TRANSCRIPT: President Trump Speaks with Sean Hannity at the White House, 1.08.26
[Video]
Note: [Sean Hannity sat in the Roosevelt Room for an interview with Donald Trump on January 8, 2026. It aired at 9 p.m Eastern the same day. He stated after the interview will be made available. We will update this transcript as the other segments are released. Video courtesy and copyright Fox News.]
Sean Hannity: You've done quite a bit of decorating since I've been here last.
President Trump: Well, I have.
Hannity: Great to see you, sir.
Trump: I didn't know it was a full hour. [Laughs] I thought it was gonna be maybe 10 or 15 minutes. [Laughs] But you do that to me every once in a while.
Hannity: Uh, I think I was pretty clear, but, uh, thank you for your time. We, we always appreciate it. Uh, there's really not much in the news, so there's not a real lot to talk about, but let's start with Venezuela. Narco terrorist, um, indicted. Guy that, we're losing 200 Americans a day to drugs.
Trump: Yeah.
Hannity: Walk us through this decision in Venezuela.
Trump: Well, it wasn't a hard decision. Democrats wanted him and Republicans wanted him, and nobody had what it takes to get him or didn't want to get him. I don't know, something happened. But, uh, he killed a lot of people. He sent a lot of bad people into our country. He was, emptied his prisons into the United States.
He emptied his mental institutions and insane asylums into the United States, and did a lot of very bad things. But he was a big, uh, drug pusher. You see that because all the boats that we shot down, they came out of Venezuela. A lot of drugs. There was a lot of boats and a lot of drugs. There are very few boats operating right now. [Laughs] It's almost no boats. You can't find any boats right now.
Hannity: I don't think anyone would go fishing in those waters.
Trump: Not a lot of people wanna go fishing anymore. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation] But, uh, we've knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water. And we are gonna start now hitting, uh, land with regard to the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico. It's very, very sad to watch and see what's happened to that country. But the cartels are running. And they're killing 250, 300,000 people in our country every single year, the drugs, it's, uh, horrible. It's devastated families. You know, you lose a child. Or a parent. I mean, parents are dying too with drugs. So we've done a really good job. We're knocking it down. The numbers are really getting to be, they're always gonna be too high if you have one person, but, uh, they're going down just like the border.
The border was a total mess for years. I did it the first time very quickly, and this time I did it even better, because this was a bigger mess. This was a border like no other probably in the history of the world. There's never been a border like that when anybody could just walk into your country.
Hannity: The border's ostensibly really closed now. They're --
Trump: Closed. They can't come in.
Hannity: They can't come in.
Trump: And nobody comes. Nobody even tries. And the people in Texas, Arizona, all these places that I won by [Laughs] such big numbers, they are so happy with the border. They had homes that they weren't even able to live in their home. Every day, people were knocking on their door. Every hour. And, uh, it's, it's just a great honor to be involved with it. The, uh, ICE and Border Patrol and all of the people have been so good. Tom Holman, Kristi Noem. The people have done such an incredible job. You have no idea.
Hannity: You've made a number of profound announcements and then a new announcement today. Uh, announcement number one was 30 to 50 million barrels of oil that they will be handing over to you, and you will sell it on the market --
Trump: Yep.
Hannity: -- uh, at market prices.
Trump: From Venezuela. Yeah.
Hannity: That money will be used for the people of Venezuela, and the people of America.
Trump: Correct.
Hannity: Uh, then they, you made an announcement yesterday that they will buy all of their goods from this country. Today, we learn that the holdovers, since Maduro's gone, have agreed to free all of the political prisoners.
Trump: Right.
Hannity: Um, it indicates they want peace with Trump: to me. Well, how do you interpret it?
Trump: We asked them to do that. Well, we asked them to do that, and they've been great. They really have been. I mean, we, everything we've wanted, they've, uh, given us. We went in, we took Maduro out, amazingly that nobody was killed. We didn't lose a soldier. We had some people wounded, but we didn't lose a soldier.
A couple of very brave helicopter pilots were wounded pretty badly, but they're good. They're in good shape. And, uh, it was an amazing attack. The other side was, lost a lot of people, unfortunately. But, you know, this house was in the middle of a fort with thousands of people and soldiers and everything else, and we went right into the middle of a fort.
Who would think you could do that and not lose anybody? But they had it planned so beautifully. Uh, General "Raizin" Caine and Pete Hegseth were fantastic. Marco has been doing a great job. The Vice president, the whole group has, it's just a fantastic, it's a fantastic group.
Hannity: Well, let's talk a little bit about you make these decisions. I don't care if it's this case, Operation Midnight Hammer. Um, in the one case, you're here in the White House in the situation room. You're watching this unfold in real time. In this case, you have operationally the same thing, a situation room down on --
Trump: Correct.
