Tensions Are Rising Again In The Strait Of Hormuz. Trump Is Vowing To Escalate Further

President Donald Trump said the U.S. will hit Iran “hard again tonight” after conducting strikes on Tuesday as tensions in the region continue to escalate.

“We’re going to hit them hard tonight, but we’ll see how it all works out,” Trump said while talking to press at the NATO summit in Turkey.

He went on to say that the U.S. would leave meetings thinking “we’ve made a lot of progress, and they’ll get out of the room, we’ll talk about it here, they’ll agree on everything, and then they’ll go have a news conference, and say we never even talked about it.”

Trump had said earlier that the ceasefire is over after the U.S. carried new attacks against the country in retaliation for Tehran’s targeting of commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

He went on to describe Iran’s leaders as “scum.” “They’re sick people. They’re led by people, and they’re vicious, violent people,” Trump added, claiming that if Tehran managed to get a nuclear weapon, “they’d use it.”

The president then said that he would allow negotiations to continue, but stressed he doesn’t “care.” “They can talk, but I think they’re wasting their time. They’re a bunch of lying guys.”

The remarks came after U.S. forces launched strikes against Iran, with the Central Command (CENTCOM) saying it hit “over 80 targets with precision munitions as an immediate response to Iran’s latest attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.”

“U.S. forces struck Iranian air defense systems, command and control networks, coastal radar sites, anti-ship missile capabilities, and more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats in and near the strait to degrade Iran’s ability to continue attacking international commerce flowing through the international trade corridor,” forces.

Trump later told press that the U.S. “attacked very powerfully last night the very dangerous people from Iran.”

“They’re sick. There’s something wrong with them. We say go and do your funeral stuff, and instead of that, they start shooting rockets at ships yesterday, and so we hit them very hard last night, very hard. I would say 20 to 120 times tougher,” he added, in reference to the ceremonies for the funeral of slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran, in turn, launched strikes at Kuwait and Bahrain, with allies Egypt, Qatar, Jordan and Kuwait condemning them and calling them a “flagrant violation of the sovereignty.”

NATO Secretary Mark Rutte, who met with Trump on Wednesday, called the strikes “absolutely necessary.”

The U.S. also revoked its temporary sanctions waiver allowing limited Iranian oil sales, ending a diplomatic concession that had been granted just weeks earlier as part the memorandum.