ON ENEMY SOIL: Iran’s President Delivers Defiant Speech at UN General Assembly

Iranian-American journalist and activist Masih Alinijad is here with me in New York. First, his senior correspondent, Eric Schon, live at the UN this afternoon. Hi, Eric. Hello, Martha. Well, Iranian President Mashoud Pardeshian should not be applauded here at the UN. Instead, he should be arrested as a terrorist. That's the demand of Iranian opponents who protested loudly today as he was speaking. We have been the victims of terrorism. I come from an Iran in which our esteemed supreme leader was assassinated without any legal framework or reason. In his address to the General Assembly, Pardeshian framed Iran as the victim. He held up photos of children that he said were killed by American and Israeli bombs and vowed that his country would never see control of the Strait of Hormuz. As he began his address, a lone U.S. diplomat walked out. That action considered the highest level of a diplomatic snub here at the world body. As the Iranian leader spoke inside the hall outside, the air was filled with chants angrily denouncing the Iranian regime. Protesters from the largest opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, expressed their support for President Trump's tough policy against Iran. And they said after decades of brutal oppression of the Iranian people, it is far past time for its Islamic revolutionary leaders to finally be ousted. The group has laid out a detailed plan to dispose the religious theocracy that has been ruling the country, instead offering a democratic alternative. The regime only responds to firmness and decisiveness. And that's why sanctions and putting pressure on the Iran regime has been the only solution in terms of external pressure. But the real change has to come from within. But the group says between economic and military pressure, it will only be a matter of time before Iran will be free. Fireworks today at the U.N., inside and out. Outside the General Assembly, Iranian activists protested the regime and demanded an end to its brutal stay in power. Meanwhile, inside, it was Iran's president taking aim at America. And the U.S. delegation wasn't having it. Yesterday, the United States president described us as terrorists. Those who are terrorists and train and protect terrorists describe us as such. We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists. The U.S. delegation walking out at the accusation that the United States is a terrorist. Terrorist. That's a word now thrown around by both sides. Iran calls us terrorists. We call them terrorists. As the saying goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fire. But what exactly is a terrorist? I imagine the definition involves the intentionally targeting of civilians. Who's been doing that? The U.S. or Iran? Critics have accused the U.S. of intentionally bombing an Iranian school during the conflict. That's an accusation that the United States has denied. And while it's impossible to completely quantify, we know that Iran and its proxies have conducted terror attacks on civilian targets in Israel and around the world, launching hundreds of missiles towards Israel indiscriminate of their intended target. Most, thankfully, shot down. I think one satisfies the definition of terrorism. But while Iran points the finger at America, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Tehran is misreading. Who holds the cards? And when it comes to Iran's nuclear ambitions, the final decision belongs to President Trump. The president has extraordinary powers. Every president does. He's the commander in chief, both constitutional and otherwise, to be able to carry out those functions. So I think that the Iranians are fundamentally misreading our political system. And I think the president made it very clear yesterday. For him, the Iranian issue is not a political issue. Every American president and, frankly, every country in the world, for the most part, agrees that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. But ultimately, no one ever does anything about it. And he's going to do something about it. Joining me now, Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy. Senator, it's good to have you here on the program. What do you make of what happened today at the U.N. and what you think could happen, potentially, with President Trump and the Iranian delegation? I think that the people running Iran are reptiles. And they're part of a colony of reptiles. China, North Korea, Russia, and, as I said, Iran. The chief reptile, the quarterback, is President Xi in China. You can't trust any of them. All four of them are the same. It's like the same hooker in different dresses. They all lie like timeshare salesmen. You can't trust them. I wouldn't turn my back on any of them, even if I thought and knew they were two days dead. Number two, they're angry because President Trump has ripped Iran a new ashtray. You won't see any articles, and I haven't seen any articles, in American press, but we have degraded Iran substantially, and that is an understatement. They have no Air Force. They have no Navy anymore. We've destroyed their weapon production plants. We've destroyed a lot of their missiles, ballistic and cruise. The country is experiencing 80 percent inflation. They've got nothing coming in or going out because of the blockade. It will be decades before Iran ever recovers. The truth is, Will, in my judgment, we have accomplished all of our goals. We've also knocked out their air defenses, and our intelligence is so good that