President Donald Trump rejects the idea that starting a war with Iran this year betrayed his slogan “No more wars,” which he repeated repeatedly during his campaign for the White House.
In an interview broadcast Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said he had “no guarantees” that there would be no wars if he were re-elected.
“First of all, I did not guarantee that there would be no war. Why then would I have built the most powerful army in the world?,” President Trump said.
Mr. Trump also defended plans for a now-abandoned $1.8 billion fund that would have compensated the Republican president’s allies, and he repeated his baseless allegations of massive fraud in the vote count that has dragged on in California since Tuesday’s primary.
He ended the interview abruptly, annoyed by questions from NBC’s Kristen Welker.
During his 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly called his Democratic opponents warmongers and maintained that he was a president who had “started no new wars” and who would usher in an era of peace.
However, Mr. Trump said during the NBC interview, taped Friday in Wisconsin, that as a candidate he didn’t “promise anything.”
“I don’t like these endless wars. It’s not an endless war. We have been engaged in this for three months,” he said of the war with Iran, which began on February 28.
Mr. Trump said he was “doing the world” and the United States a favor because he had to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But elsewhere in the interview, Mr. Trump repeated a contradictory message by saying that US strikes last year had “wiped out” Iranian nuclear sites.
He also defended his decision, taken during his first term, to withdraw from the nuclear deal concluded by Democratic President Barack Obama with Iran, an agreement he strongly criticized, without negotiating the “better deal” he had promised to obtain.
“It takes years to do these things,” Mr. Trump said.
Trump accuses California of electoral fraud
California’s notoriously lengthy vote counting has attracted election conspiracy theories. Since Tuesday’s election, Mr. Trump has claimed without proof that the Democrats are rigging the vote.
The chief federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, appointed by Donald Trump, said Friday that his office had opened “several investigations into voter fraud.”
Late-counted Democratic-favored mail-in ballots ate into the vote totals of Mr. Trump’s preferred candidates for governor and mayor of Los Angeles. While Mr. Trump has often argued that variations in vote totals as late ballots are counted are a sign of fraud, they are only a reflection of a slow counting process.
In the interview, Mr. Trump continued to assert that this was a sign of “cheating” and a “rigged election,” and became increasingly frustrated when Ms. Welker pressed him to provide evidence to support these allegations.
“I just have to look. I just have to watch,” Mr. Trump said.
“But that’s not evidence,” Ms. Welker replied.
“And I listen. And I listen to people. And let’s see what happens,” Mr. Trump replied.
“Anti-instrumentalization” fund
Mr. Trump defended plans that his Justice Department said he had now abandoned to create a $1.776 billion “anti-dealing fund” as part of a deal to resolve the lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump against the Internal Revenue Service regarding the leak of his tax returns.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche reported Wednesday that the department was abandoning the plan. This announcement came after the project was suspended by a judge.
It also came after both Democrats and some Republicans raised concerns about the lack of oversight of the fund and the possibility of payments being made to participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
Mr. Trump told NBC that he thought the fund was “a great idea” and would be “disappointed” if it was not approved.
Asked if he thought those who attacked police officers on Jan. 6 should receive compensation, Mr. Trump responded, “I wouldn’t be inclined to say that, but I have to see that.” He then proceeded to make unfounded and false allegations about of the riot and those who stormed the Capitol.
On January 6, 2025, on his first day back in power, Mr. Trump granted a general pardon to the more than 1,500 people prosecuted for the events of January 6.
