Stephen K. Bannon and Taj debate the Trump administration's military posture toward Iran, weighing 10,000 potential ground troops against bombing campaigns or arming 91 million Iranians to overthrow the regime. While Secretary Rubio emphasizes contingency planning, President Trump claims U.S. forces obliterated Iran's nuclear facilities and navy, leaving 3,554 targets and forcing negotiations. The episode concludes with Trump attacking radical left Democrats for shutting down the Department of Homeland Security, labeling them "deranged" and "lunatics" akin to the Iranian leadership. [Automatically generated summary]
Back in the Middle East, the New York Times reports that, quote, Iran said on Friday that it had warned three ships not to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a day after Mr. Trump extended a U.S. deadline for Tehran to reopen the waterway.
And as much as Donald Trump has been talking about striking a peace deal, and as reporting suggests he wants to end the war, Department of Defense officials tell the Wall Street Journal that, quote, the Pentagon is looking at sending up to 10,000 additional ground troops to the Middle East to give the president more military options.
The force, which would likely include infantry and armored vehicles, would be added to the roughly 5,000 Marines and the thousands of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division who have already been ordered to the region.
It is unclear where precisely forces will go in the Middle East, but they will likely be within striking distance of Iran and Karg Island, a crucial oil export hub off Iran's coast.
Mixed messages from the Trump administration as the war rages on.
Why would he send them if he did not plan to use them?
So that's a more credible force for some types of operation, seizing Carg Island, for example.
Maybe doing some raids or some smaller operations in the vicinity of the strait itself.
It's not a force that's going to invade Iran and try to overrun the country.
You'd have to have a force several times at least bigger than that to do that.
So it does increase the options the administration has, but they're not very good options.
Iran is fighting an asymmetric fight.
The cyber attack you just talked about is a piece of that.
The closing of the straits of Hormuz, which I don't think this force can fundamentally reverse, is another part of it.
So we're in a type of conflict that for reasons that mystify me, the administration did not anticipate, did not prepare for, and did not think through the consequences of.
Secretary of State Marker Rubio told reporters a short time ago that he was expecting Iran's response to a U.S. peace proposal at any moment.
The Trump administration has offered Tehran a 15-point plan to end the war, and this comes as the two sides could potentially begin face-to-face negotiations in the near future.
At the same time, the U.S. is sending thousands of troops to the Middle East, though Secretary Rubio says that Iranian military capabilities can be destroyed without putting any American troops on the ground.
We can achieve, we are achieving all those objectives.
We are ahead of schedule on most of them, and we can achieve them without any ground troops, without any.
Now, in terms of why there's deployments, number one, the president has to be prepared for multiple contingencies, which I'm not going to discuss in the media.
And again, I refer you to the Department of War, who will probably tell you the exact same thing.
But we can achieve all of our objectives without ground troops, but we are always going to be prepared to give the president maximum optionality and maximum opportunity to adjust to contingencies should they emerge.
A plan and victory and then an exit ramp to get off is what we need in order.
Because you have to be able to tell these parents that send their sons and daughters off to war: if your child is killed, it was for this reason.
When they come off the aircraft at Dover Air Force Base in a transfer case for a dignified transfer, you have to be able to look at those parents and say, this is why your child gave their life for this country.
So we need to be able to do that for any service member that is over in Iran right now.
Who's in favor of the first option, completely eradicating the mullahs and the IRGC, even if it means our kids have to go to war on the ground in Iran?
Who's in favor of that?
Here, my voice, my voice.
All right.
Here's an alternative.
Would you be okay?
Who's in favor of this plan?
We go there, we bomb the hell out of them.
We knock them, we hit them in infrastructure, we hit them in manufacturing, steel, communications.
We take them out.
We get them to the table and we say, look, you're going to stay in power, you Islamic nutjobs.
Kill each other.
We don't care.
We're going to do a deal with you to take your oil and we get the oil first.
You would be okay sending your children to myself.
No, no, no, no, so would I. I'm talking about our children and our children's children.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I will send my kids.
