Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has told podcaster Joe Rogan that if he had been in office, he would have prevented last year’s October 7 Hamas incursion into Israel.
During his much-hyped appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Saturday, Trump said that when he had been US president between 2017 and 2021, his approach was to “do things that… do not necessarily make me so popular... just do what is right.” According to the 78-year-old, one of the examples of that approach was his treatment of Iran.
In 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew Washington from the landmark Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which saw Iran giving up on its military nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions. Instead, he imposed a bevy of new restrictions on Tehran.
"Iran was broke. I told China if you buy [oil from Tehran] you cannot do business in the US under any circumstances. I was going... to go cold turkey with China. Some people think that would have been a good idea anyway,” the former president said.
He claimed that he had also warned “many” other countries that if they purchase even “one barrel of oil” from Iran they would be barred from the US market.
Because of this, “Iran was broke. They had no money for Hezbollah; they had no money for Hamas,” Trump said.
"We would have never had the attack on Israel at all” if he had been president, the Republican nominee insisted, referring to the October 7, 2023 strike.
During the Hamas incursion into Israel, approximately 1,200 people were killed and 250 others were taken hostage. The ongoing military operation which West Jerusalem launched in Gaza in response to the attack has left at least 42,847 people dead and 100,544 others wounded so far, according to the enclave’s health ministry.
Early on Saturday, October 26, the Israeli military announced that it had carried out strikes on Iran, hitting approximately 20 military sites in the country in retaliation for Tehran’s missile attack on Israel earlier this month. Iran has confirmed that the bombardment took place, but said it only resulted in “limited damage.”
On October 1, Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the killing of the Hamas and Hezbollah leaders as well as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) general.