Hannity: -- in, in Palm Beach at Mar-a-Lago. You make that ultimate call. You are the Commander-in-Chief.
Trump: Right.
Hannity: You're watching it unfold in real time. What is that like?
Trump: Well, I've done it now quite a bit. We took out Soleimani, which was a big deal. I mean, a very big deal. Middle East. Uh, he was, uh, very bad to people. Killed a lot of people. Everybody you see, just about 95% of the people you see walking around without legs or without arms. That was the roadside bomb.
That was his baby. He loved it. We took him out. We took out al-Baghdadi. He's the founder of ISIS. We did Midnight Hammer, which was obliterate the Iran nuclear threat. And it was a total obliteration that [Laughs] as they found out, the B2 bombers and the best pilots anywhere in the world. They did that at night with no moon, totally dark. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation]
And every, every bomb went right down a- -- an air shaft into, deep into a granite mountain. It was amazing. And we did this. And, and there's, they're similar in a way. I don't know. This, this seems to have gotten the ma- -- the imagination maybe even more than the other ones, but I think they're very equal in many ways.
But, uh, I don't know. You know, maybe taking out the nuclear threat from Iran, it's very important. But in terms of captivating attention, this seems to be something that is beyond anything that anybody seen.
Hannity: Especially the operational details. Wha --
Trump: Well, the bravery involved, you know, I mean, to have people coming, going into a, an army fort with, you know, thousands of soldiers land a helicopter right in the middle of it, break down a, a steel door because it, you know, it was a fortified house. Break down a steel door, run through the hallway shooting and come out 10 minutes later with the guy who wasn't quite able to get into his safe house, you know, there's a safe --
Hannity: I heard, I heard they got to him within three minutes. Less than three minutes.
Trump: It, it was so fast. I mean, nobody's ever seen anything like it. And, uh, but the safe house wasn't safe because they had blow torches that go through steel like it's butter. They didn't have to use them. But we, uh, we have, these are great people. These are really brave people. Even coming down those ropes, you know, they're coming down ropes off the helicopter and they run them.
I, I was thinking to myself, "I wonder if I could do that. I can have to give it a try sometime." [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation]
But they do it like it's a, like it's a stairway, like it's a beautiful stairway. And, uh, they're on the ground instantly and they're ready for action. These are brave people. We have the greatest soldiers in the world. We have the greatest equipment in the world. Nobody can match us.
Hannity: You know, a lot --
Trump: And I rebuilt the entire military during my first term.
Hannity: Good thing you did.
Trump: Biden gave some of it away, a lot of it, but, but not a lot relative to what I bought. But he gave a big chunk to Afghanistan, which was just insane. That was one of the most embarrassing moments in the history of our country. This was the opposite. This was a total, uh, you know, if you think about Jimmy Carter with the hostages or you think about, uh, the Afghanistan disaster that we had not so long ago with Biden -- [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation]
-- where it was just mass confusion and, and the death of 13 great soldiers who I got to know, I got to know the families very well and great people. But also, and nobody talks about them, 48 people so badly injured, and hundreds of people dead. Hundreds of people, you know, when those bombs were off, because I, I count the other side, but there were hundreds of people killed, all because of an incompetent group of, uh, politicians and generals and people that shouldn't be there.
Hannity: Let's talk a little bit, uh, uh, maybe an under-reported story, but we know for a fact that both the, um, Russians and the Chinese provided missile and ballistic m- -- missile systems. They did it to both or, they helped Iran and they helped Venezuela, but you were able to dismantle that. You talk a lot about American military superiority, and then that goes into the issue that you raised this week of raising the budget for 2027 from one trillion to one and a half trillion dollars.
Trump: We need it, you know, when you look at the threat out there, we have the best equipment in the world, we make the best equipment in the world. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation] We may just, you know, there's nothing even close and, but we need it because there are some real threats out there.
Hannity: Yeah. Well, I think we certainly do. Let me ask you about this. And I think this is important. With every military operation comes risk and you have to obviously weigh that risk. And I, I think Americans would wanna know what goes into your thinking because there's a whole new military doctrine. I call it the Trump doctrine.
I think it's widely misunderstood. No forever wars. However, that doesn't mean you don't use the might and power of the US military. You mentioned Baghdadi, Soleimani, I'll add the mother of all bombs in Afghanistan --
Trump: Right.
Hannity: -- the ISIS Caliphate, and then taking out Iran's nuclear weapon sites, and now our hemisphere.
Trump: Right.
Hannity: Are, are you calling it the Donroe Doctrine?
