Interview: Edward Lawrence Interviews Donald Trump for Fox Business in Pennsylvania - July 15, 2026

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for making time. I really appreciate this.

Absolutely. Good.

yeah. If I could ask you, um, you know, this is the -- there have been threats on your life from Iran. This is the first appearance outside the White House since the NATO summit. Do you feel safe making appearances like this?

I don't even think about it, because if I do, I wouldn't be very effective. So I don't even think about it. Certainly, other people do, and I think they're doing a good job doing that, but I don't even think about it, Ed.

So the Defense Production Act, you -- we're at a defense summit.

Right.

You invoke the Defense Production Act for the defense industry.

Right.

How fast do you think that means jobs? And then how fast do you think that means refilling the supplies, re -- rearming the US military.

Well, so much was given away by the Biden Administration. They were given away just willy-nilly to Ukraine and anybody else that asked for it. And when I came in, I saw this. I said, there's going to be a problem. We better do something about it. And as you know, I stopped. And now we pay -- they pay to NATO.

We sell to the European Union. We sell to a lot of them. We sell. We get a lot of money. And it's not even the money. We have to watch ourselves. You know, it's called America First. And we're building up our reserves very rapidly. And as you probably also know, the great companies that we have are now building plants all over.

Not just taking one plant that they've used for a long time and doing overtime. We have four, five, six plants by each of the major companies being built, brand-new plants in different areas to make, as an example, you could say the Patriot, which is so heavily sought, or the Tomahawk, the Tomahawk missile.

Um-hum. Um-hum.

So we want to have it not where you have to wait a year to get something or a year and a half or two years. We want to have it where you wait a week or maybe less. And we're going to have that very soon.

You're going to nudge the CEOs.

Well, they've been nudged. Oh, they've been nudged. [Laughter] And You know, one thing, speaking of your show, and your show is great, by the way, and you are, and so you know exactly what I'm talking about. Some of these companies are spending tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks. They're not allowed to do that anymore.

Now they have to build plants. So they're building plants all over the country.

I wanted to ask you, Mr. President, about Iran. Um, and on Iran, uh, you came to the conclusion that you couldn't negotiate with the IRGC. Does that mean that you might wipe them out like you did ISIS?

Yeah, it does. Uh, we will see what's happening. We received a call just as I was coming here that they want to meet. They always want to meet. But I -- you know, this should have been done by other presidents for many years, for 47 years, but really a lot longer than that, and it wasn't. And I never understood why, but now I do. Because if you're not going to do it the way I'm doing it, you're never going to make a deal with them.

They were very difficult. They're good negotiators who were tapping everybody along for 47 years. Then Obama came in, and he just offered them, you know, a fortune of money. He paid them off. $1.7 billion in green cash and hundreds of billions of dollars. And that really set everyone else back, because they started making -- wanting to make nuclear weapons.

And then we hit them, uh, a year ago, just about a year ago, with the B-2 bombers, and that ended that. So.

Well. So --

We got a little bit lucky. Our timing was a little bit lucky.

Yeah. So, Mr. President, Dan Caine, uh, Razin Caine, is your Chief of Staff.

Right.

He was the one -- or Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was the one who wiped out ISIS.

That's right.

Could he be tasked then now to wipe out the IRGC if you can't negotiate them?

Well, we're going to be in good shape. I mean, they are really -- they've been depleted. Their weapons are down very -- 91 percent. Uh, the -- the drone capacity is way down. They still have, but not a lot. Their manufacturing capacity is down. Their rocket launchers and their missile launchers are way down.

Their missiles are way down. You know, down -- they're probably depleted by 88, close to 90 percent. Now, that doesn't mean there's still not danger, and there is. They're nasty people, but they want to make a deal. I can tell you they want to make a deal. And you don't have to be a genius to realize when you see what's happening to them every night.

And now today, we gave them a little daytime shot, too. So this should have been done not by me, this should have been done a long time ago, long before me.

Something you know about the domestic economy. Inflation report came out for June.

Yeah.

It was actually deflation. It was down 0.4 percent.

Yeah.

Uh, are you concerned, though, that renewed operations in Iran might turn that around, or is that going to be a trend?

Well, look, we're making a lot of money. The defense companies are doing great. It's jobs. It's all jobs. I'm not doing this for jobs. But when you think of it, we make our own equipment. We make the best military equipment in the world. What I do want to do is make it faster, because we need it, but allies need it. Saudi Arabia.

I mean, if you told Saudi Arabia, buy 5,000 Patriot missiles, they'd buy them instantaneously. So we need this stuff. It has to be made faster. And we're doing that. They are -- we are building plants. Not only that, cars, AI, we're building plants at a level that we've never seen in this country. We have $19.2 trillion pouring in. And I think now it's even higher than that number.

There's never been a number like that for any country at any time.

Do you see inflation at the end of the year less than it is now?

Well, I think so. Uh, I think what's happening is oil is going to be a little bit of yo-yo for a while. It goes up a little bit, goes down a little bit. And when this is over, oil is going to drop like a rock. So the answer would be yes.

And one quick topic, the Federal Reserve. Um, would you be OK if the Federal Reserve paused rates for the rest of the year?

Well, it's better than raising them. OK? [Laughter] I'd like to see them go down. I'd like to see our country have the lowest rate anywhere in the world. You know, you have other countries that are only there because of us that are only successful. You know, they call them blue chips. I don't have to mention them.

You sort of know who I'm talking about. They're like blue chips. But they have massive purchases from us, and we have deficits with them. And , you know, the tariffs that brought that back a long way. Our trade deficit is down 68 percent in one year. Think of that. If you're a president and you got it down one percent, you're a genius.

We have it down 68 percent, and that's because of the use of tariffs. And I wish I could use them faster. The Supreme Court said you can't use them as fast as I was using them, but I can use them actually more effectively by the method we're doing, because there are various methods of doing it.

So you're giving Kevin Warsh some runway then to -- to lower rates?

Well, I do. I have a lot of respect for him. He's going to -- don't forget, he is a board. Maybe it's hostile. You know, it could be hostile. And maybe it's people that don't want to do what's, you know, the right thing. Look, we create such wealth for the world. And we want to create it for ourselves and also help them.

But you have -- you have countries that are paying one percent, 1.5 percent, and we're paying three and four percent, and they're only paying because of us. If we wiped out that deficit -- if we wanted to wipe out the deficits, just under the use of tariffs, and wanted to do it in one fell swoop, we'd be the biggest money machine in history, and they'd all not make money.

But in the meantime, they are considered elite countries because we allow them to make too much money. Now, I've taken a lot of that away from them. They're still doing very well. But we should have the lowest interest rate anywhere in the world, by far, like we used to have many years ago.

One last quick one. Uh, your face is now going to be on a coin, it looks like, from the Treasury Department.

Yes.

What do you think about that? [Laughter]

No, I was very honored. It's cute. Not a bad picture, but it's very cute. [Laughter] They gave me a coin. That's very unusual from what I understand.

A gold coin.

A gool -- yeah, a gold coin and a silver coin, Uh, it was very unusual, but I was honored by it.

Mr. President, thank you very much.

Thank you.

I appreciate your time.

You do a great job.

Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Thank you.