U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he was in “no hurry” to reach a deal with Iran, telling Fox News that his priority remained preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
“Slowly but surely, we’re getting, I think, what we want,” the president said, speaking on “My View with Lara Trump.”
“I’d like to say I’m in a hurry, because you know what, gasoline prices are going to come tumbling down, but if you’re going to be in a hurry, you’re not going to make a good deal,” Trump told his daughter-in-law.
“The one guarantee that I have to have is that there will be no nuclear weapons. They’ve agreed to that, and it was very interesting,” he added.
If the Islamic regime doesn’t agree to Washington’s demands in diplomatic talks, “we’re going to end in a different way,” Trump stressed.
Trump said on Friday that he was meeting in the White House Situation Room to “make a final determination” on an agreement with the Islamic Republic.
“Iran must agree that they will never have a nuclear weapon or bomb,” the president stated. “The Hormuz Strait must be immediately open, no tolls, for unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions.”
The Islamic Republic must remove all of the mines in the strait beyond the “numerous” ones that the United States hasn’t already removed “with our great underwater mine sweepers,” he said.
He added that the “enriched material, sometimes referred to as ‘nuclear dust,’ which is buried deep underground with virtually collapsed mountains, caused by our powerful B2 bomber attack 11 months ago, sitting on top of it, will be unearthed by the United States,” which, he said, “it is agreed, is the only country, along with China, with the mechanical capability of doing so, in close coordination and conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Iran, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and destroyed.”
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over the weekend also reiterated that the Trump administration will only conclude a “great deal” with Iran and warned that failure to reach such an agreement could lead to renewed military action.
“Only one president was willing to lay it out on the line and ensure after 47 years that Iran is not capable of having a nuclear weapon,” he told reporters. “Those goalposts haven’t shifted at all, which is the expectation of the American people and what we’ve stated to Iran.”
“They can either do this now through a deal, and we think we’re in a good place to make that deal, or they can deal with the War Department. And we are prepared—we’re postured even stronger today than we were on day one—to address it that way if we have to. But he [President Trump] would prefer not to,” added the secretary.
