Former President Donald Trump warned on X-Space that authoritarian leaders in North Korea and Russia would be “at their best” under a Biden administration, but said he would “not do anything bad to Iran” if re-elected in 2024.
“know [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. I know. [Chinese] President Xi Jinping [Jinping]. know [North Korean dictator] “Kim Jong Un is amazing,” the former president said during a conversation with Elon Musk on Monday night. “I’m not saying good or bad. They’re in top condition. They’re tough, they’re smart, they’re brutal. And they’re going to defend their country.”
“They wouldn’t believe it if they saw Kamala or a sleepy Joe Biden,” he speculated.
He also said America’s enemies “would not attack” Iran if he were president, a country suspected of planning retaliatory attacks for the Israeli airstrike that killed former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
“I don’t want to do anything bad to Iran,” the former president declared, “but they knew not to get involved. Iran went bankrupt because I told China, ‘If you buy from Iran, you don’t do business with the United States.'”
“And they found themselves in a situation where they couldn’t fund Hamas, they couldn’t fund Hezbollah, they couldn’t fund these instruments of terror,” Trump said of the administration.
Trump also praised the administration’s efforts to contain sanctions imposed on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline and blamed Biden for rolling them back.
“he [the] “The Keystone XL pipeline is our pipeline that would have employed 48,000 people,” the former president said. “And he’s approving a Russian pipeline.”
Musk repeatedly praised the “courage” of Trump, who was nearly assassinated at a campaign rally last month, during the interview, and argued that whether the US president is “threatening” has geopolitical implications.
Trump also revealed that in his farewell address, President Barack Obama had warned that North Korea was America’s greatest threat over the coming years.
However, Trump said he “got on well” with Kim Jong Un during his time in the Oval Office.
“I solved that problem pretty quickly. Rocket Man was terrible at first,” he insisted, making Musk laugh by recalling his “epic tweet” about a North Korean strongman.
“I said, ‘I have a red button on my desk, too, and my red button works,'” Trump recalled, suggesting that President Obama had brought the two countries to the brink of “nuclear war.”
He also blamed his predecessors for the burgeoning ties between China and Russia that worry national security hardliners.
“Obama and Biden and [former President George W.] “To be fair, President Bush did, to some extent, bring Russia and China together,” he said.
Trump said:He has taken a tougher stance on Moscow than Biden and argues that if he were president in 2022, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine.
“I said things to him,” Trump said, specifically about his warning to Putin, “and he said, ‘No way.’ And I said, ‘No way.'”
Musk also said that since the end of the Cold War, people have tended to “underestimate the risk of World War III,” referring to President Trump’s 2024 Republican policy platform for dealing with an increasingly threat-ridden environment.
“The risk of global thermonuclear war means the end of humanity,” Musk said.
“We’re going to build an iron dome over ourselves,” Trump responded. “It only takes one crazy person to start something, so we’re going to be protected.”
