Trump Says ‘We Don’t Need a Deal With Iran’ as Blockade Squeezes Tehran

Leave a CommentTrump Says ‘We Don’t Need a Deal With Iran’ as Blockade Squeezes TehranFeatured

President Trump said Thursday that the United States no longer needs a deal with Iran, writing on Truth Social, “We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed,” Breitbart News reported.

“We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!” Trump wrote. In the same post he told Vice President JD Vance to focus on domestic priorities.

The post came a day after Trump’s Veterans Day address at Arlington National Cemetery, where he said the U.S. had won a decisive military victory and would finish the job. “We want to make sure we have a total victory, not a 93% victory. It’s going to be total,” he said.

‘The regime is collapsing’

In an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, Trump said, “We control the Gulf in terms of the Hormuz Strait. We control it. Totally control it.” Asked whether he would keep the naval blockade in place if it took another 26 months to bring down the government, he answered, “Well, the regime is collapsing.”

In a separate interview with Stephen A. Smith released Thursday, Trump said Saudi Arabia had asked him to “just let it be the way it is now for a while because they’re disintegrating.” Asked whether he would already have expanded military operations without those Gulf requests, he said, “Yes, I would.”

Trump said further strikes on Iran’s remaining industrial sites and the Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility “could happen.” Asked what would happen if Iran killed a senior U.S. official, he said, “They will not exist very long any longer.”

The numbers behind the blockade

U.S. Central Command figures released Wednesday and cited by Breitbart show nearly 150 vessels trying to break the blockade have been turned back and five ships disabled. About $30 billion in Iranian crude exports have been stopped. Nearly 4,000 commercial vessels carrying about 1.7 billion barrels of crude have moved through the strait under U.S. protection.

Trump also said Iran’s inflation is above 300 percent and that the regime cannot pay its soldiers. Those figures are his and have not been independently confirmed.

Tehran’s response

Iranian official Mohsen Rezaei said Thursday that Iran’s forces were ready to deliver “new surprises on the battlefield.” Iran’s Assembly of Experts, which oversees Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, called for reconsidering Iran’s membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. On Tuesday it was reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had moved his family onto a military installation after Tehran-linked threats.

The White House said talks remain possible if Iran offers acceptable terms. “If he ever sees a smart deal worth looking at, he’ll send the VP to get it done,” a U.S. official said. Iran is demanding seven conditions before serious talks, including an end to the blockade and reparations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called those demands “absurd” on Tuesday.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who is running to lead the incoming Democratic Senate majority, has made ending the Iran war one of his top priorities, the Daily Wire reported.

The bottom line

Iran opened this week demanding reparations, sanctions relief and the release of frozen assets before it would even sit down. The President’s answer is that the United States holds the strait, the money and the leverage, and has no reason to pay Tehran for the privilege of talking.

The blockade numbers back him up. Thirty billion dollars in oil that never left port is money the regime cannot spend on missiles, proxies or the threats that forced a cabinet secretary to move his family onto a base. A regime that answers pressure by talking about leaving the nonproliferation treaty has shown what it would do with relief.

The door to a deal stays open on American terms, with the Vice President ready to go if Tehran gets serious. Until then the blockade should stay exactly where it is, and Democrats taking over the Senate in January should not be allowed to bargain it away.

Sources

ICE Deported 483,000 Illegal Immigrants in a Year, a Record, as GOP Senators Rule Out Amnesty

Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed more than 483,000 people in fiscal year 2026, the most in the agency’s history, according to ICE data released Thursday and reported by Breitbart News.

The total beat the previous record of about 442,640, set in fiscal 2025, also under President Trump. Breitbart reported it is nearly three times the Biden administration’s annual average and eight times the roughly 60,000 deportations in fiscal 2021, under Biden.

“Fiscal Year 2026 saw the highest number of ICE deportations and arrests for any year in ICE’s history,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said. He said the year’s arrest total “was more than all three full fiscal years under Biden combined.”

Arrests also hit a record

ICE took more than 491,000 people into custody during the fiscal year. About 475,000 of those were administrative arrests for civil immigration violations. August 2026 was the busiest month in the agency’s history, with more than 50,000 arrests. The ICE data does not break out border removals from interior deportations.

Senate Republicans: no amnesty

The numbers came out as Senate Republicans responded to the President’s suggestion that a deal may be possible for some long-term residents. In a television interview that aired over the weekend, Trump said, “Get the killers out, get the rapists out, get all the rough ones out, get the drug dealers out,” and to “let the people that are here — and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years — work a deal for them,” Fox News reported. Mullin then said there would be “no amnesty.”

Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., said, “I trust President Trump,” but “amnesty is off the table. I’ll never go for it.” Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., also rejected amnesty, citing Ronald Reagan’s regrets over the 1986 amnesty.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he has “not seen anything yet that’s being proposed” but would “hear them out.” Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who negotiated the failed 2024 border bill and is expected to become the top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee next year, said, “If I’m ranking on Homeland Security, I’m right in the thick of it, whether you like it or not.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is retiring, said he texted Trump as early as March that it was the “perfect time” to write border measures into law alongside merit-based reform.

Critics of the administration point to a September Fox News poll in which 53% of voters said Trump’s immigration policy had gone too far.

The bottom line

In fiscal 2021, under President Biden, ICE removed about 60,000 people. In the President’s first full fiscal year back in office, it removed more than 483,000 and made a record 50,000-plus arrests in a single month. The difference between those years was a decision in the White House to enforce the law already on the books.

That record is why Senate Republicans are right to draw the line where Banks and Budd drew it. Budd pointed to Reagan’s own regrets over the 1986 amnesty, a lesson that still applies. With Democrats taking control of both chambers in January, any immigration bill will be shaped by the party that ran the government in 2021, when removals were a fraction of today’s.

If there is to be a deal, the order matters. The border measures that produced these numbers should be written into law first, so the next administration cannot undo them with a stroke of the pen. Only then should Congress talk about anything else.