All right.
Who else would send their children to go first?
Can't hear you.
Let me hear you.
Sorry, sir.
Sir, no offense.
You're the only guy here who said they would.
unidentified
Who's going to send?
Yes.
And I think he's right.
But the point here is that we, I mean, I am also Iranian American, and I appreciate that President Trump and the other Americans who are not Iranian are supporting this war against the Iranian regime.
The problem is that this regime is not getting weaker if you leave him alone.
You know, five years ago, their missiles was a lot more limited range.
It is getting more advanced, more advanced, and more advanced.
So if we're, if we want to um replace all the regimes that have nuclear weapons that frankly hate us we're talking North Korea, maybe even Pakistan are we gonna go ahead and do regime changes in all these countries and folks?
Are we willing to send our kids to war, to go to war to, to change somehow, thinking we wouldn't get another Kim Jong III?
I don't think we can go around the world and knock out every evil regime right, like you're saying, we're gonna have to take out Pakistan, North Korea and whoever else you put on the list.
It's and it.
I mean we've bombed the hell out of them for the last four weeks.
No no no, bomb them more or do we get to their knees?
Get them to their knees, bomb every infrastructure they've got, take their roads out sorry sorry, civilian.
Take their roads out, take their manufacturing out, take their communication ability out and then get them to the table and lock them into a deal that they can't ever back out of 100.
Yes, our primary for governor is May 19th, and it is so important.
One of the things we're really trying to get Oregonians to do right now is change their registration status to Republicans so they can vote in our primary.
Because if you're not registered as a Republican, there's a lot of people that are NAVs and independents in Oregon.
They are the majority, and they are in favor of what Trump is doing.
And why don't we hear more about how we can help them?
I've heard that BB will let Bibi get his people in there to wipe out everybody and help them.
I don't know if the boots on the ground from Trump could help them, but the bottom line is not some other creep to take over the country of Iran, but to support the people and help them because they're the ones that want the freedom.
Well, victory is the complete defeat and destruction of the Islamic regime in Iran and letting the people pick their next leader and who they want because it's power to the people.
From the lakes of Minnesota To the hills of Tennessee Across the plains of Texas From sea to shining sea From Detroit down to Houston and New York to LA.
Where there's pride in every American heart, and it's time we stand and say that I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free.
And I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me.
And I gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.
Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land.
God bless the USA.
And I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free.
And I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me.
And I gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.
I'm looking left, right, center, all the way in the back.
They're rich too.
But I'm thrilled to be back with so many friends and partners, leaders, and innovators here at the Future Investment Initiative.
And it's a really great group of people, a very smart group of people.
They know what's happening in the world.
It's my second address to the conference as President of the United States.
And it's my honor to be here.
Thank you very much.
As you know, we're gathered at a moment of bold action and historic decision to make America and our allies safer and stronger, more prosperous, more successful than ever before.
That's what's happening.
Tonight, we're closer than ever to the rise of the Middle East that is finally free at last from Iranian terror, aggression, and nuclear blackmail.
That's what's happened.
It was nuclear blackmail for years and years.
And beyond that, there was blackmail, period.
Under my leadership, America is ending the threat posed by this radical regime, decimating Iran's capabilities with Operation Epic Fury, something that nobody's ever seen anything quite like it.
We have the most powerful military in the world by far.
I built it in my first term.
Remember, I said a trillion dollars.
They also said, what do you mean a trillion dollars?
A trillion dollars.
Every year, another trillion the next, another trillion.
We have the best people.
We have by far the best equipment.
We have weapons that nobody's ever seen before.
We have weapons that nobody even knows about, except for a few of us.
For 47 years, Iran has been known as the bully of the Middle East, but they are not the bully any longer.
they're on the run.
Last June, America's armed forces obliterated Iran's key nuclear facilities in one of the most spectacular military actions of all time.
Nobody had ever seen anything like it.
In the dead of night, no moon, one o'clock in the morning.
We went in.
It was called Operation Midnight Hammer.
