What They’re Saying About the U.S.–Iran Talks—June 19–20, 2026

“There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired, unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not be completed, for services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement of costs.”

“[The MOU] really probably is unconditional surrender [by the Iranian regime]. . . . Look, they have no military. They're all at the bottom of the sea. 159 ships. That’s what they had. . . . Look, you call it what you want.”

“There’s no airplanes. They had a lot of ‘em. There were 200 of them. They’re all gone. Navy. 159 ships, right? All at the bottom of the sea. Leadership, their first stringers all gone, including Khomeini, the first one. They then put a new group in there. Very good, but very nasty. I dealt with ‘em. They’re gone. They’re all gone. Then we’re dealing with the third group who I actually think is the smartest group. And I actually think it’s regime change. . . . They’re different people. All right, Khomeini Jr. is different from the father. And we have people that are much less radicalized than the previous two groups, of which I knew ‘em both.”

“‘Oh, why aren’t you tougher?’ The only way I can get tougher is if I go in there for another two or three weeks and continue to bomb the hell out of ‘em. Right? But what does that get us? The Strait of Hormuz will not be open. Let’s say I did that. Let's say I decided to do that. That it was a decision I had to make. So right now, our stock market is through the roof. The oil prices are tumbling. The oil prices are practically the same as they were before it started. The big difference is that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. They're never going to have a nuclear weapon. OK? It’s very clear and very simple. But if I were hitting them right now, when you stopped, if we’re not going to put boots on the ground, OK. I mean you don’t want boots on the ground, right? If we're not going to put boots on the ground, probably the same people, you know, they go deep into the caves. They’re called granite caves. They’re very powerful. They go deep and then when we stop, they’ll come up and they’ll probably be the same leaders. So nothing, OK, ready? When I knocked them out, we knocked them out so powerfully, we would right now have the Hormuz Strait would be totally closed. It would have mines all over it and it would have missiles flying over billion-dollar ships. And those ships will never sail. We wouldn’t have oil for months. As long as you’re dropping bombs, that thing is automatically closed because those ships cost 500 [million] to a billion dollars apiece. They’re not going to be sailing with rockets. So just to finish, I just looked, oil is tumbling. The ships are roaring out of there. They want to go home, they want to drop. They’re all full with oil. There's a gusher. I mean, we have 7[00] or 800 ships are leaving, but if I attack them, none of those ships are leaving. The stock market is way up, way, way up. . . . Everybody’s richer. Now, would you rather have that or be like some stupid people?”

“Well, so far, not too many [congressional Republicans oppose the MOU], but I think it’ll get approved. And if it’s not approved . . . By the way, Obama never got his plan approved. You know that right? Now, Obama did something very different. He thought [he] could buy . . . Frankly, if they approve it or not, look, it is what it is.”

“I had to stop [the Iranian regime] because if they had a nuclear weapon, they would use it. And you want to see bedlam, let them blow up a couple of cities someplace, like they would’ve blown up Israel. If it weren't for me, Israel would not exist today because I terminated the Barack Hussein Obama deal, the JCPOA, which was a road to a nuclear weapon. They would've had it five years ago. They would've used it within the first week, in my opinion. And Israel would no longer be with us. Israel would’ve been gone years ago had I not done that. . . . All that enriched material, they were one month away. It was right there. They could have walked down. They can't do that anymore. You know, the B2 bombers did their job with those great pilots. That ceiling, the mountain collapsed on top of it. It collapsed on top of it. Had we not hit them, they would’ve had a nuclear weapon. They would’ve used it on Israel. You would’ve used it also in Saudi Arabia. And you saw that on Qatar, on UAE, on Kuwait, Bahrain. Because when that war started, I guess my biggest surprise, almost immediately missiles were flying at these five other countries. I said, why is he doing it? And you know what that did? That brought those five countries right into my lap. They were great.”

“I will be [able to stop Israel from striking Lebanon]. I wonder. They have a lot of respect for me, and they do as I say.”

[Question: “If Israel decides to attack Iran itself, will you defend it and assist it?”

“Absolutely.”

“I want to thank [Chinese President Xi Jinping] because he didn’t get involved with the whole thing with Iran. He could have gotten involved. He could have sent a nice oil ship surrounded by 12 destroyers and see if he could blast his way through the blockade, which was an unbelievable military. . . . But President Xi, I asked him, I said, I’d really appreciate you not getting involved. And he was great. He didn't get involved.”

“There is no 300 Billion Dollar payment to Iran by the U.S. That’s Fake News! All there is for the U.S. is Success, Lower Oil Prices, and Victory. Check out the Stock Market. Dumocrat propaganda at play!!!”

“The United States is committed to PEACE, and we encourage everyone in the Middle East Region to maintain their commitment to allowing our negotiations to beautifully unfold. The Markets are loving what is happening with Oil Prices way down, and Stocks way up. We expect a complete Ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Israel.”

“We didn’t meet out of desperation, Iran did. They are FINISHED! We’ll play out the 60 days. They get no money, not ten cents!”

“Radical Left fools and Dumocrats realize how well we have done in our War against Iran, with their Country being completely defeated militarily. Obuma just kept giving them $Billions in cash, and never used our then depleted military for what should have been done to reign in the World’s number one sponsor of terror, Iran. They had ZERO respect for him. They thought he was, like Sleepy Joe Biden, a weak and ineffective leader, and on this they were 100% correct. Iran got away with ‘murder’ for 47 years, until I came along. Then it all changed. AMERICA IS BACK!!!”

