President Donald Trump sits at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office at the White House, in Washington, DC, on Oct. 21, 2025. Credit - Photograph by Stephen Voss for TIME

President Donald Trump participated in a phone interview with TIME at the White House on Oct. 15.

Over the course of the interview, Trump discussed in detail how the ceasefire in Gaza came together and his view on where the region goes from here.

Here's what Trump told TIME Senior Political Correspondent Eric Cortellessa.

TIME: I want to start off by asking what do we not know about the behind-the-scenes events that led to this agreement? What were the turning points and key moments?

Well, you know, you have 3,000 years of history, and in the case of the Middle East, there’s tremendous hatred, there's tremendous dislike, there's tremendous distrust among everybody. And you don't have allies, very few allies, and people that you think are allies don't really like each other. So you have a set of separate, in some cases some very smart, and in some cases some very rich—very, very rich countries, right? But they were able—and I knew many of them from even before politics, and, you know, they were able to come together for peace in the Middle East. This is peace in the Middle East. This is above and beyond Gaza.

And a lot of it happened—a lot of the problem was when Bush went in and blew up Iraq, he destabilized the region, because you had one strong power. You had two strong powers—Iraq and Iran—and they were identical. And they would fight each other for 1,000 years under different names and different religions, but they would fight each other for many, many centuries, and they were the same. They were the same power. So they'd fight, and then they'd come to a standstill, and then they'd fight again and become—but it was the same. And when we blew up one of the two powers, all of a sudden you had one bully, and the bully was—see, they weren't bullies when they were fighting, because they were fighting each other. But they were, they became—Iran was a serious bully.

When we went to war, because we were with Israel, and so when we went to war with them, and had all of the success, and then when I went in and knocked out their nuclear potential and capability, and it was seriously knocked out. They still can't get down there, you know, because CNN fake news said, “Well, maybe it wasn't that bad.” They said, “it was bad, but maybe not.” I said, “No, it's complete obliteration.” And, as you know, the Atomic Energy Commission said I was right. Every bomb hit their mark. It was unbelievable, the attack. It was a perfect, every plane was perfect. There wasn't a screw out of joint. There wasn't an engine that failed. there wasn't anything. It was 37 hours back and forth with 52 tankers and 100 planes because, you know, we had a lot of fighter jets and stuff to go in with them.

[Editor's Note: Independent international inspectors have yet to confirm the full extent of the attack’s damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities. In the days after the offensive, CNN reported that the U.S. military’s strikes did not destroy the core components of Iran’s nuclear program, and likely only set it back by months, citing three people briefed on an early US intelligence assessment. Nearly a month later, U.S. officials briefed some lawmakers, Defense Department officials, and allied countries on an assessment determined that, while one of the nuclear sites was mostly destroyed, the other two were not as badly damaged and could potentially resume uranium enrichment within the next several months, according to NBC News. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi has said the strikes on the Fordow nuclear site caused severe damage.]

It was an unbelievable military—it should go down someday. It was, because you remember when Jimmy Carter where they had the attack with the helicopters crashing, the men running all over the desert trying to get out? Oh man, what an embarrassment. They became prisoners, and they became hostages, right? They were there. They were there—then hostages. Well, we didn't have any of that. This was a flawless attack, and we went into the nuclear and just bombed the hell out of them, and so they no longer had that nuclear threat, and they were on a conventional basis, they were weakened severely, and we had a different Middle East because we didn't have a bully. So you couldn't have made this deal.