WASHINGTON — President Trump spent Friday repeatedly saying that he was “not happy” about ongoing negotiations with Iran and that he’s nearing a decision on whether to launch a military attack.
“We have a big decision to make. You know that. Not easy, it’s not easy. We have a very big decision,” Trump said during a political rally in Corpus Christi, Texas.
The president is demanding that Tehran completely abandon nuclear enrichment, but US negotiators were rebuffed in Geneva on Thursday despite a massive American military buildup in the Middle East.
Trump sounded increasingly hardened going into the weekend — a period of time that he has favored for military operations.
“We have a country that’s been for 47 years blowing people’s legs off, arms off, their face,” he said.
“They’ve been knocking out ships, killing people —lots of people, not only Americans, lots of people. It’s been terrible. 32,000 people killed over the last two, three months, protesters — 32,000, that’s some number of people, 32,000. They want to make a deal, but gotta make a deal that’s meaningful.”
Trump, speaking with a large Venezuelan oil tanker as his backdrop — after capturing that nation’s president, Nicolas Maduro, in a Jan. 3 military raid — told a gaggle of reporters that Iranian officials “don’t want to say the key words, ‘We’re not going to have a nuclear weapon.’”
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“They have to say, ‘We’re not going to have a nuclear weapon’ and they just can’t quite get there. They want to enrich a little bit. You don’t have to enrich when you have that much oil. So I’m not happy with the negotiation.”
Trump insisted that “we haven’t made a final decision” on whether to follow through with a threatened military attack following the massive buildup of naval and air assets within striking distance of Iran.
“We’re not exactly happy with the way they’re negotiating. They cannot have nuclear weapons,” he reiterated.
A reporter then asked Trump if there was “a risk that strikes could turn into a long, drawn-out conflict in the Middle East.”
“I guess you could say there’s always a risk,” the president replied. “You know, when there’s war, there’s a risk in anything, both good and bad.”
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner represented the president Thursday in Switzerland and are preparing for follow-up talks Monday in Vienna.
A source familiar with the talks said the US negotiators were disappointed by “multiple” aspects of the Geneva talks, including Iran’s insistence it has an “inalienable right” to enrich uranium.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is scheduled to be in Israel Monday and Tuesday for meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rubio announced Friday that Iran has been designated a state sponsor of wrongful detention and urged Americans to “leave immediately.”
“No American should travel to Iran for any reason,” Rubio warned.
Talks in Geneva got off to a bad start Thursday when Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, insisted his country had the right to enrich uranium — but all sides left saying progress was made.
Omani foreign minister Sayyid Badr Al-busaidi, who is mediating negotiations, met Friday with Vice President JD Vance in Washington to discuss their status.
In his first term, Trump abandoned former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear pact with Iran, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, arguing it lacked comprehensive safeguards to block atomic weapon development by the theocratic regime.
Trump’s use of gunboat diplomacy to back up his call for complete denuclearization follows his airstrikes in June 2025 on three Iranian nuclear facilities — Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — in support of Israeli military action.
The president’s acknowledgement that further action could spark a major war is significant because of his own record of slamming his predecessors for destabilizing the Mideast with regime-change interventions, often singling out President George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq.
But Trump quickly followed his remark Friday with examples of one-off strikes that lost no American lives.
“We’ve had tremendous luck with myself — Soleimani, al Baghdadi, everything worked out — and then we do the Midnight Hammer and so many others. Everything’s worked out, and we want to keep it that way,” Trump said.
“But we’re going to see. Look, it’d be wonderful if they negotiate really in good conscience, good faith and conscience, but they are not getting there.”
