Benny Johnson's advice for Trump on Iran: Be like Smaug from The Hobbit. “You got to go full dragon in Lord of the Rings, and scorched-earth the entire town.”
Johnson: “What's the name of that dragon in Lord of the Rings?”
Published
Citation
From the June 11, 2026, edition of The Benny Show, streamed on YouTube
BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): And so Trump's pissed, and you can see it. You can see that he's, like, saying, OK. Fine. If peace isn't an option, then you choose death. And you're not going to win with the guy who wrote Art of the Deal, and President Trump is keenly aware of his place in history here, and of the Thucydides trap that he's gotten himself into where he simply has to make the decision to either end it all, like smote earth, you know, you got to go full dragon in Lord of the Rings, and scorched-earth the entire town. What's the name of that dragon in Lord of the Rings, ALX? Not Smeagol. Smaug. Thank you. Smaug. Yeah. You got to go full Smaug, or they'll be smart, and they'll sign a peace deal, which is of course what I want, and what I think you should want, and what everyone should want, because we should be focusing on the betterment of the American people every single day, and the president's administration has done an amazing job on that. And this has been a distraction and an unnecessary distraction. So that's all.
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So, you can go full Smaug, or you make a durable peace that President Trump can take and stabilize the entire region. Oil flows. This is Kharg Island. And the reason why I'm showing you this is because Donald Trump this morning saying, yo. It's done. We're done. We're done with this. Iran has no Navy, no Air Force, no radar, no aircraft carriers. All forms of defense are gone. Very hard tonight. I'm going to hit them, and at some point in the not too distant future, we're going to do boots on the ground invasion of Kharg Island. We're going to take their island. We're going to take their oil infrastructure, and assume total control over their oil and gas markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States Of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter.