Trump says ‘if anything,’ US ‘forced Israel’s hand’ in initiating Iran strikes

A reporter asked Trump in the Oval Office, "Mr. President, did Israel force your hand to launch these strikes against Iran?" Trump replied, "No, I might have forced their hand."

Trump said of Iran, "You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack first. If we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that." He said that the US has "great negotiators," and that "based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first."

"So if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand, but Israel was ready, and we were ready, and we’ve had a very, very powerful impact, because virtually everything they have has been knocked out. Now their missile count is going way down. Amazingly, they’re hitting countries that were, you know, let’s call them neutral, right? They lived together for a long time. They, I think they were surprised. I was surprised, I think, and now those countries are all fighting against them and fighting strongly against them."

This comes after Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed similar comments on Monday night.

"There absolutely was an imminent threat," Rubio said. "And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded, because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first, after they were attacked by someone else, [if] Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths."

"We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage," Rubio continued. "Had we not done so, there would have been hearings on Capitol Hill about how we knew that this was going to happen and we didn't act preemptively to prevent more casualties and more loss of life."