Trump: Well, they call it the Donroe. I didn't call it that, but they're calling it this, the Monroe Duncan, and now they call it the Donroe, which is basically safety for this part of the world. And, uh, yeah, I mean, it's pretty simple. We don't want drugs pouring into our country. We don't want bad people coming into our country, like happened for four years under Biden who was a disgrace, worst president of the history of our country.
Horrible. We had some other bad ones. Let me tell you, Obama was a terrible president. The divisiveness and the hatred that was caused and many of the people allowed into the country. But what Biden did was a step beyond anything that anybody's ever done where you had millions of people pouring through the border. Now we have nobody coming in unless they come in legally.
Hannity: Hmm. Let's talk about, you said for the interim, you will be in charge. Okay. Obviously, the remaining leadership underneath Maduro, they've made, I mentioned earlier, three major concessions, 30 to 50 million barrels of oil. They're gonna buy and purchase all their goods from America. Now they're releasing political prisoners.
Trump: Yeah.
Hannity: Okay. What is your ultimate goal for the governance of Venezuelan?
Trump: Prisoners that nobody thought they would ever see again are being released, yeah. And in many cases, good people is what I understand, but prisoners, nobody ever thought they'd be released. So we're going to be working with them and leadership of the country, and so far we've been working very well. You know, we picked up the Russian freighter that trudged out there.
Hannity: Well, I want to ask you about that.
Trump: Well, they had some Russian ships guarding it and they decided not to mess around with us. And we took that one and it's unloading the oil. But we're, we're getting, uh, we're taking billions and billions of dollars worth of oil and it'll be hundreds of billions of dollars. It'll be trillions of dollars, but we're gonna be there till we straighten out the country.
We'll see how the country's doing. But we'll be running the oil. We're meeting tomorrow with all of the big oil executives. We're gonna be right here in the White House. We're gonna meet with the, you know, biggest oil people in the world. They're all coming here. The top 14 companies are coming here. They're gonna go in. They're gonna rebuild the whole oil infrastructure.
They're gonna spend at least $100 billion and it's an unbelievable oil that they have and an unbelievable quality of oil and amount of oil.
Hannity: When they nationalized the oil industry in Venezuela, uh, going back to the 1920s --
Trump: Yeah.
Hannity: -- American companies had invested billions.
Trump: We built it. Yep.
Hannity: All of it.
Trump: And then it was taken away from us. Yeah.
Hannity: Stolen.
Trump: It was stolen from us. And, uh, it was taken away, you know, years ago over a period of time, but it was taken away in the, uh, early 2000s, even beyond that, but the early 2000s. And, um, I just took it back.
Hannity: I can't imagine, um, them being able to, they, they have the largest oil reserves in the world. I can't imagine without American investment, ingenuity, engineering, a- -- and our assistance that they would be, ever be able to tap into the vast resources that they have. Again, the largest in the entire world. So that will be a big part of it. What does that mean in terms of America's new partnership with Venezuela?
Trump: Well, it means lower oil prices all over the world, which is great for everybody. It means lower oil prices for America, which I have it down. Don't forget, I inherited a mess. I inherited, they talk about affordability. There was no affordability under Biden. He had the worst inflation in history, the highest and worst inflation in history.
Prices were through the roof, and I'm fixing it. I inherited a mess. I say it all the time, I inherit, because people don't understand. I inherited a mess. Uh, open borders, millions of people in this country that shouldn't be. We're moving them out. We're moving them out pretty rapidly too. Murderers and drug dealers and, uh, just some of the worst people in the world came in. Not only from Venezuela, from all over.
The Congo. The Congo sent us tremendous numbers of people. I don't know what it is with the Congo. They open their jails and they walk into our country. They drive, drive them up to our front entrance, they get out, and they walk right into our country. And these are tough, hardened criminals. These are real criminals and from many countries.
I mean, from, they came from Afric- -- Africa, they came from the Middle East, they came from South America, but a lot came from Venezuela. They opened, he opened his prisons and sent all of the people from his prisons into the United States. Why not? I'd do the same thing of our way. You take the people, they're nothing but trouble for you, and they're killers and they're, they're the worst people that you can imagine.
I mean, some of the crimes are so bad you wouldn't believe it. They, we just accepted them into our country. Nobody did anything about it. So we're getting them out. Washington, D.C. as an example, is very dangerous, and now it's very safe. I mean, everybody's coming to Washington. Uh, it's a very safe city now.
And before when I took over, it was really a danger. It's got really bad. We had it pretty good, but, uh, it wasn't really a focus because you didn't hear the level of danger until -- [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation]
-- my second term. My first term, we watched Washington, but it wasn't like it was the big deal. Now, all of a sudden, when I came here, I was hearing stories about the kind of crime that they had here. You, people come in from Iowa and from Indiana and great places, and they end up calling their parents that your son has been killed.