we will know within minutes if Iran starts its nuclear program again and we can bomb it again. They have no nuclear weapons program. The only problem in all of this is the Strait of Hormuz. China could open it tomorrow if it told Iran that China is choosing not to, and at some point the president is going to have to decide whether, having achieved all of our objectives, it's time to come home and let China and Russia and North Korea and Europe and all the other countries that refuse to help take a crack at it because they're going to pay the price of a closed strait even more than America. That's what I think. Look, I think these are all objective facts. I didn't pull these out of my rear end, even though I do my best thinking there. All you've got to do is look at the facts, and you can see what I'm saying isn't true. Sounds like the focus then, whether or not they are reptiles, should be the focus on China. Before we go, though, I do want to ask you about the Senate Judiciary hearing today on women's sports. Kim Jones, who is the founder of ICONS, says the idea that men, even men masquerading as women, going into the women's locker room is the equivalent of sexual harassment. Watch. The threat of a man being in the locker room is terrorizing for women being undressed in front of a male who is obfuscating or hiding their sex in order to gain access to women's spaces. There's no other way to explain it other than it's scarring. It is the equivalent of sexual abuse and sexual harassment. It is voyeurism. What do you think, Senator? She's right. I don't mean to hurt anybody who has gender dysphoria or thinks they have gender dysphoria, but we've got hundreds of women out there, thousands of women out there, that are having to compete still with hundreds of biological males who say they're transgender females. And it is still a problem, even though they're quiet about it. The Hamas wing, the Lulu Lennon wing of the Democratic Party, the wing that wears the bin Laden jerseys, they're all promoting it as hard as they can. And if they get control, they'll come out of hiding and openly promote it once again. All right, Senator John Kennedy, it's always good to hear from you. Thank you. Thank you, Will. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant. Mr. Secretary, thanks for being here. Brett, good to be with you. President Xi just landed his first visit in more than a decade. The president was on the tarmac. You met with a top negotiator for China again today. It was not scheduled. What came out of that? So, Brett, we had a very extended meeting on Sunday in New York. This is the fellow who leads our economic and trade team. Vice Premier. Vice Premier Hu Yifeng. We met for about 12 hours on Sunday, and we still had some unfinished business. We met today to see if we could do a bigger deal as opposed to just a series of smaller things. We have agreed today that we will extend what we call the Busan Agreement, the economic detente between the two countries that was scheduled to end on November 10th. That is going to be extended until January 10th to give us more time to see what we can do on the economic front. And we had a very productive Sunday. We had a very productive meeting this morning. So it's going to be two how long? Two more months. Now, reportedly, the Chinese wanted two years. You want two months. You think that a bigger deal can be made in that time? Well, I don't know whether a bigger deal can be done. I don't know whether we will just roll the current deal. There are some deliverables that have not been perfect on the Chinese side. So we also want to see, now that we've sat down and told them our expectations, to see if over the coming months they can be a bit more fulsome in enacting the agreement. For this meeting, what could the president potentially walk away tangibly with? So the good thing, Brett, is this is their second in-person meeting. There's a chance they may have a historic four meetings this year, four meetings between the most powerful country in the world and the second largest economy in the world. A visit in Beijing, this visit, a visit to Shenzhen for a conference in November, and then President Xi coming for the G20 in Doral. And many of the things that were begun in Beijing, whether we see whether there are $30 billion on each side, non-critical goods that we can take the tariffs off of. That's the Board of... That's the Board of Trade. We call it 30 by 30. We're going to see probably some announcements of maybe financial services, ag purchases. So there's quite a bit going on here. And for the ag purchases, we've heard those before. Farmers have heard them. Could they maybe come from the political aspect before November? Well, what we want to ensure is that they are meeting their obligations. Chinese have been very good thus far about meeting their obligations this year. They've agreed to buy $25 million, excuse me, 25 million tons of soybeans. And they've been very fulsome in those. They have about $17 billion of other ag commitments that we think they're a little behind schedule on, and we are encouraging them to pick those up. Yeah. I talked to the president in Beijing about the price of gas and, you know, how he looked at it. And this is when he was in Beijing. Here's what he said. Gas prices in America are still high, painfully high. They're going to drop like a rock as soon as it's over. Painfully high, though, now, and could be creeping higher before it's done. Well, lower than Biden, excuse me, lower than Biden, straight will be open, and you will see gasoline