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Trump Participates in a Greeting with the Secretary General of NATO, Jul. 8, 2026

July 8, 2026 · The White House · 0:17:37

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump greeted NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Ankara, Turkey on July 8, 2026, ahead of the summit’s main leaders’ session, and spoke with reporters alongside him. The President rated the previous night’s dinner with President Erdogan “a 10, maybe a 12,” said the meetings with Turkey on trade had gone very well, and previewed the day: “We’re going to have a very big meeting with lots of leaders… A lot of things have been determined, and some things haven’t, frankly.”

He then gave the summit’s first on-camera account of the previous night’s strikes on Iran. Iran’s forces, he said, had started “shooting rockets at ships yesterday” after being told to attend to funeral observances, “and so we hit them very hard last night. Very hard. I would say 20 to one.” The objective, he said, was “the denuclearization of Iran… We’re not going to let them because they’re crazy and they can’t have a nuclear weapon.” He announced a closing news conference later that day — the press conference paged separately in this collection.

Why it matters

The greeting is where the President first put the overnight Iran strikes on the summit record, standing next to the alliance’s secretary general: the retaliation ratio, the trigger as he described it, and the denuclearization objective, all stated hours before the formal press conference. This chronicle files it on the Foreign Policy & Defense hub.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the twenty-to-one retaliation statement and the strikes’ stated trigger are dated claims by the President, checkable against the Defense Department’s own accounts of the same night. Noted for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Participates in a Greeting with the Secretary General of NATO,” Ankara, Turkey, July 8, 2026 (official upload, embedded above). All characterizations as stated by the President at the greeting.