Doesn't happen anymore. We have, uh, a very safe, Washington, D.C. is a very safe city. We put our National Guard there. They're all central casting. You take a look at these guys, it's great. We won the case on merit, based on merit from the Supreme Court, a great victory. A courageous victory, actually, but we're, this country is now based on merit again.
Hannity: Mm-hmm. Let me ask you about Maria Corina Machado. I've had her on TV this week.
Trump: Yeah, she's a very nice person.
Hannity: Okay. She won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump: Yeah.
Hannity: When she accepted that Peace Prize, she dedicated it to you. She said to me this week, both on TV and radio, that she wants to give the Nobel Prize, her Nobel Peace Prize to you for liberating her country. Um, in 2023, she won over 92% of the vote to be the leader of the opposition. Maduro kept her off the ballot. Um, do you have any plans to meet with her? And would you accept the Nobel Prize she wants to hand to you?
Trump: Well, I understand she's coming in next week sometime. And I look forward to saying hello to her and I, I've heard that she wants to do that, that to be a great honor. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation] I did put out eight wars, eight and a quarter because, you know, Thailand and Cambodia started going at it against.
Hannity: I'll put the list up if you want.
Trump: I give a quarter, so it's -- [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"]
Trump: -- you know, you put the list out, it's a hell of a list. But we, uh, I've stopped eight wars and I think it, you know, it's been a major embarrassment to Norway. Now, I don't know what Norway has to do with it, but that's where the committee is located. A lot of Norwegian people. And it's been a very big embarrassment to the country of Norway, whether they have anything to do with it or not.
I think they do. They say they don't. But, you know, when you put out eight wars, in theory, you should get one for each war, okay? 'Cause some of these wars were going on for 30 years. Uh, India, Pakistan was ready to go out it big, and these are two nuclear countries. I got that one stopped. E- -- e- -- eight planes were shot down.
They were really at it, and I got it stopped. It was a big one. Uh, you look at the Congo, Rwanda, and the Congo, they've been fighting for 30 years, and I got it stopped. I get, I get so many wars, so it's such a beautiful thing. It makes me feel so good. Not because of the Nobel Prize, but because I, I saved millions and millions of lives, and that's what really makes me feel good.
Note: [Commercial break]
Hannity: Let me go back to this issue of the political future for the people of Venezuela.
Trump: Yeah.
Hannity: Now it's interesting, you mentioned all of the criminals and the people let out of prisons that were sent to our borders and our country.
Trump: Right.
Hannity: That's Tren de Aragua, that's cartel members. Those are --
Trump: Some of the worst criminals in the world were let into our country.
Hannity: Known terrorizers.
Trump: Biden's open border policy. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation]
Trump: Anybody could come in.
Hannity: And that, that will get into the issue of Minneapolis going on right now. But back to this one issue, do you foresee a Venezuela that will have free and fair elections? And I would have little doubt that the opposition would probably win handily if they were free and if they were fair.
Trump: Yeah, I do see that, and I think that's happening, but before we do that, it's gonna take a while to do. We have to rebuild the country. They couldn't have an election. They wouldn't even know how to have an election right now. The country's become third world, and they wouldn't know how to have an election right now.
Uh, we're gonna rebuild the oil and the oil infrastructure. We'll be in charge of it. It's gonna do great, and make a lot of money, and, uh, we're gonna take it from there, but we're gonna rebuild the country. And we'll, ultimately, you're gonna have elections.
Hannity: When you talk about increasing defense spending, I, and I go back to the campaign, and I go back to your first term. Foreign policy usually doesn't get a lot of discussion. And in many ways, you have dedicated a lot of time, energy, and, and resources.
Trump: Very important for our country.
Hannity: Why, how is that in America's first interest, because that's what you stand for?
Trump: Well, like, the Middle East was blowing up when I got in. It was everybody was fighting, everybody, which in all fairness has been going on for about 3,000 years in the Middle East, and we now have peace in the Middle East. Nobody thought that was possible. But you have some great countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, uh, and many other countries that have been around a long time.
They're very wealthy. Uh, they were, in many ways, put out of business. They weren't able to do business. They, you know, they, tremendous wealth for the world. Uh, the oil supply was hurt. Everything was hurt. I mean, you had things happening in the Middle East that were bad, not alone, not only at, in Gaza with the death and the destruction going on for years.
And it's been cleaned up. It's amazing. It's been cleaned up. Now, there'll be some remnants right now. We're gonna have to see what happens with Hamas. We're gonna have to see what happens with Hezbollah and Lebanon. But we have 59 countries that signed on, and they wanna go in and help if, if we should have to do something with Hamas, which is a possibility, not a -- I think they're gonna do what they said they were gonna do. They were gonna disarm, but they've been armed for a long time. They've been a little slow to disarm.
