at his resort in Doral, Fla., his first since the beginning of the U.S.-Israel-led war. “We’ve wiped every single force in Iran out, very completely, most of Iran’s naval powers have been sunk.”
Trump also said the U.S. has held off hitting “some of the most important targets” such as electricity production sites.
“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,” he said.
He did add that the U.S. has begun hitting Iran’s drone facilities as well as the facilities where Iranian missiles are made and delivered.
But Trump didn’t cite a firm endpoint to the conflict, at once signaling the U.S. success and an open-ended goal.
“We could call it a tremendous success right now, as we leave here, I could call it, or we could go further, and we’re going to go further,” he said.
Later, when pressed about when the war would end, he said victory would be “where they’re not going to be starting the following day to develop a nuclear weapon.”
Trump also brushed off a question from reporters about whether or not the U.S. would take responsibility for an air strike that killed more than 150 people at an Iranian girls’ school. There is a growing amount of evidence, including video footage, that indicates it was an American Tomahawk missile that likely destroyed the school.
Trump said hadn’t seen the video and that it could have been Iran’s or another country’s Tomahawk missile.
“A Tomahawk is very generic. It’s sold to other countries, but that’s being investigated right now,” he said, though Iran is not known to have Tomahawks.
If the investigation finds that the U.S. was behind the strike, Trump added “I’m willing to live with that report.”
Trump did not spend a lot of time discussing the spiking oil and gas prices given the outsized political toll they might take, but said they are affecting other countries more than the U.S.
“It doesn’t really affect us,” he claimed.
But the price of crude oil skyrocketed to above $100 a barrel Monday before settling just below that number as a result of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, effectively choking off a key shipping route.
In the same breath, Trump said Iran cannot “hold the world hostage and attempt to stop the globe’s oil supply.” If Iran tries, Trump warned Iran that the U.S. will “take them out so quickly, they’ll never be able to recover, ever.”
