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Trump Holds a Press Conference at the G7 Summit in Evian, Jun. 17, 2026
June 17, 2026 · The White House · 1:08:47
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
President Donald Trump held a press conference in Evian, France on June 17, 2026, closing the G7 summit, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent beside him. “On Sunday, we reached an agreement with Iran that achieves everything we set out to accomplish. Everything and much more. Ending the current conflict, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon. That’s what was all about. That was about 99% — Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. They can’t develop it, buy it. They can never have a nuclear weapon.”
He argued the alternative was economic catastrophe: continued bombing would have kept the strait closed — “people that own billion-dollar ships… are not like sailing ships or having their ships participate when you go up the coast and you go through the strait and there are rockets flying over your head” — and risked a depression: “The one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.” He credited the long arc he dates to the Soleimani strike in his first term, described the agreement’s terms as he presents them — “the most important clause to me… is a very strong statement that they will never have a nuclear weapon. And it doesn’t say they’ll have one in five years or 10 years or 20 years” — and contrasted it with the Obama agreement: “The Obama deal was a road to a nuclear weapon. And let’s call it the Trump deal was a wall for a nuclear weapon.”
The G7 leaders, he said, “are thrilled that we made a deal. Every one of them.” He announced a parallel effort with the Gulf nations on non-nuclear issues — ballistic missiles and terrorist proxies — thanked Pakistan and Qatar for their mediation work, and said maritime traffic through the strait “has already increased very substantially and the normal flow of energy will resume in the coming days.”
Why it matters
This is the set-piece presentation of the Iran agreement to the world — the President’s fullest public case for it, delivered to the allied leaders whose support the agreement needs, with his Treasury Secretary at his side. The agreement is the central foreign-policy fact of the summer this chronicle is paging, and this press conference is its fullest official statement.
Scoreboard watch
This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: the agreement itself, as the President stated its terms — conflict ended, strait reopened, no Iranian nuclear weapon ever, with inspections and the 60-day process to follow. What the scoreboard will check is the record against each stated term.
Sources: The White House, “President Trump Holds a Press Conference, Jun. 17, 2026,” Evian, France (official upload, embedded above). All figures and characterizations as stated by the President in the press conference.
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