On Sunday morning, September 20, 2026, Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst went on Fox & Friends Weekend from Tel Aviv and told viewers, “I just spoke with President Trump about the situation with Iran.” He then read out what the president had said to him by phone. Trump was in a “deciding mode,” Yingst reported, and “very big things are going to be happening in the not-so-distant future.” He described the options as “wiping Iran out, letting them rot economically or making a deal.” Then: “My question is, if and when do I blow the entire nation up? They better behave.”
There is no recording of Trump saying it. Every outlet that carried the line, including the right-leaning New York Post and Daily Wire, is transcribing Yingst's on-air account of a private call. That makes it one reporting event, though one that aired on the president's friendliest network and has drawn no denial, clarification or claim of misquotation from the White House. Fox's own written account of the call paraphrases the sentence, saying Trump warned that Iran had better behave; the words themselves are in the broadcast, as transcribed by Mediaite and The Hill.
It came three days after a similar remark. On September 17 he had told Axios he faced a decision on whether to “annihilate them” (see Trump Says He Has a 'Big Decision' on Iran: 'Do I Want to Go In and Annihilate Them or Do I Not?'), and in April he had written that “a whole civilization will die tonight” (see 'A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight': Trump Declares 'Power Plant Day and Bridge Day' as 100+ Legal Experts Call It a War Crime). In the same call he said some Iranian officials were “hiding like rats,” and also that he would “probably be open to” meeting Iran's president at the United Nations that week. He did not mention nuclear weapons, and no new military action was ordered or announced.
The remark landed in a tense weekend. Trump had returned from Camp David a day early without explanation, U.S. embassies in the region had issued security alerts, and Iran's central military command said, in a statement it framed as a response to intelligence about a planned American attack rather than to Trump's words, that if the United States made “any mistake” then “all its positions and interests in the region will be targeted by sustained, effective and painful attacks.” A Fox News poll the network reported the same day found 71% of voters think the administration lacks a clear plan to end the war.
No reaction from lawmakers or legal scholars to this specific statement had been published when this entry was written. Reactions circulating online, including calls to invoke the 25th Amendment, date from the April statement and should not be attached to this one.