Trump: Yeah, they've been a little bit slow.
Hannity: Will you support Israel? Will you put them on a timetable?
Trump: Well, I would, but first we'll see whether or not they're gonna be disarming. Look, I'm all for it if they, if they don't. They made the promise that they were.
Hannity: If they don't.
Trump: They've, they've made an agreement that they're gonna disarm. So we're gonna have to assume that they're going to, but, you know, it's not their nature. Disarmament's [Laughs] not exactly their nature. Hezbollah's been very bad in Lebanon. Uh, but overall, I mean, we have an amazing situation compared to what it was.
And we really do have peace in the Middle East. And I will say Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and other countries have been amazing. They've been, you know, so helpful in getting it done. But the biggest thing was, uh, the attack on Iran. If you, if you had a, a strong Iran and respected Iran, a powerful Iran, like I guess it was at one point, uh, you know, a year ago, year and a half ago, you wouldn't have been able to make peace because the other countries wouldn't have been able to have that dark cloud hanging over them.
And they, by, by knocking out their nuclear, you know, they would've had a nuclear weapon within two months. By knocking that, that's why I had to go in. [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"] Every president wanted to go in and none of them did.
Hannity: You mean you didn't wanna send cargo planes of cash and other currency?
Trump: Oh, terrible. I mean, I've never seen hundreds of, hundreds of millions of dollars were sent in cash on Boeing 757s, beautiful Boeing 7- -- they opened, the cash was piled up to the ceiling. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation] I never even knew a president could do that. [Laughs] How do you do that? What do you do? Call the banks?
Hannity: Are you --
Trump: You know, they emptied down every bank in Virginia and Maryland to get that cash and they sent it over there and gave it to them. No, we took the opposite approach. Exactly the opposite approach.
Hannity: Are you following the protesting that is taking place all over the country of Iran now?
Trump: Yeah, I'm following it very closely.
Hannity: And have you found, have you read that the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is now, has a plan B to go to Russia?
Trump: Well, someplace, yeah. He's looking to go some place.
Hannity: Do you believe that Iran --
Trump: It's getting very bad.
Hannity: Do you think the country's on the verge of collapsing?
Trump: Well, it could be. I mean, what they've done is they start, in the past, they've started shooting the hell out of people, and all of a sudden people without any weapons whatsoever are standing there and you have machine guns gunning them down, or they grab, take them to prisons and then hang them and kill them.
So they played rough. And I said, "If they do that, we're gonna hit them very hard." Well, we're gonna hit them hard. We're ready to do it. If they do that, we're gonna hit them hard. And so far for the most part, there's been some of it, but for the most part, they haven't. There have been people killed. Uh, some of them, the crowds are so big that some of them have had really, like, were, were stomped on, literally. It was, it was terrible. The crowds are just, uh, they're massive. The enthusiasm to overturn that regime is incredible. But, um, there's been people killed, but it's more from death by, it's literally stomping.
Trump: It's, it's, uh, people running in a certain direction. So we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens over there.
Hannity: So --
Trump: They know though that it's a stampede is, I guess, the best word. They have like a stampede. You talk about stampede for cattle. But the people are stampeding, and you're losing a lot of people with the stampedes. There's so many, there's so many people protesting. Nobody's ever seen anything like what's happening right now.
But I have put a red-line notice that if they start shooting at them... These people are totally unarmed people. And they love their country. They want something to happen. Look at their country. They've, they've gone, they've gone back 150 years. But I've told them that if they do anything bad to these people, we're gonna hit them very hard.
Hannity: So if there is mass murder by the Iranian Ayatollahs and those leadership, you're pledging to the people of Iran that you will come to their aid?
Trump: I've said it very loud and very clear, yeah, that's what we're gonna do.
Hannity: I have, I have this hat. I guess you were playing golf with Lindsey Graham.
Trump: Yeah, I did that for Lindsey Graham, who - --
Hannity: Yeah. Make a, well, it says, "Make Iran great again." And --
Trump: And what he means by that, because I said, "This is a little tricky hat." [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"] Why do you want me to sign this hat?
Hannity: I don't know.
Trump: H- -- he's really talking about the, the --
Hannity: Can I o- -- can I sell it on eBay? Can I sell this?
Trump: Yeah, you can probably. It's got --
Hannity: It's probably worth a lot of money.
Trump: It's got, got my signature. [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"] Nobody asked me to sign that. I said, "You know, there's a lot of definitions for that." And what he's talking about is the, the people that are, you know, protesting, I guess, is the only word you can use. It's really, uh, the biggest protest I've ever seen. The people that are protesting, if they take over the country, he wants to see if Iran can be great again.