“There’s a lot in the media about all of the things Iran gets, right? I’ve heard numbers like $300 billion reconstruction fund, $24 billion of unfrozen assets and all this other stuff. And what the deal contemplates is that there will be economic benefits—to be clear, not paid for by American taxpayers. Not a cent of American money goes to Iran. But there could potentially be economic benefits for Iran paid for by investment from other countries, but only if they fundamentally transform their country. And so when I see people say: Well you shouldn’t give them anything—I say: Well, we’re not giving them anything. And then they’ll say: Well, you shouldn’t allow anybody to invest in their country. And I say: Well, if the Iranian political system is transformed in how they interact with the United States of America, isn’t investing in their reconstruction and redevelopment a good thing? Like, if we’ve transformed their country, isn’t that good? . . . [T]he Iranian political system is not going to be transformed by this deal, but I think the Iranian political system has been transformed by what has happened not just over the last few months but over the last year and a half.”

“[T]he Obama-Iran deal allowed them to generate a stockpile of enriched uranium. Our deal ensures that stockpile is destroyed and eliminated, so that’s a very, very big difference, a very important difference for the American people. . . . and it sets a minimum methodology for the destruction. But when you say negotiated over a period of months, this is why I always try to be clear about what this is and what this isn’t. This is not a blood oath, right? People break contracts. And my attitude is, you know, I can be cynical at some times about what people promise. . . . But . . . when people say: Is the destruction actually in the memorandum of understanding? The answer is yes. But it’s not like we sign this thing on Friday and through some act of magic it happens. There has to be a process for doing it. We have to see that it’s actually happening. And so while the memorandum of understanding, while the peace deal, is, I think, fundamentally good for the American people, a big part of this is verifying, ensuring, they honor their end of the commitment.”

“What I would say is that while there are fractures [in the Iranian regime]—and those fractures were very powerful a couple of months ago—we do see some coalescing with both the hard-liners and the pragmatists behind the idea, not just that they want a peace deal now, but that 47 years of Iran policy toward the United States has been a mistake.”

[Question: “Independent of the deal itself, what is your administration’s estimate of how long it would take Iran to reconstitute things based on what has been done to them in the last two years?”]

“It’s a very hard question to answer, and, obviously, it gets a little bit into classified information, but it’s dependent a little bit also on how much money they have. To build an underground nuclear facility with all of the centrifuges and all the capacity to enrich uranium and all the ability to turn enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon, it would cost a lot of money. And so without access to money, it would take many, many years—decades possibly. If they had unlimited access to resources, but they don’t, it would obviously be shorter. But we feel with extraordinary confidence, if they did everything that they could to build a nuclear weapon, they couldn’t do it during this administration. And what this deal does fundamentally is set up a framework whereby we can be confident that they’re not going to build a nuclear weapon far into the future.”

Vice President JD Vance | Comments to Journalists

“Everybody knew the Strait of Hormuz—just for pure function of geography and how easy it is to asymmetrically disrupt traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Everybody, the Gulf coast coalition, the United States, Israel, Iran, everybody has known that Iran has had that as a potential leverage point to use. Everybody understood that, so the idea that we discovered that or that the Gulf coast coalition discovered that is not accurate. . . . One of the things that we’ve actually been able to do under what was originally called Project Freedom is that we’ve been able to get a lot of oil and gas out of the Gulf in the last few weeks. And I do think this is one of the things the Iranians learned. The Strait of Hormuz is not a card that you play and then you pick up off the table. You have to play it day after day after day. And I think the fundamental transformation is that the Iranians saw that leverage point— to be clear, it was very powerful three months ago—was weakening more and more over time. . . . So could we have kept going? Sure, we could have kept going, and we would have gotten more and more oil and gas out of the Strait of Hormuz. But the fundamental thing that the president asks—and he’s just fundamentally pragmatic about foreign policy—is he looks at the situation and says: If we keep going, gas prices stay higher for longer, inevitably, and we also don’t get this opportunity that we have right in front of us to at least take a shot at transforming the Middle East. And if it doesn’t work, we can always figure out new options a couple of months down the road. We could always just say: By the way, you know what? Their nuclear program is destroyed. They can’t rebuild it without any money. So we’re going to continue to choke their economy and say to the Iranians: Come to us when you want to make a deal. There’s a lot of optionality here, and I think what the president said is he wanted to get us to a point where we had optionality, we had leverage, and then play this out a little bit further. And that’s what we’re doing.”

“I am very confident we can maintain the ceasefire.”

“One of the frustrations . . . that I had in the lead-up to Operation Epic Fury . . . is how sclerotic and impossible it was to actually talk to the Iranians. Fundamental questions like: What is it that you want, Iran? What is it that you care about? What is it that you’re willing to give up? That conversation was quite literally impossible six months or so ago. . . . But I would say the fundamental problem is Donald Trump could strike a deal with the Iranians, but it would require the Iranians to actually negotiate like a normal country. The fundamental difference is they are negotiating like a normal country. They’re making demands. Now, of course, sometimes we don’t like these demands. We disagree with those demands, but they’re talking to us in a way that I don’t think has happened diplomatically with the Iranian system in a very long time, maybe ever.”