prices drop, energy prices generally. I call it a little pain. Look, I agree. The oil goes up, but it's going to come down lower than it was. All right. So tonight, crude oil prices are at roughly $92, ticking up a little bit. We did pull this stat, just a comparison on days where crude oil was above $100 a barrel. For President Obama, 308. First term of President Trump, zero. President Biden, 83, and 24 of days above $100 a barrel. Where do you see this, and how much does it affect our economy as you look at inflation overall? There are two kinds of inflation. There's headline inflation and core inflation. And what we've seen is that we do have a supply shock here with the Iran conflict. We're going to get to the other side of this. On the other side, what we've seen is this has not moved through to core inflation. Core inflation has actually moved down. It's at 2.4, lowest in five years. Lowest in five years. So that tells me, once we are on the other side of this energy supply shock, and as the President said in the video, that I actually believe, along with him, that oil prices will be much lower because we've seen a tremendous amount of supply come on just in this year. For the family in Ohio, for the family in Michigan, they're feeling something much different. What do you tell them about the state of the economy? Well, the economy is very strong. And what I would say is we saw the PMI numbers today, the strongest, the purchasing managers agreement index, strongest since 2021. We've seen over a million private sector jobs created. We are seeing real wage growth. So what I would say is that unlike under the Biden administration, where we had negative wage growth, we are seeing substantial wage growth here, that wage growth is going to continue going. We will get to the other side of this Iran conflict. The energy prices will drop and you will pick your purchasing power back up. Without the Iran war, people would be feeling a lot different, you think? Well, I think that the inflation number, I know the inflation numbers would be very different. I think we would have been back at the Fed's target now. But on the other side, that if the Iranians were to get a nuclear weapon, I would say gas could be $6, $8 a barrel. I want to talk about the Iran pinch and your economic pressure, but back to China for a minute. You've opened this new channel with China on artificial intelligence. The president calls it super intelligence, a kind of hotline if something goes wrong. So far, we haven't heard publicly that Beijing has agreed to that. Did your meeting suggest that they would? I believe they will. They're very eager to engage with us on AI because we have, the U.S. is substantially in the lead. China is behind us, but they are well ahead of any other country. And I think it's very important for us to engage on this. I think we are working to define with them what we think the most important or the most perilous risk factors are, whether it's uncontrolled AI agents, whether it is non-state actors using AI either for cyber ops or for biologics. And would it be emergencies, this hotline, or it's kind of yet to be determined? It's yet to be determined, but I would also hope that we would be able to talk about any incidents that have occurred, especially any that have crossed national borders. There's some reporting this week that you're a leading candidate to be the president's new AI czar. Has the president asked you? I would think that that is probably fake news. I will continue being part of the administration's AI effort. Would you want it? I think there's one AI czar, and that's President Trump. You've said humans are responsible, not AI. Was that a signal that this liability question about companies is more about it's the humans? It's 100%. Humans are creating these AIs and the agents, and the responsibility lies with them. I would tell your viewers to read Daniel Huttenlocher, who has one of the AI institutes at MIT, had an excellent New York Times editorial last week where he goes into this. So I am in complete agreement with Professor Huttenlocher. A month ago, you launched what you called Economic D-Day on Iran. Today, oil is still, as we talked about, about 100. The strait is definitely pinched. There are tankers that are getting through, but a lot of them are getting attacked regularly. A month in, is it working? Well, first of all, Brett, the tankers, they may get hit. Many of them just sail on. They just sail on. The Iranians may launch three, four, five, six drones after them. Our great navy is blocking them. But we are getting between 10, 15, sometimes 17 million barrels a day out. To put that in perspective, before the conflict began, the number was 20. And there's probably another 3 million going out through alternate methods. So that gets us back to somewhere between 13 and 20, which is the reason we have seen oil come down from the spring highs. And in terms of operation economic outcasts, we are squeezing the Iranians like they've never seen. Today, I would say that the external flights from Iran, probably more than 80 or 90 percent of them got shut down. I'm not sure how the Iranian representatives at the UN are going to get home. So we have made it very clear around the world, whether it's the financiers, the people who are doing business, the people who are supplying the Iranians, we know who you are, you know who you are. And we are going to prosecute and execute your companies and your bank accounts every day and every week. One of them is here. I mean, China is still Iran's biggest oil