President Donald Trump told 'Meet the Press' moderator Kristen Welker he would work with Iran to retrieve and destroy its highly enriched uranium if he can make a deal and defended an anti-weaponization fund.
“If we make a deal that now we’re friendly, we’ll all go together. It’ll be our equipment. We’ll take it out and destroy it, whether it’s on-site or whether we take it off-site,” Trump said.
Trump added, “And we will go with them, or without them. But we won’t have people shooting at us, OK?” and warned, “Now, if we don’t make a deal, then we’re going to take them out militarily very harshly. And we’ll wait till we do that before we go, in which case we’ll have safety either way.”
He said the United States could monitor activity because it has “cameras on it, all over it. If anybody walked there, if you walked over there, I would be able to read your first name on your lapel,” crediting that capability to his Space Force.
Trump said he is looking to keep U.S. troops deployed in the region until “completion” and said, “I don’t consider them in danger,” and he told Welker the two sides are “very close” to signing a pact.
On the terms he wants in a pact, Trump said he insisted on language banning Iran from acquiring nuclear material, quoting himself: “if they buy, purchase or acquire,” and said Iranians “pushed back ‘a little bit’ on my demand. ‘And then they didn’t.’”
Trump described Iran’s new leadership as “more rational, very smart,” said Mojtaba Khamenei is “part of” the approval process for a deal, and said, “I would if he’d like to,” about speaking directly with the new supreme leader while declining to say definitively whether he knows the leader’s exact location.
He declared, “Look, we have totally destroyed their military,” and said Iran has “some missiles left. They have some drones left,” adding his assessment that Iran has about “21%, 22%” of its prewar missile stockpile remaining.
Trump defended the Justice Department’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, called “the weaponization fund” a “great idea” and said he would be “disappointed” if Republicans did not get it approved.
Asked whether anyone who attacked police officers on Jan. 6 should receive taxpayer money, Trump said, “I wouldn’t be inclined to say so, but I have to see it.”
“Throughout the interview, which aired Sunday, Trump made a series of false, misleading or exaggerated comments,” the fact-checking account said, citing, among other items, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s March 2025 testimony that U.S. spy agencies had assessed Iran had not decided whether to build nuclear weapons and noting the International Atomic Energy Agency assesses Iran likely retains nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%.
On gas prices, Trump predicted they would fall once a deal is signed; oil executives cited in the account warned of a longer recovery, with Neil Chapman estimating “four to six weeks” to rebalance supply chains and Sultan Al Jaber saying it would take at least four months to return to 80% of pre-conflict flows, with full flows not returning before the first or second quarter of 2027.
The Justice Department told a court that the anti-weaponization fund is “not going forward,” and the account noted there is nothing to stop the administration from making payouts to allies in the future even without the fund.