President Donald Trump gloated over Israel's attack on Iran during a brief telephone conversation with CNN's Dana Bash.
The journalist spoke to the president Friday morning, hours after the Israeli strike that killed three of Iran's top military leaders, and he touched on some of the same points that he made in social media posts contradicting his own administration's statements, but added some braggadocio.
"I know we were reporting real time that his secretary of state Marco Rubio released a statement simply saying that Israel informed the Trump administration about these strikes beforehand, but didn't say explicitly that the U.S. supported what Israel was doing," Bash said. "So that's how I started a very brief conversation, and he responded by saying quote, 'We, of course, support Israel, obviously, and supported it like nobody has ever supported it,' and then he went on to say this: 'Iran should have listened to me when I said, you know, I gave them, I don't know if you know this, but I gave them a 60-day warning and today is day 61,' and then he said, 'They,' meaning Iran, 'should now come to the table to make a deal before it's too late,.'"
"Then he said something really noteworthy," she added. "He said, 'The people I was dealing with are dead, the hardliners,' to which I just wanted to underscore, so what you're saying is Israel has now killed the people who you were dealing with, and he said, very sarcastically, 'They didn't die of the flu, they didn't die of Covid.'"
Bash then offered her analysis of the conversation.
"It was a brief conversation, but my takeaway was twofold," Bash said. "Number one, they are really hoping that instead of escalating the situation, which is what most people our terrific reporters and analysts have been talking to all morning, believe is possible, even probable. He's hoping that instead of that, this forces Iran to come to the table. We'll see if that's if that's going to happen. He also, you know, he made clear he understands that it could escalate, but he is hoping now that Israel has done what it's done, that it takes another turn and de-escalate. We'll see."
"CNN News Central" host John Berman expressed surprise about the disconnect between Trump's statements and those from other top administration officials.
"It sounds like such an interesting conversation, though brief," Berman said, "and you hit on what seems to be emerging as one of the key questions here, especially based on what secretary of state Marco Rubio said almost immediately after the attacks began, which was, basically, this was Israel acting unilaterally. It's one thing if president Trump says this morning that he supports Israel, it's another if he signed off, as it were, on the attacks yesterday, and it's still hard to tell where that line is."
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