customer. President Xi is here. You haven't yet sanctioned the big Chinese banks. Are they off the table now because you're dealing with Beijing? We have had very good discussions with the Chinese. But with some countries, it's better to have private discussions rather than to have public spectacles. We've made public spectacles. Our partners in the UAE have been very good. They helped us close the branches of the second largest Egyptian bank that have funneled 1.8 billion. We closed with our Turkish partners the 30th largest bank in Turkey that was getting billions to the regime. And the second largest bank in Russia, we sanctioned their external. I mean, that sounds really impressive. Why is Iran this resilient? They're a cornered animal. And we, the world, has never seen anything like this. And it's because of sequencing. So we had six weeks of kinetic activity. We have the blockade. And now we have an effort never seen before in terms of constricting and cutting off the financial oxygen to them. And I don't know whether it's going to be a week, a month, or two months, but they are going to yell, uncle. And the goal here can be one of three states of the world. One, the regime turns on each other. Not impossible. Two, we get some kind of uprising from the Iranian people. They've probably killed 50,000 of their own population. So very difficult. And then three, to get the Iranians to, if they want to make a deal, to stick to the deal. As President Trump said at the beginning of August, he didn't think the Iranians were ready for a deal. We gave the MOU a try on June 3rd. And then the Iranians, a few weeks later, began firing the on-ships in the strait and being very aggressive. And this time, if there is a deal, I guarantee you they're going to stick with it. We made news about the deal at the beginning, the two-month extension with China on that trade. Before you leave, give me one number you want voters to look at before they vote in November and why. I would actually say two. So it would be the wage levels going up. Median wages are up 3.5% to 3.7%. And the million jobs, 1.3 million jobs for Americans that we have seen, and we are seeing the manufacturing renaissance in this country. And I think we are just starting to accelerate away now, Brett. We'll watch all of this and the summit over the next day. Mr. Secretary, thanks for your time. Good to see you. Thank you. The United States president described us as terrorists. We have been the victims of terrorism. We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists. Our innocent people have been the targets of cowardly attacks and aggressions imposed upon our country. The Iranian president at the United Nations today, you can see the U.S. delegation walking out mid-speech there. The Israeli ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danen, saying about that speech, the same regime that murders its own citizens when they dare to protest against it, you are in no position to lecture Israel and the United States about morality, some of the backdrop from the U.N. General Assembly. Let's bring in our panel, Fox News contributor Mark Thiessen, Josh Kraushauer is a Fox News radio political analyst, and the embassy, Egbert Wally, former chief of staff advisor to the Biden White House press office. Okay, Mark, obviously the Iranian president with his take on things. To hear the treasury secretary in that seat say, talk about the economic pressure, you wonder where the breaking point is here for Iran. Well, I thought that was very interesting. He said there are three options. One, the Iranians turn on each other. Two, the Iranian people rise up and overthrow the regime. Or three, they make a deal and they stick to it. But four is not in there. The annihilation of Iran is not in there, as far as the president Trump said. Yeah, that's option four. He's because the president's added that and he's in charge. So I like options one and two and four. I'm not so big on option three. I think the idea that they're going to make a deal and stick to it is the least likely and least desirable outcome. It would be much better for President Trump and for the country and for the world if the Iranian regime left power before he did in 2029. Your take on the interview, your takeaway from the best interview. Well, I thought it was really interesting what he was talking about with Iran and the idea that the Iranian people would rise up when we know this is a brutal regime that subjugates its people and that they were looking to us for some help when there was a feeling of revolution earlier this year. But also, you know, I think some of what he talks about with Iran is a concern to people who are on the Hill, like Senator Wicker, who spoke today on the floor. And as chair of Senate Armed Services, he is concerned about Iran and China's partnership when it comes to the troops that died as a result of that. So I think the conversation overall about Iran was interesting from Bessett. Yeah, I'll get to China in a second. Here's Bessett on the economic impacts of Iran. Well, the economy is very strong. We will get to the other side of this Iran conflict. The energy prices will drop and you will pick your purchasing power back up. Without the Iran war, people would be feeling a lot different, you think? The inflation number, I know the inflation numbers would be very different. I think we would have been back at the Fed's target now. But on the other side, that if the Iranians were to get a nuclear weapon... And then he went on to say what that would mean for gas prices