And every single one of those bombs hit their mark, air shafts.
They will never build an air shaft again, I promise you that.
They went right down that granite mountain through air shafts, most incredible technology you've ever seen, that a thing like that.
And it was decimation, it was obliteration.
One of the networks said, well, maybe it wasn't that bad.
It was that bad.
Turned out to be even more than we thought.
But after that attack, the Iranian lunatics refused to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons.
And I have to say before that, Barack Hussein Obama, did you ever hear of him, Barack Hussein Obama?
He had the Iran nuclear deal.
He went to Iran, paid him.
Remember, he sent two 757, Boeing 757 jetliners.
They took the seats out and they piled it with cash, like 1.7 billion of cash.
That's when I realized the president isn't very powerful.
The presidency is a very powerful thing when you can do that.
I haven't done that yet.
I haven't found a reason to do that yet, but that's big.
1.7 billion in cash.
You know, there wasn't a bank in D.C., Virginia, or Maryland that had any money after that disaster.
But they sent the cash to Iran.
But more importantly, they signed an agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, which if I didn't terminate it in my first term, I terminated it almost immediately.
If I didn't terminate it, they would have had a nuclear weapon long ago, and they would have used it on the Middle East, Israel, and the Middle East.
And you know the Middle East because when you look at all the missiles that got fired, UAE had 1,500 missiles shot at it.
They didn't think they were going to have any.
Saudi Arabia didn't expect to have, I mean, we have the most powerful Saudis.
Oh, yeah, sir, you're so powerful.
But yeah, sir, you didn't expect any missiles going to Saudi Arabia.
They didn't expect him in Qatar.
They didn't expect him in Kuwait, in Bahrain.
The missile rained down on you.
They were going to hit you with nuclear, whatever they had, but we stopped it.
We stopped it.
We stopped it with him.
And then it was a big moment also in my first administration when I took out Salome.
And a lot of people think that might have been the biggest thing of all because he was a mad genius.
He was a vicious, horrible human being, but he was a great general and a great leader, if you call.
If you define a leader in a certain way, a very, very powerful leader.
In fact, he was so powerful that I really think that the leadership of RAN was extremely happy when I took him out, but they don't say that, but nobody's going to be asking him anymore because they're not here either.
But getting the termination and terminating the Iran nuclear deal that was done by Biden and Obama, I would say mostly Obama.
Actually, I don't think Biden knew where he was then too.
He had no idea.
If you said to him, the Iran nuclear, what's that?
But there were four years of hell we had with this guy as our leader, I'll tell you.
And then we hit him with the B-2 bombers.
So we did it twice.
But if they would have had a nuclear weapon, it would have been a whole big deal.
And I wouldn't be here right now, and probably you guys wouldn't be too happy.
You might be in an area who knows where you would have been.
But we did it twice.
And I think, I really believe we saved the Middle East.
We saved not just Israel.
We saved the Middle East.
And it was proven by all those rockets that fired down upon you.
Saudi Arabia got hit a lot.
You all got hit, and nobody expected any missiles to be wasted.
You would have thought they were only going at Israel.
They were.
And as President of the United States, I would never allow the world's number one state sponsor of terror to obtain a nuclear weapon.
I said that for a long time.
And I didn't.
To defend America and our allies over the past 27 days, the U.S. Armed Forces, most powerful in the world, have been annihilating Iran's military capacity with force, precision, skill like the world has never seen.
It was violence, actually, really violence.
We're crushing Irans.
Currently, as we speak, I just looked.
We had another big day.
We hit them.
They don't know what's happening.
Remember this?
They lied about three days ago.
I said, yeah, we're negotiating with Israel.
We are not negotiating.
They're being hit so hard.
Anybody would be negotiating.
They are negotiating.
They're begging to make a deal.
They're begging to make a deal.
Turned out I was right.
They were negotiating, which they admitted two days later.
And in order to make up for their misstatement, they said, we're going to send you eight ships of oil.
And the following day, I saw, this is two days ago, I saw in one of the networks, very strange, there were eight ships of oil coming out of Iran.
