President Donald Trump gave Axios an update Sunday on his deeply unpopular war against Iran, during which he repeated a near-identical phrase to one he uttered to former ally Tucker Carlson just before launching the conflict.
It's a comment that led the conservative commentator to suspect at the time that the president was acting "against his will."
“We are low-keying it,” Trump told Axios in what the outlet described as a “brief phone call” regarding the U.S. war against Iran. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”
It was Trump’s next remark that bore a striking similarity to his past remarks made just before the war.
“It will work out. It always works out,” Trump said.
The U.S. war against Iran has sent food and gasoline prices soaring in the United States due to disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz, the critical shipping waterway through which 20% of the world’s oil trade flows. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Trump has privately floated abandoning his top war objective – securing a nuclear deal with Iran – so long as Tehran fully reopens the strait, which flowed freely before he launched the war.
Earlier this month, Trump was prepared to launch a massive attack on Iran before walking back the threat amid reports of critical U.S. shortages of missiles, and on Sunday, he revealed to Axios how his administration planned on dealing with the war going forward.
Similar remarks were flagged by Carlson during his interview with The New York Times in May, in which he recalled pleading with Trump prior to the conflict not to launch the war.
“He said to me, 'everything's gonna be okay' because I was getting overwrought [and told him] 'don't do this.' He said, 'it's gonna be alright,' and he said, 'do you know how I know that?' And I said, 'no.' He said, 'because it always is,’” Carlson told the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
Carlson’s read on Trump’s remarks, he explained, was that Trump was well aware that the conflict would “end his presidency,” but proceeded anyway, and “against his will.”
“I do think there's a kind of Teddy Roosevelt optimism there, but that's not really what it was,” Carlson continued. “This is my read: that was more a justification from a man who feels he has no choice, and that is my strong view, and not just my strong view, [but] the view of others who were around him.”
Carlson has also previously accused Israel – which has advocated for the United States to attack Iran since at least the 1990s – of exerting significant pressure on Trump to launch the war, and went as far as to suggest the president may have been the victim of a “blackmail operation.”