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Trump: When you look at Oct. 7, war on Iran ‘had to be done’

“They would have had a nuclear weapon. They’re crazy. And they would have used it,” the American leader said.

Trump State of the Union
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address on the House floor of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Feb. 24, 2026. Credit: Daniel Torok/White House.

The war against Iran “had to be done,” U.S. President Donald Trump said at a summit of Latin American leaders in Florida on Saturday

“They’re just bad people,” Politico quoted Trump as saying.

“When you look at Oct. 7 and beyond Oct. 7, look at all the killing that [the Iranians have] done over the years for 47 years. This had to be done. They were very close to a nuclear weapon. They would have had one if we didn’t do our B-2 hit, ‘[Operation] Midnight Hammer’ [in June], they would have had it eight months ago. They would have had a nuclear weapon. They’re crazy. And they would have used it, so we did the world a favor,” Trump said.

He added that if asked, on a scale of one to 10, how the military campaign was progressing, his response would be “about a 15.”

Iran backed Hamas militarily and materially for years before it and other Palestinian terrorist organizations and individuals carried out the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, killing roughly 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 more into the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, 2023.

“I’m scared of what’s going to happen now,” Miri Bar-Halpern, a Jewish psychology lecturer at Harvard Medical School, told JNS. “I can already predict the backlash.”
Netanyahu remains 8 seats short of a Knesset majority as Eisenkot-led bloc secures 48 seats and Arab parties 19.
“They will push legislation very hard to end the Iran war, and it’s not inconceivable that they could get a fair amount of Republican support for that,” William Galston of Brookings told JNS.
“We, in American Jewry, don’t always look through the lens that our Israeli brothers and sisters are looking at the candidates or the issues through,” William Daroff told JNS. “They’re not voting on the issues that we tend to be most focused on.”