President Donald Trump is revealing new details surrounding the United States’ negotiations with Iran just days after both countries signed a memorandum of understanding calling for the war to end.
In an interview with Axios’ Marc Caputo published Thursday, Trump weighed in on the 14-point MOU between the two countries and pushed back on claims that the agreement is not the same as an unconditional surrender from Iran.
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"Well, it really probably is unconditional surrender," Trump said.
"Is it?" Caputo questioned.
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"I think so," Trump replied. "Look, they have no military. They're all at the bottom of the sea. 159 ships. That's what they had."
Trump went on to double down on the U.S.'s efforts to decimate Iran’s military operations as he highlighted the successful assassinations of some of the country’s most powerful leaders.
"There's no airplanes," Trump said. "They had a lot of 'em. There were 200 of them. They're all gone. Navy. 159 ships, right? All at the bottom of the sea. Leadership, their first stringers all gone, including Khomeini, the first one. They then put a new group in there. Very good, but very nasty. I dealt with 'em. They're gone. They're all gone."
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According to Trump, the U.S. spent nearly two months wiping out Iran’s ships in a covert, overnight operation.
"Do you know that for the last two months, I've been taking many ships out there and nobody knew it," Trump continued. "You know why they didn't know it? Because we knocked out their radar. We knocked out all of their defensive stuff and they were unable to see. Last week we had one night, 25 ships. One night, 22. One night, 19. One night, 21. So every night all these ships out."
Trump went on to provide more details surrounding the undercover efforts.
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"Oh, people were saying, ‘Where is this oil coming from?’ Nobody knew," Trump added. "We'd leave at one o'clock in the morning, all lights off, and we'd have our Navy destroyers going alongside and they had no equipment because we destroyed all of the equipment that would normally be used to detect this."
"And I went for a month and a half taking many ships out there every night at one o'clock in the morning. And we were never detected until about a week ago. And then I announced that we're doing it."
The President also addressed his economic motivation behind his decision to call for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz as part of the MOU.
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"So right now, our stock market is through the roof," Trump said. "The oil prices are tumbling. The oil prices are practically the same as they were before it started. The big difference is that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon."
"We have 700 or 800 ships leaving, but if I attack them, none of those ships are leaving," he added. "The stock market is way up, way, way up. You know, the stock market is up over the last four or five days when it looks like we're going to make a deal."
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Under the MOU, both Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian agreed to end the war, while calling for the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened and launching 60 days of nuclear negotiations.
Trump concluded the interview by touting his administration’s success in lowering the crime rate in Washington, D.C., while also making cosmetic improvements to the city ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary.
"We've taken Washington, D.C., from a death trap to one of the safest cities in America," Trump said. "We took crime down 94% in a period of a year. This place when I got here was a death trap, and now it's one of the safest cities in America."
"I beautified it. New grass. Got rid of all of the graffiti. 48 fountains and monuments have been, not I mean, so bad graffiti all over. 50 years, they weren't touched — and now they're all beautiful," he added.