You know, years ago, a friend of mine was a developer from New York, and I was a young developer, and he went to Iran, and he built buildings in Iran, and he made a lot of money, and he did very well, and it was, uh, like condos and rentals. And he loved Iran. He thought it was great. And he did a lot of work there. He did tremendous amount of work. He loved the people. He thought they were so incredible. And then it all stopped when this stuff started happening.
Hannity: In 1979.
Trump: Yeah, it stopped like --
Hannity: Then 440 --
Trump: -- like magic.
Hannity: 444 days Americans held hostage.
Trump: Yeah, that was right. It was, uh, not a good time for Jimmy Carter. It wasn't a good time for --
Hannity: America.
Trump: -- his politics.
Hannity: Oh, didn't work out very well for anybody. If, in fact –
Trump: Well, you know, I think about that though, if I could interrupt, because, you know, when we were going into the middle of Venezuela with helicopters landing in an army fort where you have thousands of soldiers and you have people with guns all over the place, I thought so much about that Jimmy Carter catastrophe.
We had so many hostages taken, American hostages, we had the helicopters crashing, you had the sandstorms. If you had sandstorms, you should come back. [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"] But they tried to blast through the sandstorm. Nature always wins. Remember, it's a little --
Hannity: Oh, the helicopter.
Trump: Nature always wins. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation] And, uh, helicopters don't have that kind of an engine. You know, they, a lot of moving parts. They don't like sand blowing into their gears. But anyway, they decided to go forward. I should have come back. But I was thinking about that because, you know, here we are going into a, actually a much more dangerous situation, if you think about it, on Venezuela.
We're in a, in a fort, a military army fort, and the house was built there for protection, and we're going in with helicopters, with jets, with helicopters. I mean, the jets preceded the helicopters and did an unbelievable, these are unbelievably talented pilots and people, and very brave people. So I was thinking a lot about the Jimmy Carter thing.
I don't know what he would have done or how he would have done if that didn't happen, but there are those that say that destroyed his, his chances of winning election and, you know, lost that election pretty big. Uh, he might have lost it anyway, perhaps, but there was no question after that mess, and I was saying, "Boy, I hope that doesn't happen with me." But we have "Raizin" Caine and all of these great people, and they did an unbelievable job.
Hannity: You know, you started in your first term the Abraham Accords.
Trump: Right.
Hannity: And I would argue beyond Israel, it's other countries in the region, Egypt, Jordan, the Saudis, and, and pretty much every country --
Trump: Right.
Hannity: -- that they probably were breathing a sigh of relief as well as the Israelis because they didn't want Iranian hegemony in the region and a nuclear-armed Iran. Um --
Trump: Well, you had to stop that. You had no choice. And it should have been done long before I got there. It should have been done earlier. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation] They just, uh, you look back and Obama should have done it. They all should have done it. Clinton should have done it. Obama went the other way. I mean, Obama decided to go with Iran. I mean, he was, I don't know how Jewish people can vote for Biden and Obama. They were absolutely on the side of Iran. They were against the Jewish people.
Hannity: Or Mamdani.
Trump: Well, we're gonna find out about him.
Hannity: Your favorite mayor. [Laughs]
Trump: Well, I have a very nice relationship, but I thought it would take at least maybe a month or two months before he went after me. He, he hit me on, uh, the attack on Venezuela, which is pretty unusual because not too many people have hit us. That was a perfect attack. Think of what we've done. I mean, we've taken over a whole country. We're gonna make the country strong and good and we're gonna, they'll ultimately be able to vote and put somebody in that they like. Uh, the oil that we've taken, we've taken $4 billion worth of oil in one day, and, uh, that'll increase. We're gonna have it rebuilt. All the big oil companies are coming in. They're gonna make a lot of money, and Venezuela's gonna get some of that money, and we're gonna get some of that money. And we brought stability to the region, we brought stability and much lower oil prices. You know, we have gasoline now down to, in many cases, $1.99 a gallon --
Hannity: In just six or seven states.
Trump: -- and with Biden it was four and a half dollars, $5.00. [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"] We have it way, w- -- we have, we've brought it way down. We've done a great job. On the word affordability, uh, prices are way down. Can even go lower. Prices, you know, everything follows oil.
Hannity: Hmm.
Trump: -- is so big. Everything follows oil. If oil prices are down, everything's down. I mean, you can look - --
Hannity: -- so everything goes lower.
Trump: -- 'cause it's just, it affects everything. It affects a truck that delivers donuts, it affects the stove that makes the donut. It affects everything.
