As Trump declares war won, Iran mocks suggestion talks underway, warns against ground invasion

President Trump voiced optimism on Tuesday that a peace deal will be reached with Iran, while insisting the war had already been won.

“This war has been won,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office. “The only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”

“We killed all their leadership,” he said when CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe asked which Iranians the U.S. was now negotiating with. “And then they met to choose new leaders and we killed all of them. And now we have a new group, and we can easily do that, but let’s see how they turn out.”

“It’s — we have, really, regime change,” the president said. “You know, this is a change in the regime, because the leaders are all very different than the ones that we started off with that created all those problems. So this was, I think we can say, Jason, this is regime change, right?”

Iran’s new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei is the son of the former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war. While the new leader has not been seen since he was tapped to succeed his father, and he’s believed to have been wounded in the same strike, there have been no signs of a disintegration of Islamic Republic’s well-defined power structure, with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard still defiant, and seemingly in control of Iran’s war effort.

O’Keefe asked the president why he trusts Iran.

“I don’t trust anybody,” Mr. Trump responded. “I don’t trust you.”

O’Keefe asked why the U.S. should bother talking to the Iranians.

“Because they’re going to make a deal,” Mr. Trump said.