Sean Hannity asserts President Trump's "50 days before Midnight Hammer" ultimatum is succeeding as Operation Epic Fury winds down, citing 20 oil tankers passing the Strait of Hormuz and the dismantling of five Iranian leadership tiers. He warns that Iran possessed over 1,000 pounds of 60% enriched uranium capable of building 11 bombs within days, threatening to destroy critical infrastructure if negotiations fail while 3,500 Marines stand ready. Hannity condemns legacy media predictions of a "forever war," alleges the previous administration released 700 potential sleeper cells into the U.S., and argues that preventing a nuclear-armed Iran is essential to save millions of lives, drawing parallels to the decisive action taken against Nazi Germany. [Automatically generated summary]
Sean, if you want to join us, we have a lot of news we got to get to today.
Let me just say, if you know Donald Trump, unlike so many that comment about Donald Trump and you know his objectives and you actually listen to what he says, he is not somebody that is that complicated to figure out.
When he gave the Iranians 50 days before Midnight Hammer, he meant 50 days.
He gave them an opportunity every time before Epic Fury, and now they have an opportunity to make a deal.
I know it's the fourth-tier leadership of the Iranians, although they kind of, I guess in a similar sense, if you think of proof of life in a kidnap ransom situation by again and again showing, and I'll play President Trump on the weekend coming up, that they're allowing 20 huge oil tankers as promised through the Strait of Hormuz.
Clearly, the people that the White House is talking to have power, or else that would not be possible.
They wouldn't be able to accomplish that.
If you do know him and you do listen to him and you have faith in him and have been a supporter, not one of these fair weather friends supporters that think they know Donald Trump, that don't know anything about Donald Trump and at various times hated Donald Trump, but act like they're the experts on Donald Trump.
And there's a lot of those people out there.
I've known him for 30 years.
He means what he says.
This is how I will interpret it for you and then give you the specifics behind it, is Donald Trump now has indicated, Marco Rubio has indicated for people that actually want to pay attention, this operation, Epic Fury, is winding down and winding down very, very clearly.
You know, when the White House first started negotiation, we now know who it is, the head of the Iranian parliament, I guess, is one of the main things.
Now, there is fragmented leadership, and I'm sure that there is a power vacuum, and I'm sure that there's probably a little bit of a power struggle within Iran and probably some disagreements.
But with all of that said, it's sort of like John Brennan saying last week, oh, I believe the Iranians over Donald Trump.
If they say they're not negotiating, they're not negotiating.
And then Donald Trump got his present, and those oil tankers went right through the Strait of Hormuz with no problems at all whatsoever.
There is a reason that you have 35 U.S. sailors and Marines that have arrived in the Middle East.
I'm going to tell you what the president said, then I'm going to interpret it all for you.
And I'm going to tell you that my interpretation is very clear.
It is unambiguous.
If you read the tea leaves and you know Donald Trump's guiding principles and what he has said and what his stated goals are and what they have wanted to accomplish here and what precipitated Epic Fury in the first place, when you factor all of that in together, there is now a fairly predictable outcome in a fairly short timeframe because the 10 days that he gave them last week to negotiate are quickly coming to an end.
And the goal has always been, beyond everything else, is to destroy any potential possibility that the Iranians can have nuclear weapons.
That has been their number one goal.
In the process, they have destroyed their Navy, their Air Force, their missile defense systems, their missile launchers, their ballistic missile systems.
And now we can now achieve our objectives, you know, whether or not ground troops will be necessary or not.
Now, there are a couple of things that need to happen before you could really say that the president has accomplished all of his goals there.
And this then goes to the real reason why we went in in the first place.
And the saddest part of all of this, assuming that the president can, and again, none of this is easy.
All of it is hard.
Being a commander-in-chief, you know, George Bush famously said, I'm the decider.
I have to make those decisions.
Ultimately, the president had to make a decision.
And I've said from the beginning that there are three principles really guiding Donald Trump.
And one is he learned the lesson from Reagan, peace through strength.
This president, that's how he defeated the ISIS Caliphate, never got the credit he deserved, but that was an existential threat to America and the world.
Took out Soleimani, Baghdadi, took out, dropped the mother of all bombs on Afghanistan, Midnight Hammer, 14 bunker buster bombs taking out the nuclear enrichment capabilities and so on and so forth, and then giving them time here.
What precipitated this, let's go back to it, because this is what's also going to end it.
Again, just pay attention to what the president is saying.
Listen to what he's saying.