and the price of inflation. It's tough to argue that core inflation is at 2.4, which it is, but that you take out food and energy, that's that number. It's the lowest it's been in five years. But the feeling that families feel, and as I mentioned, Michigan, Ohio, wherever, that's the thing that is affecting some of these polls. Yeah, we're dealing with two different timetables. I think the administration has been effective in really putting the squeeze on Iran, but Iran is holding out and they're hoping that the political timetable, especially in the run-up to the midterms, is going to put pressure on the administration and especially these Republicans running in tough races that are going to try to call on the administration to step down and not continue its economic pressure on Iran. You're already hearing in swing races, Mike Rogers in Iowa, Ashley Hinson, some key Republicans in these key Senate races have started to get a little nervous about the politics and how Iran is playing in their home states and home districts. So that's what Iran is playing for, the long game, and hoping that it will put pressure politically on Republicans back home. Some of these candidates, like Mike Rogers and others, are doing ads, talking to cameras, saying the Iran war needs to end. All right, let's talk about China, the back-and-forth about the U.S.-China relationship, how important this visit is. Trump, stop fawning over foreign strongmen like Xi and put your foot down. There are only two world leaders that Trump has ever met plain-side, Putin and today, Xi. What a signal that says about Trump's priorities. The relationship between the United States and China will define the 21st century. The idea that we would not interact with them at the highest levels is irresponsible, it's outrageous. We had a little preview of what could come out of this and a pause on these tariffs for another two months. But what about the relationship overall and what this visit means? Well, first of all, it makes perfect sense for the president to have a good relationship and pull out the pomp and circumstance for a consequential leader like Xi Jinping, as long as he's tough behind the scenes. It sounded like, from your interview with Besant, that we're not going to get a big breakthrough deal during this summit. He's referred to it as the second of potentially four meetings this year between them, and the fact that we're going to kick the can down the road for two months suggests that there's not going to be a big breakthrough. The big issue between the United States and China right now is the AI arms race, or SI, I guess we're supposed to call it now. Are you making the change? I'm not yet. I thought superintelligence was frightening. That's kind of scary. I don't want superintelligence to be smarter than me, I don't like it. During the Cold War, when you'd have a summit in Washington, the goal was to get an arms control deal. Today, nobody's talking about an AI deal with China, nor should we be, because we are right now, to win the AI arms race, whoever gets out of the box first wins, because unlike nuclear missiles, which can't improve each other, each generation of AI builds better AI, and so whoever has the lead at the start will build an unsurpassable lead over time. So if China were to pull ahead of us, we'd never catch up. By contrast, if we maintain our lead, they'll never catch up to us, and that's why we shouldn't give them advanced chips to build better AI with. So here is Besant on the AI question and setting up this hotline. The president calls it superintelligence, a kind of hotline, if something goes wrong. So far, we haven't heard publicly that Beijing has agreed to that. Did your meeting suggest that they would? They're very eager to engage with us on AI, because the U.S. is substantially in the lead. There's some reporting this week that you're a leading candidate to be the president's new AI czar. Has the president asked you? I think there's one AI czar, and that's President Trump. So we'll see where that goes. But it sounds like AI is going to be a hot topic this week. Yeah, it sounds like superintelligence will be a hot topic this week. And even when you think about Taiwan, right? President Xi Jinping has said that Taiwan is of utmost importance in discussing the U.S.-China relationship. Taiwan produces 60% of the world's semiconductors, 90% of advanced chips. So those two conversations are tightly connected. And also for the state dinner, which I don't think from Republicans and Democrats there needs to be all of this oohing and aahing over it. President Obama hosted Xi Jinping in 2015. This is necessary, especially when we have American CEOs like Jensen Wang, who, with his company NVIDIA, have real conversations to have. I think that President Trump and Xi Jinping should be having these conversations this week. Pretty much all the AI bigwigs will be at that dinner as well. Josh? Yeah, I mean, the test of this summit and the meetings is whether this is pageantry or they're actually deals made, whether it's by the administration or whether it's by some of the companies and actually getting more intelligence on what China is up to. I will say I'm a little scared about super– I don't know if that's the right branding, because when you say the AI machines are going to be operating on their own and that gives us an advantage over China, I want to win the arms race, but I don't want them to be controlling us and getting things out of control. So I think that's a worry of a lot of voters out there. All right. Panel, thanks.