President Donald Trump described Iranian protesters being shot “between the eyes” by snipers and dying en masse as he subjected a room full of White House guests including children to a rantabout the Iran war on Tuesday.
Trump gave the group of children and other White House guests a stark and somewhat gory look into global politics on Tuesday as he held them captive in the Oval Office while he took questions from the press on the Iran war and other topics. He then followed it up by launching into a Q&A session with the media, leaving his guests standing awkwardly by for the second time in two months as he rambled on about unrelated issues.
In one surreal moment the president was asked by a reporter — with a young child standing directly beside him — whether he believed Iranian protesters could topple their government if armed by the U.S., and the president responded by describing the brutal massacre of protesters, with detail, to the press and his assembled visitors.
“They don’t have any guns. You can have 200,000 people protesting and have five or six sick people with guns, and when they start shooting them right between the eyes, and you see a guy fall, and another one fall, and you have no guns.” Trump said. “They killed 42,000 people last month. 42,000 unarmed protesters.”
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He didn’t end there, reaching back to the protests after the killing of a 22-year-old Iranian woman in the custody of Iran’s religious police in 2022 and 2023 and describing again how snipers were allegedly deployed to kill unarmed protesters, though the president erroneously described it as having occurred “last year”.
Explaining how the massive throngs of protesters, including women, took to the streets after Amini’s killing, Trump said: “Everyone thought that was the end of Iran.”
“And then, suddenly, a woman dropped dead with a bullet right there. Always right there,” the president said, pointing to the space between his eyes.
This breaking news report will be updated.