Donald Trump: US is negotiating 'right now' with Iran. What a major concession Tehran claims to have accepted
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that his administration is “right now” negotiating with Iran for a ceasefire in the war between the two countries and that Tehran wants to end the conflict, AFP and Agerpres report.
“What I said yesterday was absolutely true. We are in negotiations right now,” the US president said, adding that his emissary Steve Witkoff, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are participating in these discussions.
He made the comments to reporters invited to the Oval Office to witness the inauguration of Markwayne Mullin as US Secretary of the Interior.
“We're talking to the right people, and they really want to make a deal — you have no idea how badly they want to make a deal,” Trump said of the Iranians, as quoted by The Guardian.
“It all starts with the fact that they can't have a nuclear weapon,” the US president also stated: “I don't want to say ahead of time, but they agreed that they would never have a nuclear weapon. They agreed to that,” he emphasized.
Trump insists Iran has been defeated militarily
The US president also said Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth was “pretty disappointed” at the prospect of the US negotiating a truce with Iran.
“Pete didn't want to make a deal,” the White House official said, adding that Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the chief of staff of the US military, were “the only two people who were quite disappointed.”
Trump called it a “good attitude,” a curious statement given his repeated claims in recent days that the U.S. and Iran are in talks and that things are going very well.
“They were not interested in a deal,” the White House leader said of his two underlings. “They were only interested in winning this match,” he insisted.
Speaking earlier at the White House, Trump was asked by reporters how optimistic he is that a peace deal with Iran will work. He replied:
“This war has been won.”
He claimed that if they wanted to destroy something like “that very big and powerful plant” – referring to Iran's South Pars gas field, which he has previously threatened to attack – “there's nothing they can do about it”.
Iran is “militarily wiped out,” he said, adding: “They are dead.”
Iranian officials vehemently deny any negotiations with the US
The US president's comments came after earlier on Tuesday Iran's embassy in Pakistan called the US offer for negotiations “a scam” and refused any dialogue with Washington. The embassy in Islamabad made the comments after Pakistan offered to broker a ceasefire.
“Iran considers the US's request for negotiations as a new deception attempt to reposition itself, find loopholes and look for connections to intensify attacks again,” the Iranian embassy in the Pakistani capital said on the X social network, just hours after Pakistan confirmed its offer to mediate between Iran, the US and Israel.
The Iranian diplomatic mission stated that “confidence is nil after two rounds of attacks during the talks” and that, “through intimidation and totalitarian rhetoric, there is no possibility”.
A day ago, Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement saying, “We deny US President Donald Trump's claims about negotiations taking place between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Cited by CBS News, the foreign ministry added: “The Islamic Republic of Iran maintains its position of rejecting any kind of negotiations before achieving Iran's post-war goals.”
The comments were also made by the Iranian embassy in Kabul, which wrote on social media that Trump had backed down on Iran's threats to “target the entire region's energy infrastructure.”