Hannity: -- more, uh, um, issues on foreign policy and national security. Then I do wanna get, do a deep dive into the economy. I wanna ask you, I don't see a --
Trump: -- economy is unbelievable by the way.
Hannity: We're gonna get to that.
Trump: I know, but it's unbelievable - --
Note: [Crosstalk]
Hannity: -- Cuba survive without Venezuelan oil? I don't see how it can.
Trump: -- who survive?
Hannity: Cuba.
Trump: -- no. Uh, uh, Cuba totally relies on Venezuela for money and for oil. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation] -- they give Venezuela protection. That was always the deal. They're very tough. They're good soldiers. They got wiped out, as you know. [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"] Three days ago, wiped out. I don't wanna even say how many, but they got wiped out. But Cuba, uh, gives protection to Venezuela and Venezuela gives Cuba money through oil. [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"] -- it's worked that way for a long time.
Hannity: -- talked about --
Trump: -- it doesn't work that way anymore. So I don't know what Cuba's gonna do. I think Cuba's going to fail. It's got, I don't think there are any alternatives for Cuba.
Hannity: I don't, I don't know how they survive without Venezuelan energy.
Trump: We have great people from Cuba. Marco Rubio is great. He knows Cuba very well [Laughs]
Hannity: Some people said, or, uh, somebody told me today it was Marco's revenge [Laughs]
Trump: So well, maybe it was, but, but --
Hannity: Um --
Trump: -- uh, they, a lot of great people. [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"] A lot of great people. Well still, we'll see what happens.
Hannity: Well, you live in South Florida.
Trump: We wanna, we wanna do something to help Cuba.
Hannity: Yeah. But let me, well, you mentioned Vladimir Putin --
Trump: -- know the Cubans I wanna help though? I wanna help the Cubans in the United States that got treated so badly by Castro 'cause we have a lot of Cuban population here. We have some of the best people in the country, Cuban. And I wanna help those people. They got treated so badly. They, they left on rafts and they left on other, and they got just thrown out.
Hannity: Broken down --
Trump: -- those people, those people are gonna be taken care of.
Hannity: Broken down, dilapidated --
Trump: Yeah.
Hannity: -- rickety boats, shark infested waters, inner tubes, because things were so bad there.
Trump: They were. They came in and, yeah, they came in in the worst, the worst, uh, floating vessels that there have --
Hannity: Hmm.
Trump: -- ever been, and circled by sharks and everything else. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation] -- many of them, as you know, many, many of them didn't make it.
Hannity: -- talked about peace and your involvement around the globe and the success that you've had. You said many times that you thought the easiest conflict to resolve would be the European conflict, Russia and Ukraine.
Trump: Yeah.
Hannity: -- now you pointed out many times that it became the most difficult. A couple of things on that issue. Um, Vladimir Putin, you did, we did take out this Russian flag tanker along with Great Britain.
Trump: Right.
Hannity: Tough decision, number one. Number two --
Trump: I didn't think it was a tough decision.
Hannity: Will you support the sanctions bill? I think there are 84 or five senators that want --
Trump: Yeah, they only do it if it's, it's subject to me and, you know, I support it.
Hannity: -- what, you support it?
Trump: I hope we don't have to use it. And, you know, we have big sanctions on Russia right now. [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"] Russia's economy is very bad. Um, but they are much bigger than Ukraine. You know, they're a much bigger, uh, more powerful country from that standpoint.
Hannity: -- Vladimir call you after this, this tanker was seized?
Trump: I don't wanna say that, but the fact is that the Russian ships, it was a submarine and a destroyer. They both left very quickly when we arrived. [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"]
-- we took over the ship and the oil is being unloaded right now.
Note: [Commercial break]
Hannity: Let me move on to the economy because if you look historically, let's, first, we'll talk, this is a midterm election year. Three times in the last 100 years --
Trump: Yeah.
Hannity: -- the party in power was able to maintain control. Um, four times in the last 150 years, you discussed this when you met with Republicans this past week. So historical trends are not with you. However, historically, peace and prosperity do drive elections. We just took a trip around the entire globe, and, and you have your fingerprints pretty much everywhere, all over the map. And --
Trump: We've done great everywhere. Uh, it's amazing. It's an amazing phenomena, that on two or three occasions, I don't know, it depends on how far you wanna go back, but if you go back a long way, the sitting president, whether it's Democrat or Republican, always loses the midterm even if they've done well, almost always.
And, you know, you'd think it would be like a fifty fifty deal. Even if the president's done a great job, I think we've done a great job. We've done maybe the best job ever in the first year. But they always seem to lose the midterm. There's something down deep psychologically with the voters that they want, maybe a check or something?