Listen to what Mark Orubio is saying.
Listen to what Witkoff is saying.
Now, if you recall, it was the Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, along with Jared Kushner.
They were negotiating with the Iranians.
They were saying to the Iranians in this negotiation, we will provide civilian use, enriched uranium, which is about 5% enrichment, and it's very hard to go from 5% to 60%.
And the Iranians said no, they said they had the right to enrich uranium and have nuclear weapons.
Okay, that was a non-starter.
And then they bragged about their thousand-plus pounds or 460 kilograms, whichever Linda prefers on any given day, which would be 60% enrichment to get to 90% weapons grade enrichment.
That would be about a 7 to 12 day process, depending on which nuclear scientist you might be talking to on any given day.
That would be the equivalent of having enough capability to build 11 nuclear bombs.
All right.
That was the inflection point.
Again, have I talked to the president, gotten specific confirmation?
No, but it's obvious because the president's stated words were they can never have nuclear weapons.
At that point, it became far more imminent their ability to get nuclear weapons, which the president then had to apply other military and historical principles to.
And I think the second thing that the president looked at is, well, this is an evil regime, the number one state sponsor of terror.
Yes, they do chant death to America, death to Israel.
They have been fomenting death and destruction throughout the region.
Their history, their fanaticism, coupled with a weapon of mass destruction, you know, could lead to a modern-day Holocaust.
And if we learned anything from the last hundred years of history, which we have gone into great depth and specificity and detail on this program, over 100 million dead human souls, then you ask yourself, what are the lessons to be learned from history?
If you have a chance to take out radicalism that could result in millions of dead people ahead of time, I think history would teach us, take advantage of that window of opportunity and remove that threat.
And that, I do believe, at the end of the day, is what the guiding principle has been for the president here.
The third thing, and this part has yet to be proven, but if my timeline and calculation is correct, and that, you know, three weeks from now, we are going to be having about Iran a very, very different discussion, very different discussion, because there are really two major strategic goals.
The first one has to do with the real fundamental reason that I believe the president went in, which is the untold story, and that is that they were way closer to getting enough enriched weapons-grade uranium than anybody had ever known.
Why Globalists Were Dead Wrong00:06:07
Whenever globalist organizations had made assessments about Iranians' military capability, they have been dead wrong.
The IAEA has always been dead wrong.
They've always underestimated their capabilities.
And we learned something else in the course of this conflict, that the Iranians had ballistic missiles that had a far greater range than had previously been known.
Now, Gordon Chang will join us later in the program today.
He will tell you that with the help of the North Koreans, that even though we estimate their current range is somewhere in the 2,500-mile-plus range, somewhere in and around that area, which we didn't think that they had,
that in fact, it may be much higher if the North Koreans, as suspected by some people in the Intel community, have these boosters that could then, you know, now we're talking about the potential very quickly, very soon, of reaching the continental U.S. You know, if the president is fully successful in this mission, we will be finished in no time.
But there are two main components that have to be dealt with.
One is what led us in there in the first place, the clear and present danger of the Iranians or the thousand pounds of 60% enriched uranium.
Now, we're in the middle of negotiations with the Iranians, and the president put out this truth social post.
It says the United States, the USA, is in serious discussions with a new, more reasonable regime to end our military operations in Iran.
Now, granted, you have to assume that this fragmented leadership.
You have to assume that.
You have to assume that there is a battle fight for power.
But to go on, the president also went into great length about how this particular group of negotiators also have proven that they have the power to accomplish things as evidenced by the 20 oil tankers that they've allowed through the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, he said great progress has been made, but if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately open for business, we will conclude our lovely stay in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells, Karg Island, and possibly all desalinization plants,
which they need because they've had a massive drought there, which we have purposely not yet touched.
This will be in retribution for our many soldiers and others that Iran has butchered and killed over the old regime's 47-year reign of terror.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, Donald J. Trump.
Now, the president warned the Iranian negotiators, if they don't make this deal soon and they don't open the Strait of Hormuz, I would say that there are two big military accomplishments left.
One is this 60% enriched uranium issue.
Because the danger is if they either will give it over voluntarily or it will be taken by force.
It is not an accident that we now have over 3,500 Marines ready to go into Iran if possible.
Now, is that the first choice?
Absolutely, positively not.
Is the president clearly, as he did before Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury, trying to prevent that from happening?
Yes, he is.
Has everyone that made every prediction about Donald Trump been dead wrong?
