Doocy Traps Trump on Iran Quote at G7

Doocy reads – Peter Doocy confronted President Donald Trump during a Wednesday press conference at the G7 on the risks of negotiating with Iran, then read back Trump’s own January 2020 line about Iran never winning a war but never losing a negotiation. Trump responded with

At a press conference on Wednesday at the G7, Peter Doocy leaned into a single sentence—an old Trump line about Iran—that he used to press the president on the pitfalls of negotiating with Tehran.

Doocy started with a direct challenge. He asked Trump about “this — a wise man once said, in January of 2020, ‘Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.’” Then he let the moment hang, finishing with: “That wise man–”

Trump cut him off immediately. “Who said that?” the president asked, as Doocy answered, “Donald Trump.”

Trump’s response came fast. “That’s what I thought you were going to say,” he quipped.

Doocy tried to bring the exchange back to the stakes of the negotiation itself, pressing: “How do you go back to the United States and convince a skeptical American public that this deal–” Trump interrupted again as he turned the question into an argument about how the outcome would be portrayed.

“Well, look, here they lost militarily, okay?” Trump replied, adding that the political and media reaction would depend on timing as well as messaging. He said that even if he “would go another three or four weeks,” critics would still argue the opposite—that he’d gone too long.

Then Trump leaned into a scenario designed to undercut the idea that diplomacy would be treated as a win. He said if Iran “raised the white flag of surrender. ” if they said. “Praise be to Allah. Donald Trump is the greatest president ever. we totally concede. we totally give up. this war is over. we have failed. ” then “The New York Times and CNN and a couple of others” would still frame it as a victory.

“They’re not all that dishonest. ” Trump said. before arguing that the media would portray Iran’s position as success anyway. He pointed to what he described as U.S. military actions—saying, “when we knocked out their last ship, they had 159 ships,” and when the U.S. “knocked out their ship, the Times refused to do a story on it.”.

Trump said the refusal came with the framing that the U.S. action didn’t matter because Iran “don’t have a Navy.” He expanded the point by saying the media “don’t have an Air Force. ” and argued that the president’s own credibility problem—at least in his telling—was tied to what he described as unfair coverage.

He returned to the theme of mistrust in the press, saying, “We need a fair press,” and arguing that “they’re all doing so badly, because they lost credibility.”

Trump said the pattern would persist regardless of results. He claimed that when he won “in a landslide” and had “93 percent bad press,” the media still would “take good stories about me and make them bad.” He said that was the reason voters chose him.

From there, he named outlets and described them as consistently negative: “network, ABC is horrible,” he said, adding that he believes “ABC is the worst,” then “NBC’s terrible, and CBS is terrible, CNN obviously.” He said he “never get[s] good stories, no matter what I do.”

He contrasted that, in his view, with coverage he claimed he receives elsewhere, saying he could “get it all over the world,” but that “no matter what I do, I’m going to get bad press.”

The exchange left Doocy’s original question largely unanswered in a conventional way: how to persuade Americans about a deal with Iran. Instead. Trump treated the negotiated framing as something pre-decided by how he said different media would interpret any outcome—while the president’s argument about Iran stayed anchored to his insistence that Iran had “lost militarily.”.

Peter Doocy Donald Trump G7 Iran negotiations January 2020 quote White House press conference media credibility New York Times CNN