A few hours before the polling stations open in the United States for the midterm elections, President Donald Trump said this Tuesday that the confrontation with Iran is not "a war" but "a soft war," emphasizing that for months there have been no shots fired and that conversations are under way.
In a telephone intervention on Fox News host Sean Hannity's program, Trump defended that Washington negotiates "from a position of total strength," that it can stop the offensive "at any moment" and that Tehran "is very eager to reach an agreement," although he warned that the fighting could resume if that understanding is not reached.
Trump backed the pressure campaign by calling the 2015 nuclear deal a "disaster," criticizing it for having opened the "path to the atomic weapon" to Tehran while it was consolidating itself as "the first state sponsor of terrorism" on a global scale. Along these lines, the president indicated that seven months ago he chose to take "a little detour" in his schedule --despite the "good figures" in the United States-- with the aim of preventing Iran from achieving nuclear capability, a scenario that, he emphasized, "we are not going to allow."
The leader maintained that the Iranian defenses "have disappeared" and that the country now barely has missiles and drones or infrastructure to produce them, attributing to the "Midnight Hammer" operation of June 2025 the destruction of all its atomic potential. Likewise, he pointed out that it could be necessary to attack the alleged nuclear facility located in the Pickaxe mountain --whose existence the Islamic Republic denies--, an action that, he stated, could be completed "in an hour".
Control over Venezuela and the world oil
Faced with criticism over the disbursement of 30.000 million dollars (26.800 million euros) in the war, he responded that they are "peanuts" compared with what was obtained in Venezuela, where, according to his account, the conflict "lasted much less than a day" and the United States now holds "total control" and "our own people".
Trump stated that, adding U.S. crude production and Venezuelan production, the country controls more than half of the planet's oil reserves. He also emphasized that Greenland was "obtained" after an agreement with Denmark and that its value amounts to "five trillion dollars".
In the diplomatic arena, Trump has boasted that the United States is "respected again all over the world", citing as examples the king of Saudi Arabia and the secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte. In addition, he has maintained that Washington is ahead of China in "superintelligence" (SI) --the term his Administration uses to refer to artificial intelligence-- and that the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, congratulated him in Chinese on his management.
In another sphere, the president has reproached the previous Administration for having "given away" abundant military equipment to Ukraine without passing the bill on to the European Union, something that --he has assured-- he does do.
In the same vein, he has boasted about having forced other countries to raise the price of medicines by means of the "threat of tariffs" in order to manage to lower their cost in the United States.
With a view to Tuesday's elections, Trump has urged his supporters to "pretend" that he appears on the ballot: "If our people vote, we win by majority".
Polls indicate that the Republican Party could lose the majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, which would complicate Trump's legislative capacity during the second part of his term.