They couldn't be more wrong about what the Trump doctrine is.
But, you know, the three principles are: what would be the point?
The president, it was never his stated goal for regime change, but regime change happened.
It happened in the opening minutes of Epic Fury and Roaring Lion.
It just happened.
They wiped out the first tier of leadership, the second tier of leadership, the third tier of leadership.
We're either at the fourth or fifth.
Nobody can say for sure.
And so I've got to imagine that the people they are negotiating with had to have learned something.
Because what is really sad in all of this for the president is we will never be able to calculate.
We probably at some point will learn how dangerous, how dangerously close the Iranians were to having nuclear weapons.
Now, there are going to be some people out there that will doubt.
There are some people that have always wanted to say that this is going to be a forever war.
There are some people that would rightly be skeptical.
I'm not even against skepticism.
I think skepticism within an administration and outside an administration can be actually helpful.
And you've got to look at an upside, downside to any military decision that a president has to make.
But in the end, the president has to make it.
And people would say, well, we don't want this to become a quagmire.
We don't want this to become Iraq and Afghanistan.
We don't want America to return to the idea of nation building.
We don't want a forever war.
Why should we believe the same government that lied to us about COVID?
Those are all legitimate criticisms, except none of them have to do with Donald J. Trump.
And that's the point.
So this could create, and this would be the thing.
If we could have taken out the Nazi regime and Hitler, how many lives could have been saved if we acted earlier?
It's not like if Donald Trump is fully, completely successful and prevents them from getting this nuclear weapon or nuclear capability and ballistic missile capability, you're not going to be able to sit there with a calculator and figure out how many human lives ultimately were saved here.
So the best case scenario is one that I'm hoping for, is that the Iranians will wise up, understand they've got no shot.
They'll have no country, no money, no infrastructure left because the president means what he says.
Media Refuses To Listen00:03:39
He doesn't make idle threats.
And that everybody that had been so dead sure they understood Donald Trump in the end, I think will be proven wrong.
Now, or they're going to do it the hard way.
And so far, every time they've had that choice, unfortunately, they've chosen the hard way.
There's been so many lies, so much propaganda.
You know, and it's interesting because the American people, especially the president's supporters, about 90% of them support what he's doing here.
But the president has been clear about this from the start.
They're going to eliminate Iran's nuclear missile and missile threats.
They're going to leave the regime no way to assault its neighbors moving forward, nor do they want to decimate the world's energy supplies.
The president is clearly threatening that to get their attention, and he will.
He said from the beginning it would be four to six weeks.
We're now on the other side of that.
We're getting close where it's going to be about two issues moving forward.
One is going to be keeping open the Strait of Hormuz for the free flow of oil at market prices.
And the second is going to be they cannot have 60% enriched uranium.
The president refused to list anything as off-limits, including that would be a limited ground operation if they don't give it up voluntarily, that enriched uranium.
But according to everyone else, he's failing.
Oh, he's actually succeeding at a level I've never seen before.
Be sure to check in as soon as you get to your car after work for breaking information you need to know about.
This is the Sean Hannity Show.
So from my perspective, and again, I don't, it's kind of hard to say this.
Knowing Donald Trump as well as I do, knowing how he thinks, knowing his history, covering this man for 11 years, I know how I know he means what he says.
And the amazing part of this is people don't listen.
The media purposely doesn't listen.
The Democrats, they purposely don't listen.
If you look at the media, I mean, I talked about this.
I was doing Patrick Bett David's podcast last week, and I talked about this.
I mean, it is so disgusting how the corrupt media in this country is.
You know, you have, you know, the economists claiming Iran is winning.
Didn't Hakeem Jeffries also say Iran's going to win and ran's winning?
Republicans in Congress convinced this is going to be a forever war.
It's not.
And it's not, and you say, well, Hannity, how do you know that?
Because I know Donald Trump, and I'm listening very clearly to what he has been saying.
And the fact that people don't listen is kind of breathtaking to me because he has been crystal clear and consistent about what the goals of Epic Fury were, you know, from the very beginning.
And the main goal has always been to eliminate Iran's nuclear and missile threat and also to leave the regime no way to assault their neighbors nor decimate the world's energy supplies.
Eliminating The Nuclear Danger00:12:40
And now, and he said it would be four to six weeks.
Well, that leaves us about two to three weeks left, and it's over.
And I think we're on that timetable.
Now, time will prove if I'm right or wrong, but I have every confidence that they're going to continue to degrade whatever military capabilities by air, because we own the skies there, that the Iranians may have left.
