My fellow Americans, good evening. Let me begin by congratulating the team at NASA and our brave astronauts on the successful launch of Artemis II, it was quite something. It will be traveling further than any manned rocket has ever flown and will very substantially pass the moon, go around it and come back home from a distance that has never been done before. It’s amazing. They are on the way and God bless them, these are brave people. We want to, God bless those four unbelievable astronauts. As we speak this evening, it’s been just one month since the United States military began Operation Epic Fury, targeting the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror, Iran. In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. Victories like few people have ever seen before. Tonight, Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them, terrorist regime, they led, are now dead. Their command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is being decimated as we speak. Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed. And their weapons, factories and rocket launchers are being blown to pieces. Very few of them left. Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks. Our enemies are losing and America, as it has been for five years under my presidency, is winning, and now winning bigger than ever before. Before discussing this current situation, I also want to thank our troops for the masterful job they did in taking the country of Venezuela in a matter of minutes. That hit was quick, lethal, violent and respected by everyone all over the world. After rebuilding our military during my first term, we have by far the strongest military anywhere in the world. And now we’re working along with Venezuela and are, in a true sense, joint venture partners. We’re getting along incredibly well in the production and sale of massive amounts of oil and gas, the second largest reserves on Earth after the United States of America. We’re now totally independent of the Middle East, and yet we are there to help. We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil. We don’t need anything they have. But we’re there to help our allies. Tonight, I want to provide an update on the tremendous progress our warriors have made in Iran and discuss why Operation Epic Fury is necessary for the safety of America and the security of the free world. From the very first day I announced my campaign for president in 2015, I vowed that I would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. This fanatical regime has been chanting, “Death to America, death to Israel” for 47 years. Their proxies were behind the murder of 241 Americans in the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, the slaughter of hundreds of our service members with roadside bombs. They were involved in the attack on the USS Cole, and they carried out the countless other heinous acts, including the blood, just horrible, bloody atrocities of Oct. 7 in Israel, something that most people, never seen anything like it. This murderous regime also recently killed 45, 000 of their own people who were protesting in Iran, 45, 000 dead. For these terrorists to have nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat. The most violent and thuggish regime on earth would be free to carry out their campaigns of terror, coercion, conquest and mass murder from behind a nuclear shield. I will never let that happen, and neither should any of our past presidents. This situation has been going on for 47 years, and should have been handled long before I arrived in office. I did many things during my two terms in office to stop the quest for nuclear weapons by Iran. First, and perhaps most importantly, I killed General Qassem Soleimani. In my first term. He was an evil genius, brilliant person, a horrible human being, however, the father of the roadside bomb. And he lived, just horrible what he did. Iran would have been perhaps in a far better, stronger position had he lived. We would have had probably a different conversation tonight. But you know what? We’d still be winning and winning big. And then, very importantly, I terminated Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, a disaster. Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash. Green, green cash, took it out of banks from Virginia, D.C. and Maryland. All the cash they had. Flew it by airplanes in an attempt to buy their respect and loyalty, but it didn’t work. They laughed at our president and went on with their mission to have a nuclear bomb. His Iran deal would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran. They would have had them years ago, and they would have used them, would have been a different world. There would have been no Middle East and no Israel right now, in my opinion, the opinion of a lot of great experts, had I not terminated that terrible deal. I was so honored to do it, I was so proud to do it, it was so bad right from the beginning. Essentially, I did what no other president was willing to do. They made mistakes and I am correcting them. My first preference was always the path of diplomacy, yet the regime continued their relentless quest for nuclear weapons and rejected every attempt at an agreement. For this reason, in June, I ordered a strike on Iran’s key nuclear facilities in Operation Midnight Hammer. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. Those beautiful B-2 bombers performed magnificently. We totally obliterated those nuclear sites. The regime then sought to rebuild their nuclear program at a totally different location, making clear they had no intention of abandoning their pursuit of nuclear weapons. They were also rapidly building a vast stockpile of conventional ballistic missiles, and would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland, Europe and virtually any other place on Earth. Iran’s strategy was so obvious, they wanted to produce as many missiles as possible, and they did with the longest range possible, and they had some weapons that nobody believed they had. We just learned that, we took them out, we took them all out so that no one would really dare stop them and their race for a nuclear bomb, a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before. They were right at the doorstep. For years, everyone has said that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. But in the end, those are just words. If you’re not willing to take action when the time comes.