I don't know what it is exactly, but you would think when you have a victory and then on top of the victory, you have a great successful presidency will be an automatic win, but it's never been a win. I mean, almost never been. You said two times or three times in a hundred years. It's right around that number. [Hannity verbalizes "Yeah"]
Think of it. Out of, you know, the elections take place every two years in this case. And to only win a couple of times in many, many years is hard to believe. And it doesn't make sense. And nobody's been able to define why. So I think, hopefully, we're gonna, we're gonna change that because we've had incredible, we passed a great, big, beautiful bill, tax cuts for everybody, no tax on tips, no tax on social security, no tax on overtime.
Uh, deductions, if you buy a car, you take a, a loan from a bank, you can deduct the interest on the loan. Nobody ever thought that was going to happen. And we, we have so many things and, uh, we're respected all over the world, again, like we've never been respected before. I mean, we're respected. Look at NATO.
NATO agreed to go from 2% to 5% and they pay us the money. You know, we don't lose anything in terms of money. What I do wanna stop in the war with Ukraine and Russia is last week it was just reported they lost 32,000 soldiers. The week before for the month, uh, the, the month before, they lost 27,000 and the month before that, they lost 26,000 soldiers between the two of them.
And I'd like to be able to save those souls. They, you know, it doesn't affect the United States very much. It really doesn't. We sell, you know, Biden gave them 350 billion dollars. Can you imagine? We didn't get any of it back, but I did actually, I made a deal for rare earth. I said, "Listen, if we go any further, we're gonna, we want rare earth, we wanna get our money back." And I made a deal with Ukraine, it was a very fair deal where we get our money back. I enough work to get the money back. This is Biden's war. This isn't my war. I would like to stop it because there's so many people being killed.
Hannity: Let me go to the economy --
Trump: Mostly soldiers, but so many people.
Hannity: So I've always been a movement conservative. I've always believed in supply-side economics, starting with Reagan. Lar- -- at the time, 70 to 28%, he dropped the tax rates, longest period of peacetime, economic growth. 21 million new jobs were created. Now, this one big, beautiful bill, largest tax cuts in history.
Trump: Yeah.
Hannity: Unlike any president before you, you have secured trillions in monies dedicated to ma- -- new manufacturing --
Trump: Right.
Hannity: Including automobiles, semiconductor chips. Rare earth would be part of it.
Trump: More than anybody has ever gotten.
Hannity: Okay. So all of this is now in the, in the, it's going to be infused into the eco --
Trump: To the hopper.
Hannity: It's in the hopper. It's gonna be infused into the economy. But we just ended the third quarter. With 4.3% GDP, we just have the lowest gas prices of five years, as you pointed out, that impacts everything every buy, everybody buys at every store that they go to. Um, no tax, tips, overtime.
Trump: Right.
Hannity: That, that, I, I worked in the service industry. I worked in the construction ind- -- industry. That helps workers, that helps families.
Trump: Sure.
Hannity: Scott Bessent said that people are gonna feel it in their paycheck. They're feeling it at the pump. You look at all of this. You've created a little shy of a million new jobs already. And --
Trump: Manufacturing.
Hannity: -- that's after inheriting the economy. It's, it's, it's really not your economy for the first six, eight months.
Trump: And they're, they're private sector jobs.
Hannity: Right.
Trump: They're not government jobs. Don't forget, I could have the greatest numbers in history. All I have to desire, a couple of million people put them in government. That's what Biden did. He just put people in government. You had 10 people for one job. I did the opposite. I've trimmed down government. Uh, any numbers that we have are with a very trimmed down government.
I could come up with unemployment or employment numbers that are so good that, like, nobody's ever seen. Just say fellas hire two million people right now. But you can't make our country great that way. That's how you go into trouble. That's how you become Venezuela.
Hannity: A lot of people don't understand, in the big beautiful bill, there's something known as 100% appreciation.
Trump: Yeah.
Hannity: That is putting an accelerant --
Trump: One year depreciation.
Hannity: -- on manufacturing.
Trump: Right.
Hannity: One, you can depreciate the, your entire investment if you're building, for example, a manufacturing facility.
Trump: In one year.
Hannity: In one year.
Trump: As opposed to 40 years.
Hannity: And it may seem, may not seem like a big deal, but for people that are struggling --
Trump: It --
Hannity: -- financially, to be able to deduct the interest on your call loan, that's a - –
Trump: So I had the, the most successful economy in the world in my first term. We did great. I think that was the single biggest. I had that, but that was for a much shorter period of time. It's not as good as this one. But that was the reason I believe that we were so successful. [Hannity sounds a verbal affirmation] We had great jobs. We had great everything. We had the greatest economy. This economy will blow it away. I believe this economy's gonna blow it away, but we have that, and now, we have it for 10 years.