President Trump said the U.S. military would strike Iran for a second day on Wednesday as he loses patience with Tehran’s negotiators and punishes them for downing an American helicopter.
“We’re going to be attacking them, attacking them very hard,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office. “We’re going to hit them again hard today.”
Mr. Trump said that meant bombing Iran, though he mainly tied it to Iran’s takedown of an American helicopter on Monday.
The president said the Apache chopper was an “incredible machine” and “very expensive.”
The president ordered retaliatory strikes on Tuesday and said his patience is wearing thin as negotiators try to reach a deal that would lift a U.S. blockade of Iran’s ports, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and set the table for nuclear talks.
“They should sign that deal,” Mr. Trump said. “They keep tapping us along. They keep playing us for suckers.”
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Mr. Trump accused former U.S. presidents of allowing the Iranians to duck and weave in talks, conditioning Tehran to string things along.
The president said he will not be rushed into a bad deal, even as Americans complain of high gas prices. Inflation continued to rise in May, according to the government Consumer Price Index report on Wednesday.
“We want a deal that’s meaningful,” Mr. Trump said. “We want a deal that works.”
The president also suggested that millions of barrels of oil are starting to move through the Strait of Hormuz. He characterized it as a sneaky, well-orchestrated maneuver that evaded Iran’s detection.
“Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now,” he said. “We took out the other night, 22 ships late at night with no lights, because they don’t have any radar, because we blasted the crap out of it.”
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