President Donald Trump said repeatedly on Monday that he believed the Iranian regime was going to “take over the Middle East” and would have obtained a nuclear weapon “within weeks” had he not ordered the U.S. military operation against Iran. 

Trump made the comments from his Doral, Fla., golf club at a press conference while defending his decision to have the U.S. launch its military operation in Iran, noting that Iran had a “number of missiles they were able to buy and make over the last six months, and those missiles were aimed at various countries.”

“When you look at over 1,000 missiles shot at, like the UAE, they were looking to take over the Middle East,” Trump said. “We got there first. We’re lucky.”

“If I didn’t hit them first, they were going to hit our allies first,” he continued. Had the U.S. not struck Iranian nuclear sites last June, “that was definite, because they would’ve had a nuclear weapon within a matter of weeks.”

Trump said that negotiations between the U.S. and Iran on the latter’s nuclear ambitions had reached a stalemate last year because the Iranians told Special Envoy Steve Witkoff “essentially, in a real nutshell, we want to continue to build nuclear weapons.”

“The situation was very quickly approaching the point of no return, and the United States found it intolerable. In my opinion, based on what Steve and Jared [Kushner] and [Secretary of Defense] Pete [Hegseth] and others were telling me, [Secretary of State] Marco [Rubio] was so involved, I thought that they were going to attack us,” Trump said. “If we didn’t do this at the time we did it, I think they had a mind to attack us.”

Trump, who is in Doral for the House Republicans’ retreat, made similar comments while discussing the ongoing U.S. military operation in Iran earlier Monday in a speech to Republican lawmakers and donors.

“Within a week, they [Iran] were going to attack us,” he told the crowd at the Republican Members Issues Conference.

In comments at the retreat and the presser, Trump touted the progress made in the nine days since the U.S. first struck Iran as evidence that the operation had been a “tremendous success” thus far. 

“We’re achieving major strides toward completing our military objective, and some people could say they’re pretty well complete. We’ve wiped every single force in Iran out very completely,” Trump told reporters, adding that “most of Iran’s naval power has been sunk” and the regime’s “drones are way down.”

“We continue to target Iran’s drone and missile capability,” he continued. “We’ve struck over 5,000 targets to date, some of them very major targets, and we’ve left some of the most important targets for later, in case we need to do it. If we hit them, it’s going to take many years for them to be rebuilt, having to do with electricity production and many other things. So we’re not looking to do that if we don’t have to.””

About the future of Iran’s leadership, Trump said, “We want to be involved. We don’t want another president that maybe wouldn’t be willing to do what I’m willing to do, for the good of the world, for the good of our nation, to be stuck with a situation in five years or 10 years.”

Speaking to attendees at the GOP retreat, the president described the U.S. attacks on Iran as a “little excursion” that he expected would “be a short-term” operation. 

“We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil,” Trump said. “And I think it’s going to be a short-term excursion.”

Trump also acknowledged the broader differences between himself and Vice President JD Vance on foreign policy matters at the presser, but said that Vance was supportive of his decision to strike Iran. 

“We get along very well on this. He was, I would say, philosophically a little bit different than me. I think he was maybe less enthusiastic about going, but he was quite enthusiastic.”