We did learn that once again, the world underestimated their ballistic missile capability, and they were fully transparent in bragging about all the 60% enriched uranium we have.
You combine ballistic missiles and the potential maybe with North Korea, because we've learned the North Koreans have been helping them out at a level we didn't really know until recently.
I'm sure our Intel community did know, but their booster rockets would mean.
I mean, we now know their ballistic missiles are capable of hitting Paris and London and probably not that far away from an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Somebody that knows a lot about it, Gordon Shang, will have more to say on this at the top of the next hour.
But the president has been consistent.
The president does not believe in forever wars.
Now, because the calculus of this kind of changed and it's really what precipitated the president's actions here, which is the 60% enriched uranium, that then complicates things a little bit more because there's no way that this president is going to come this far and go this deep into preventing them from ever becoming a nuclear power and leave 60% enriched uranium,
which if they reconstitute their enrichment program, can be turned into weapons-grade uranium in anywhere from 7 to 12 days.
So that's not going to happen.
Nor is the president going to leave without a plan in place to see that the free flow of oil at market prices remains the same, too.
And yeah, are all the predictable people in the legacy media mob, have they been predicting doom and gloom?
Did any of them ever anticipate this?
And then you've got this whole other crowd that really never supported Trump too, the new isolationists, as I refer to them.
You know, okay, so Iran's on the precipice of having nuclear weapons, and you don't want to, you didn't learn anything from World War II.
You didn't learn anything from Mao in China or Stalin in Russia or Hitler in Germany.
You didn't learn a thing from fascism and Mussolini.
You didn't learn from Tojo in Japan.
You didn't learn over 100 million human souls died and how many of those lives could have been saved had we acted sooner instead of having this appeasement mindset mentality.
That's the breathtaking part of how Europe has exposed itself in all of this.
But the goals that we set out to achieve are being achieved by the greatest military on the first face of the earth.
And the fact that some were, are still willing to gamble with a nuclear-armed Iran as a future for our children and grandchildren, I really don't have much to say to them, except that they're wrong.
They're morally, historically ignorant.
And I don't think they understand the nature of evil.
So we'll see if this can be done the easy way.
The president has tried numerous times to do things easy in the easy way with the Iranians, but of course we know to no avail.
And, you know, the one thing is assuming the president is successful in defanging this dangerous threat to the world, we'll never be able to calculate how many lives may have been saved.
You know, had we taken out Hitler before Nazi Germany, had the admonitions of people like Winston Churchill, you know, won the argument of that day versus Neville Chamberlain, how many millions of lives would have been saved?
And that's the calculation.
Look, if you have a different opinion than me, I'm perfectly fine with that.
And I know I'm never going to convince you that it would be foolish to go in another direction.
And I'd hate to think of the consequences if we didn't have such a decisive president that might not have the political will and courage to defang and neutralize a threat before millions of lives could be destroyed.
Those that would be comfortable handing off our country to our children and grandchildren with a nuclear-armed Iran, I don't understand their decision-making.
Thank God we have built out first, really under Donald Trump and his first administration, the next generation of weaponry, which made this, and none of it is easy.
I don't want you to misunderstand me.
Every bit of this is hard.
Anytime you make a decision to put our national treasure in harm's way, it is hard.
But on the other side of it, if we were inactive because of political cowardice or a lack of courage or resolve or understanding of what could possibly be waiting on the other side of a nuclear-armed Iran, it's not something I even want to ever think about.
And the world hopefully will never have to think about.
By the way, I don't know if you saw this progressive candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Saeed, apparently is a candidate in Michigan's Democratic U.S. Senate primary telling his staff during a conference call he worried about celebrating the killing of the Iranian Ayatollah, Ali Hamani, because his voters in Dearborn would be very sad about that.
I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today.
I just don't want to comment on Khamani Khamenei at all.
I don't think it's worth even touching that.
This is what we practice, but isn't Khamenei a bad guy?
Isn't it great that he's dead?
My first amendment is 86 years old.
He's going to be dead sometime soon anyway.
Okay.
But just don't say it publicly because we don't want to lose a voting base that would be like this.
There was a very interesting analysis in the Mideast Forum as it relates to the Strait of Hormuz, which again is the last part of this puzzle, I think, before there is a drawdown and hopefully complete victory for the president in terms of achieving his objectives.
And some say, well, Sean, why don't we go all the way?
Because that was never the president's objective, meaning regime change.
