Washington 22 January 2026

22 January 2026

President Trump said: “We have a big force going toward Iran. I’d rather not see anything happen but we’re watching them very closely. I stopped 837 hangings on Thursday…. I said, ‘If you hang those people, you’re going to be hit harder than you’ve ever been hit. It will make what we did to your Iran nuclear [program in June 2025] look like peanuts…. We have a massive fleet heading in that direction. And maybe we won’t have to use it”. When asked about whether Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would need to step down, Trump responded: “I don’t want to get into that but they know what we’re looking for and there’s a lot of killing going on”. Relatedly, Vice President JD Vance said: “We just want to make sure that we have options. We have a lot of forces in the region. We have people who could be endangered…. I think Trump just wanted to make sure that if, God forbid, the Iranians did something very stupid, that we had the resources necessary to respond”.