Trump says the Iran war will end when he wants it to

Donald Trump has given the Iran war an end date: whenever Donald Trump feels like it. Telling his Lubbock rally on Tuesday about a question he’d been asked earlier, “when will the war in Iran end?”, he said his answer was that it ends when he wants it to. He’d already said as much a few seconds before, in nearly the same words. Hours later, after midnight at Joint Base Andrews, asked what he’d discussed with Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, he said it again: on Iran, it’s “simply a question of when do I want to end it.”

He also says it will be quick, and that when it ends, “we win that one, just like we won in Venezuela,” adding that he’s “winning here very strongly.” And the finish line, as he puts it, is that “they will never have a nuclear weapon.” Those are his claims, the Venezuela “win” included. He didn’t say when, or how anyone would know.

The setup came straight out of his own inflation brag (“I inherited the worst inflation in American history, and we have it way down now”), so the war section lasts about half a minute before he moves on to investment numbers.