And then they actually said, we're going to add an extra two.
And they added an extra two, so we had 10 ships.
And then people realized we were actually negotiating.
We're negotiating now.
And it'd be great if we could do something, but they have to open it up.
They have to open up the strait of Trump.
I mean, Harmouth.
Excuse me.
I'm so sorry.
Such a terrible mistake.
The fake news will say he accidentally said, no, there's no accidents with me, not too many.
If there were, we'd have a major story.
No, well, we had that with the Gulf of Mexico.
Remember, the Gulf of Mexico?
And one day I said, why is it the Gulf of Mexico?
We have 92% of the area around it.
They have 8%, really less than 8%.
But for 350 years, it was going, you know, they were there 100 years longer than us, Mexico.
They're at 350, we're at 250.
And I said, I've said often asked myself, why don't we call it the Gulf of Mexico?
It seems like we dominate.
Well, when I checked, it was more than 92%.
So I announced, I wouldn't say Mexico was thrilled, but I announced that from now on, the Gulf of Mexico is going to be called the Gulf of America.
And it took about one hour, and it was done.
Everybody, I mean, the president called me.
She's really a nice person, too.
I like her a lot.
She called up, she had the most beautiful voice.
She's a very elegant woman, has a beautiful, beautiful voice.
She goes, President, president, president, tell me, this is not so.
No, no, it's so.
And then Google Maps changed it.
We won the court case in about one hour, and Google Maps changed the name.
And it's now the Gulf of America, which it should be, in all fairness.
We're crushing Iran's weapons, stockpiles, destroying their missiles and drone factories at levels nobody ever thought was possible, and turning their defense industrial base into nothing.
Iran's Navy is gone.
It's all sunk at the bottom of the Gulf and elsewhere.
Did you see the attack submarine that we have, one after one of their boats?
It was called the Salame.
It was the pride of their fleet.
But this attack submarine goes like 60 miles an hour.
It says, I never saw anything.
And it caught them in about two minutes.
And that was the end of the Salome.
Now, then they're 100% dead.
They have 22 mine droppers.
They're going mine droppers.
And the mine droppers, 22, all 22 are gone.
So I guess they can drop mines, but they're going to have to take them out by a rowboat because they don't have any boats.
Their air force is dead, totally, completely dead.
It's out of business.
No planes left at all.
Their anti-aircraft and communications capabilities are totally dismantled and dead.
And their leaders are all dead.
Other than that, I think they're doing quite well.
No, their leaders are dead.
Their supreme leader is no longer supreme.
He's dead.
The son is either dead or in very bad shape because nobody's heard from him.
I think he says, just keep me out of this.
This is the only country where nobody wants to lead.
There's nobody who would like to lead Iran.
Please raise your hand, a big audience of distinguished, who would like to be our leader?
Dead silence.
Nobody wants to lead.
Now we have an amazing military.
We have the greatest intelligence apparatus that anybody's ever seen.
We can tell you everything that's going on.
We know everything that's going on.
We're achieving each and every one of the military objectives four weeks ago.
Four weeks ago.
And we're doing it really, I guess, with two weeks.
We call it a military operation.
We don't call it a war.
We call it a military operation.
We're very disappointed, by the way, with NATO.
They didn't come to our aid.
I didn't try too hard, actually, you know, because I wanted to prove a point.
I didn't sell.
They probably think I'm a lousy salesman.
You know, they said, I said, would you like to help us?
President Franz Macron, nice guy.
He is a nice guy.
He said, I don't want him when the war is over.
I want them before we start.
And UK, our longest ally, you know, nobody ever thought this was possible.
They said to the Prime Minister, I said, Mr. Prime Minister, we'd like you to have two aircraft carriers.
They're little ones.
They're not very good.
I know they don't go fast, and I know they don't work very well, but we could probably use them maybe for helicopters.
And they said, yes, oh, yes, we are preparing them.
I see, when will they be ready?
Maybe in a month or two.
Oh, great.
That's wonderful.
