President Donald Trump on Wednesday looked to one of the Ultimate Fighting Championship fighters who will compete at the White House next month for validation on his unpopular war against Iran as he hosted a group of the MMA fighters in the Oval Office.
The president was asked why he feels optimistic about the possibility of a deal to end the two-month-old conflict and what makes the current situation different from the multiple previous occasions on which he claimed a deal was close only to backtrack.
In response, he repeated a series of now-familiar boasts about the state of Tehran’s conventional military forces and claimed it would take the Islamic Republic a full two decades to rebuild what has been lost to American bombs since February 28 before turning to one of the fighters, Justin Gaethje, to ask his opinion.
“You would call that ‘we’re in good shape,’ right?”
Gaethje responded: “Fantastic shape.”
Seemingly satisfied, Trump repeated his previous statement about the U.S. being “in good shape” and added that “we’re doing well.”
“Now we have to get what we have to get. If we don’t do that, we’ll have to go a big step. But with that being said, they want to make a deal,” he said.
The president added that there have been “very good talks” with Tehran “over the last 24 hours” and claimed it was now “very possible that we’ll make a deal.”
Asked for statistics to justify his claim that the talks with Iran have been “very good,” Trump suggested that Tehran’s negotiators seem to forget about what they’ve already allegedly agreed to and attributed the purported forgetfulness to “pride” while comparing Iran’s interlocutors to the prizefighters behind him.
Trump had the fighters for the June 14 — Trump’s birthday and also Flag Day — event in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Alex Pereira will fight Ciryl Gane, while Gaethje will take on Ilia Topuria.
“You know, they’re proud. Like, like, these guys are proud. Nobody more proud than these guys. Sometimes they fight on pride because, you know, they’re injured. They’re hurt. No matter how great you are. You get hit by somebody else that looks like them. It’s very tough. But they have great pride. These people have great pride. The others do too. Enemies have great pride,” he said with the fighters around him at the Resolute desk.
The president then launched into yet another extended soliloquy about the success of a separate U.S. operation to remove now-ex-Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and boasted of record stock market highs in the run-up to the start of the U.S.-Israeli air campaign against Iran on February 28.
He claimed the drops in market values since the start of the war haven’t been as significant as he’d predicted and said oil prices haven’t gone as high as he’d feared even though gasoline prices in the U.S. have reached near-record levels as a result of Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
“The stock market’s higher now than when we started this war, and I thought oil prices would go to $200 or $250 — it’s at $100 now — and I think you’re surprised, and I’m surprised, but even if it went to $200 it would have been worth it,” he said.
“I said, I hate to do this, but we have to make an excursion down to Iran, because we can’t have a nuclear weapon,” he added.
The president’s comments came on the heels of a bombshell report from Reuters which cited a U.S. intelligence assessment suggesting that the war against Iran has done little, if anything, to slow Tehran’s nuclear capabilities, just a day after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters at the White House that the U.S. side of the bombing campaign, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury,” was “over.”
At the time, Rubio also said that the conflict’s new phase, Project Freedom, was a defensive operation meant to to save some 23,000 civilian mariners from 87 countries stranded on ships in the Gulf.
But hours later, Trump abruptly pivoted and claimed that initiative would be placed on hold “by mutual agreement” to allow for productive talks aimed at ending the war.