We've already had regime change.
You can make that argument.
We've had regime changed on tier one, tier two, tier three, probably tier four.
And we're on the fifth level of it.
You would hope that maybe the president is right in his analysis that this is more reasonable.
He's dealing with more reasonable people.
But, you know, while the media and the left obsessing over the volatility that the president also warned about in terms of oil markets in the short term, Iran, you know, fans the flames of panic, and Democrats and Republicans are just, you know, I guess, willing dupes in all of this.
But the panic, however, is really unwarranted in many, many ways because that can be neutralized as well.
And, you know, unfortunately, NATO really exposed themselves here.
I'm not sure if NATO will even survive this in the end.
I think after, you know, Spain, you know, Macron and France and, you know, Kieris Tharmer, how do you even consider such people allies?
The only thing the president requested is help us keep the Strait of Hormuz open for the free flow of oil at market prices.
When Spain now has closed their airspace to U.S. warplanes and a further rebuke to President Trump, a NATO member, and not going to be complicit in something that is bad for the world, really?
I guess the leader of Spain is willing to risk that.
Jerusalem Post had an interesting piece out.
European affairs journalist Jean-Marie Montali speaking to the Post about his and Razavi's book on Iran and their spy and influence networks within France.
How is it France has no go zones and other parts of Europe have no go zones?
And why did Great Britain ever allow unfettered illegal immigration without assimilation resulting in Sharia courts, nearly 100 of them, inside of Great Britain?
But it is what it is.
The one component I don't think we knew a lot about going into this, and Gordon Chang will weigh in on this more in the next hour, but the Islamic Republic of Iran, their vast missile system, is the brainchild.
As a matter of fact, most of their ballistic missiles are coming from North Korea and that regime, who's been working hand in glove with the Iranians, the missile launched at the Diego Garcia was a North Korean missile.
The Iranians bought 19 of those from the North Koreans.
They took delivery back in 05.
They have had this capability since then.
It's not the secret weapon as some people were claiming that it was.
But I know that on Fox, they reported last week Iran significantly escalated the war effort by launching two of these intermediate-range ballistic missiles towards the Diego Garcia.
That's, again, 2,500 miles from Iran.
They didn't meet their target.
But the most important threat from Iran as the war with the U.S. and Israel has evolved has been ballistic missiles.
And with the help of the North Koreans, which is nuclear-armed, that is a clear and present danger.
And at some point, I guess little Rocket Man is probably going to be engaged by the president, too, although the president was pretty effective at neutralizing him in his first term and actually developed a relationship that ended up being somewhat productive, actually.
But there's a mountain of concerns, too.
But this is all a Biden-Harris-Maorkis problem.
And I keep reading, New York Post, 1,500 Iranians intercepted at the border during the Biden administration.
We had over 12-plus million unvetted Biden-Harris-Maorkis illegals from over 200 countries.
Many of those countries have terror ties.
You know, of those 1,500 Iranians that were intercepted, we have no idea how many gotaways there were.
And there are known terrorists in the country.
I've confirmed that with Tom Holman, confirmed that with Kash Patel.
We have no idea how many people were able to get into the country.
Senator Haggerty quoted in this New York Post piece.
He's a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But about half of the intercepted Iranians were released into the country by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Maorkis.
And between Joe Biden's years 21 to 24, 700 Iranians released into this country pending court cases.
And we have no idea where most of them are.
Is there a possibility some of them are sleeper cells?
Yes, of course it is.
By the way, the Foreign Office has issued do not travel warnings to 52 countries.
I suggest if you're planning on traveling, you check that list out ahead of time.
U.S. also urging citizens to leave Iraq immediately.
But to be honest, if you're in that part of the world, until this is all said and done, I'd leave a lot of it behind.
Now, we have a lot to get to.
We have, I don't know if you saw the lunacy on display, the no-kings protest around the country.
Fox News had a very interesting report that these numbers, a lot of this is astroturfing.
They actually came up with a conclusion about 500 organizations behind these no-kings protests.
They say it's grassroots, but it was 100% astroturf.
We'll get to that.
We'll have the latest on the government shutdown.
There is an insider advantage poll that shows a huge percentage of Americans approve of Donald Trump's executive order to finally pay TSA agents.
Some Democrats are against that and much, much more.
When we come back, Gordon Chang knows more about the real capability of the Iranians way more than has been disclosed.
This likely, in all likelihood, this was a far more imminent threat than anybody knew.