I said, Are you going to help us?
Yes, yes, we're going to help you when the war is finished.
We will be there.
This is NATO.
And I've always said NATO's a paper tiger.
And I always said, We help NATO, but they'll never help us.
And if the big one ever happened, and I don't think it will, but if the big one ever happened, I guarantee you they wouldn't be there.
And we learned from that.
And remember what I said, because they made a big mistake.
The Chancellor of Germany, these are all friends of mine, Friedrich, the Chancellor of Germany.
He said, this is not our war.
We have nothing to do.
Well, Ukraine's not our war, but we helped them.
I wouldn't have had a help.
If I were president, that war would have never happened.
But we had a man of a very low IQ as president, and he had no idea what the hell he was.
I was listening to him talk.
I said, he's forcing an issue that's going to be trouble.
And it turned out to be trouble.
Last week, 28,000 soldiers died.
The week before that, 32,000 soldiers died.
I think we're going to get it settled, but it's a terrible, it's a terrible thing.
Worse since World War II.
I settled eight wars, and this should have been one of the easier ones.
But the hatred between President Putin and President Zelensky is extreme, never good.
Hatred's a bad thing when you're trying to settle a war.
I want to thank the entire kingdom of Saudi Arabia, been very helpful, unlike NATO.
Saudi Arabia fought, Qatar fought, UAE fought, Bahrain fought, and Kuwait fought, even though they shot down three of our planes with the finest missiles.
We could have done without that.
They didn't know they were our planes.
They wasted three great Patriot missiles, and you have to say there's nothing like these Patriots.
You know, we had an attack of 101 a few days ago, 101 missiles shot at a very valuable thing that we had floating on the water, namely an aircraft carrier, biggest in the world.
And they were shot, 101, going 2,500 miles an hour.
And out of the 101 missiles shot, 101 missiles were shot down and spread out all over the sea.
Pretty amazing.
That's called incredible technology, right, Steve?
That's called great technology.
Think of it: 101 missiles going 2,500 miles an hour.
You don't have a lot of time.
And these aren't necessarily weightlifting shoulders.
These are very smart people doing that.
And I watched them.
I watched their performance.
Missiles launched, missiles launched.
It's almost like they're bored by it.
They have like nine seconds ahead of FIFA, the most powerful man at sports.
All right, we have to have like 11 seconds to make a determination.
Then at seven seconds, fire, fire, fire.
The most unbelievable thing.
Fire, boom, fire, boom.
One at a time, just knocked them out like they were nothing.
Genius, it's like unbelievable.
I mean, to think the, and we have the technology nobody has.
Look at what happened in Venezuela.
They had other equipment, not ours.
They made the mistake of using other equipment.
Didn't work too well.
And Venezuela was, you know, took 45 minutes.
It was a 45-minute war.
This one's bigger.
This one's bigger.
It's a bigger country, a lot more powerful.
It's a lot more powerful, but it's not powerful anymore.
Within two days, I think the damage was done.
But now it's really done.
Now we're just going after targets.
And again, they have no anti-aircraft.
So we're just floating over the top looking for whatever we want.
And we're hitting it.
And we have another 3,554 targets left.
And that'll be done pretty quickly.
And then, you know, at some point, we're going to have to determine what we do.
But they have, they've never seen anything like it.
When we hit Venezuela, and you know, that's a very strong military country.
They have soldiers, if you've ever been there, been there.
They have a lot of soldiers walking around all over the place.
Everyone's a soldier, very military kind of a place.
And the general, who's a general, professional general, really good.
And he said, we were all set for him.
We knew there was a problem when we noticed at one o'clock in the morning, every 32 seconds, another airplane, a very fast plane, was coming off the deck of an aircraft carrier.
That's actually the biggest aircraft carrier in the world.
And every 32 seconds, vom, vom, boom.
And it was one o'clock in the morning.
So we said, okay, I think we're in trouble.
But they were ready for us, Johnny.
And we were ready.
He said, we were ready.
And then they hit us, and they came from 17 different angles.
