President Trump: Our powerful military campaign to end the threats posed by the Iranian regime continued in full force over the last few days. They have been literally obliterated. The air force is gone. The navy is gone. Many, many ships have been sunk. They're war fighting ships, but I guess they didn't know how to use 'em. Anti-aircraft is decimated, their radar is gone, and their leaders are gone. Other than that, they are doing quite well. They have been a terror for forty-seven years, and now I guess the world, with the United States, with the help of Israel, is doing what should have been done many years ago.

President Trump: Since the beginning of the conflict, we've struck more than seven thousand targets across Iran,. and these have been mostly commercial and military targets. We've achieved a ninety percent reduction in their ballistic missile launches, and a ninety-five percent reduction is drone attacks. The missiles are trickling in now, at very low levels, because they don't have too many missiles left. We've also attacked the manufacturing plants, where they; places where they manufacture the missiles and the drones. And that's going on today. We just hit three of them today. It's getting very har for them to manufacture.

President Trump: More than one hundred Iranian naval vessels have been sunk or destroyed over the last week and a half; has to be some kind of a record. Additional strikes continue to launch from all directions every single hour. As you know, we attacked Kharg Island and knocked it; knocked it literally, destroyed everything on the island except for the area where the oil is. I call it the pipes. We left the pipes. We don't want to do that, but we will do that. We can do that on five minutes notice, it'll be over. But for purposes of someday rebuilding that country, I guess we did the right thing. But it may not stay that way. Just one simple word, and the pipes will be gone too, but it will take a long time to rebuild that.

President Trump: We are aggressively dismantling Iran's defense industrial base, and ability to rebuild it's missiles and drone capability is getting down to close to zero. And we're hammering their capacity to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, with more than thirty mine laying ships destroyed. We hit, to the best of our knowledge, all of their mine laying ships. Now they can put them on other types of ships, I guess, and drop 'em in, but we don't know that any have even been dropped in. We're not sure that any have been. That's a big negative for them if they do it. It's a form of suicide.

President Trump: This is a paper tiger that we're dealing with now [Iran]. It wasn't a paper tiger two weeks ago; it's a paper tiger now.

President Trump: We've been protecting these countries for years, with NATO. Because NATO is us. You can ask Putin. Putin fears us. He doesn't fear; he has no fear of Europe whatsoever. He fears the United States of America, and the military that was built by me in the first term.

President Trump: They [Iran] showed buildings in Tel Aviv, burning to the ground; highrises burning. They showed buildings in Qatar. They showed buildings in Saudi Arabia burning, and they weren't burning. They weren't hit. It was all AI. AI-based. Terrible. It's terrible. And that's their only; I think that's the only thing they do well.

Reporter:Now that you've announced the U.S. has destroyed all of Iran's mine laying ships, why can't the U.S. just immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz?

President Trump: Well, we could, but it takes two to tango. We have to get people to take their billion dollar ship and, you know, drive it up. When Pepe has his big sugar ships coming around, and they cost a billion dollars, and we say, 'I think it's okay now, Pepe. Take a ship. Drive it through the Strait of Hormuz', he may say. 'Let me wait a while'. Because it takes ship owners and; you know, these ships are very expensive. They could cost up to two billion dollars.

President Trump: I can tell you that when this is over, oil prices are going to go down very, very rapidly,. So is inflation, so is everything else.

President Trump: Hezbollah's a problem. It's been a problem for a long time, not just now….they're rapidly being eliminated.