‘I Have Agreed to Talk’
· The Atlantic
One day after launching strikes on Iran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and embroiled the region in war, President Trump told me this morning that the country’s new leadership wants to talk with him and that he plans to do so.
“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long,” Trump told me in a phone call from his Mar-a-Lago club shortly before 9:30 a.m.
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Asked whether his conversation with the Iranians would happen today or tomorrow, Trump responded, “I can’t tell you that.” He noted that some of the Iranians involved in negotiations in recent weeks were no longer alive. “Most of those people are gone. Some of the people we were dealing with are gone, because that was a big—that was a big hit,” he told me. “They should have done it sooner, Michael. They could have made a deal. They should’ve done it sooner. They played too cute.”
Yesterday morning, in a video posted on social media, Trump called on the people of Iran to rise up against the current regime once the bombing campaign ended. “Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond,” he said. “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach.”
[Read: ‘The worst-case outcome is complete chaos’]
I asked Trump whether he was willing to prolong the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran to support a popular uprising if one unfolds. “Will they continue to get support if it takes some time to overthrow the regime?” I asked. Trump was noncommittal. “I have to look at the situation at the time it happens, Michael. You can’t give an answer to that question,” he said.
But the president also expressed confidence that a successful uprising was coming, noting the signs of celebration in the streets of Iran and supportive gatherings of expatriate Iranians in New York and Los Angeles. “That is going to happen. You are seeing that, and I think it’s gonna happen. A lot of people are extremely happy over there and in Los Angeles and in many other places,” he told me. (In addition to pro-regime-change celebrations in several major cities, large anti-war protests have also been held, many of them just a few blocks away.)
Trump told me he was pleased with Iranian people’s reaction so far. “Knowing it’s very dangerous, knowing I’ve told everybody to stay in place—I think it’s a very dangerous place right now,” he told me. “The people over there are shouting in the streets with happiness, but at the same time, there are a lot of bombs coming down.”
For years, the U.S. intelligence community has tracked and disrupted Iranian-led assassination plots against U.S. officials, including Trump, inside the United States. I asked him whether he had any indication of renewed Iranian threats against the U.S. homeland since the start of the attack. “I don’t want to tell you that,” he said.
[Read: How Trump lives with the threat of Iranian assassination]
Soon after our conversation, U.S. military officials announced that three U.S. service members were killed in the operation and five more were seriously wounded—the first known American casualties of the campaign. Trump told me he expects the attack on Iran will not disrupt Republican efforts before this fall’s midterm elections to convince voters that his administration is focused on delivering economic benefits for the country. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had,” he told me. “The word isn’t out because people like you don’t write about it properly. But the economy is ready to go through the roof. And it already is in many cases.”
Trump argued that the attack’s effect on oil markets, which reopen tonight, would likely be less disruptive on American pocketbooks than some analysts had predicted, given the early success of the operation. “This could have been a huge price increase with respect to oil, if things went wrong,” he told me.
“So we’ll see what happens,” he added, before pivoting back to his decision to attack Iran for the second time since June. “People have wanted to do it for 47 years. They’ve killed people for 47 years, and now it’s reversed on them.”