They were here.
They were there.
We ran for our lives.
It was over.
And it was over.
And then we took this guy, who was a very bad guy.
And within literally minutes, he was in the back of a helicopter in a house that was in a big military base with thousands and thousands of soldiers.
The house was all steel with steel doors, steel everything.
They had the small steel doors, the big stewards.
We were equipped for anything.
Even the big, big one, it would have been opened within 30 seconds.
They walked in with blowtorches.
And within minutes, he was out of the house, being thrown into the helicopter, sailing away.
And the soldiers just looked by, bye.
Enjoy your trip, sir.
It was amazing.
It was an amazing, but this is more amazing what's happening now because we took a very strong country.
I could see, yes, sir, the problem you would have had.
I mean, this was not a weak country.
This was a strong country.
They had over 10,000 missiles that they accumulated since October 2nd, if you think.
Since the B-2s, really since the B-2s, they accumulated them in a matter of months, six months, but they had well over 10,000.
They had rocket launchers.
You know, rocket launchers are more important than the rockets, because you take a rocket launcher out, that's the end of that.
People think you can take those big rockets and throw them out your window like when you were a child with the paper airplanes.
You said, doesn't work that way.
You need those launchers.
And we knocked out 97% of the launchers.
That's why you may be attacked, but you're not being attacked with very heavy numbers of missiles like at the beginning.
But in particular, I want to thank my friend, the Crown Prince Mohammed, who is a fantastic man and a great friend of mine and a friend of all of yours, I think.
And he's a warrior.
He's a warrior.
He was not afraid of this country that, frankly, he should have been afraid of because they're very powerful.
I want to thank Tamim because Tamim is, these three people have been unbelievable to then UAE, Mohammed.
These are three great people.
And they were under tremendous attack, unexpected attack.
And they weren't thinking this was going to happen.
Nobody was.
And they turned against them and really became very powerfully aligned.
And they were with us, but they weren't with us very obliquely.
They were with us.
But I think that I have to acknowledge for their bravery because they were being hit pretty hard.
All three of them, they were being hit pretty hard.
The Emir, Mohamed, Mohammed.
They had two Mohammeds and Tamim.
And they're friends of mine.
And also I have to say that Bahrain and Kuwait, they were stand up, more so than NATO, I want to tell you.
More so than NATO.
Now they're a little closer to the action than NATO and all fairness, but very disappointed with NATO, but I wasn't disappointed with our allies in the Middle East and others and others.
We had tremendous support from countries that were not in the general area.
but they were tremendously supportive.
I think Turkey was fantastic, actually fantastic, and they stayed out of things that we asked them to.
And he's a great leader.
He's a great leader.
And Indonesia was great.
So many, we had so many great, you know, you learn who your friends are, really do.
You learn who your friends are.
But Indonesia, Turkey, and so many other countries, but the five were great.
But your dear friend and my dear friend was, he was all manned.
You know, Mohamed said, oh, yes, as soon as we do this, as soon as we do that.
I said, Mohammed, we did that.
Oh, yes, but we have a couple of other things.
It's now time.
We've now taken them out and they are out bigly.
We got to get into the Abraham Accords.
And we hope all of the countries are going to be in the Abraham Accords.
We have some very brave countries that did it, you know, years ago.
They went in and you know who they are, the four, the early four, and they did a great thing in doing it.
And it was great for them also economically, but it was a great thing that they did it.
But I think all the Middle Eastern countries are going to be joining now.
And in some cases, I would say all the Middle Eastern countries and beyond.
You have people not in the Middle East that want to be members.
You'll be seeing that soon.
In the meantime, the conflict in Iran also makes it absolutely vital for the radical left Democrats in Congress to immediately end their dangerous shutdown of our Department of Homeland Security.
You know, if they want to play games, that's all they are.
These people are lunatics.
They sort of remind me of, they remind me actually a little bit of Iran.
They're deranged, the deranged Democrats.
For 42 days, they've tried to completely eliminate funding for the number one duty of government, which is keeping America safe.