President Trump gave a wide-ranging press conference Wednesday at the end of the G7 summit where he tackled questions about his tentative agreement with Iran.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
President Trump has signed the new preliminary agreement with Iran, doing so in an unexpected fashion – from the Versailles Palace in France. A ceremonial signing was scheduled to take place in Switzerland with Vice President JD Vance on Friday. Well, earlier today at a press conference at the end of the G7 summit in France, President Trump boasted that this new agreement ensures that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon while warning that he may resume strikes if Iran, in his words, misbehaves.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: If they don’t honor that, we’ll probably go back to bombing them until they honor it, you know? It’s amazing what bombs can do.
CHANG: While the president talked in broad strokes, another U.S. official read the full text out loud to a separate group of reporters on the condition of anonymity. NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez was in the room for the press conference in Evian, France. Hi, Franco.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, so this trip was only – what? – barely two days or a little more than that, but it seems like there was a lot packed in. I’m just curious. Like, how well did it seem like President Trump handled this whole quick turnaround from the UFC fights, which were just on Sunday, right?
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s really no doubt that it was an ambitious schedule. You know, as a reporter traveling with him, you know, I can tell you that sleep was pretty hard to come by.
CHANG: I’m so sorry.
ORDOÑEZ: But, you know, this president, though, Ailsa, is known for not sleeping much, really.
CHANG: Yeah.
ORDOÑEZ: And he did have a mix of meetings every day, I mean, including with the French president, with Gulf leaders, also with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But really in the opener of his press conference today, I mean, he kind of meandered, you know, going from Joe Biden’s favorite ice cream to disparaging Iranian culture while comparing himself favorably to former President Herbert Hoover.
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TRUMP: But the one I always thought of, Herbert Hoover – and he caused it. He raised taxes too fast, and he raised interest rates too fast all at the same time. And he caused the Great Depression.
ORDOÑEZ: And all this came as he was trying to basically sell his Iran framework.
CHANG: OK. Well, let’s talk about this framework. How much more clarity did President Trump offer on this agreement?
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, it was pretty striking how much Trump’s public promises do not appear to be backed up by the text of the agreement. I mean, while it says Trump or Iran will never procure or develop nuclear weapons, you know, they’ve said that before. And from there, it gets really more aspirational, more into generalities. I mean, just as an example, the framework says the two sides agreed to discuss the issue of uranium enrichment and that they’ve also agreed to resolve the disposition of the enriched material that’s still buried in the mountain. The White House insists that Iran has agreed to destroy the enriched material, but that’s not quite so clear in the text. And like many things with Trump, I mean, he speaks in such strong declaratives while the framework really is a lot of TBD.
CHANG: Yeah.
ORDOÑEZ: You know, it’s just to be determined.
CHANG: Also, like, Trump lashed out at former President Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal. Why do you think Trump is so obsessed with that comparison?
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, he brought up the Obama deal repeatedly through the summer. I mean, Trump has been fixated on Obama for years, I mean, constantly comparing his own record against Obama’s. And look, Trump is a big consumer of media, as we know, and the airwaves have really been full of people, full of experts, comparing, you know, these two deals, particularly because Trump ripped up the 2015 agreement saying it was too weak.
CHANG: OK. Well, finally, I mean, maybe it’s a little too early to talk about Trump’s legacy right now, but what impact do you think this war with Iran will have on Trump’s presidency or at least how it’s remembered?
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, I think historians are going to ask, what did the U.S. get for this war? I mean, what you have now is a slow reopening of the strait and the negotiation on a nuclear front. And that’s basically where we were before. So so much of the scrutiny going forward is going to be on, what was the U.S. get (ph) for all the bombing, for the loss of more than a dozen troops and the U.S. economy taking a big hit?
CHANG: That is NPR’s Franco Ordoñez. Thank you, Franco.
ORDOÑEZ: Thank you, Ailsa.
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