Levin’s weekend evening show doesn’t draw a particularly large audience — but he can often count Trump as one of his viewers. And if the president tuned in that night, he heard the Fox host alternately shower him with praise and denounce the Iranian regime. Over the course of Levin’s lengthy monologue, he:
- Praised Trump as a “brilliant negotiator” who has been “brilliant as a president,” but needed to recognize that “diplomacy as diplomacy” would fail because Iran’s “short-term goal is to avoid and delay regime change.”
- Declared that “delay means it will be left to our children to deal with an Iranian regime that is tens of thousands of ballistic missiles, scores and scores of nuclear warheads and a rebirth through consolidation of power eternally and subsidies and support from China, Russia, North Korea and others.”
- Advised that “Iran has never been weaker in 47 years,” while a strike “is only going to get much more difficult and complicated as time goes on.”
- Claimed that “the Iranian regime will never surrender its very purpose for existing -- to destroy us and the West,” adding: “It is a seventh century barbaric Islamist regime. It is a terrorist state. It is a death cult and it believes that God is on their side.”
- Warned that Iran’s leaders “won't think twice before using an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead to attack the continental United States.”
Levin concluded his monologue:
They think the West will take a deal. They are going to play tough. Maybe they will play tough to the end. Who knows?
But I've got to believe seeing President Trump in action, knowing President Trump, reading again The Art of the Deal, that he knows what he is up against and that he would never ever leave it to our children and grandchildren to deal with this evil, genocidal, mass-murdering regime of the seventh century.
The fact that we destroyed their nuclear sites — it's obvious they're still pushing to build more nukes or we would not be negotiating with them at all. And the people of Iran, they deserve our help. They deserve our support. They have not stopped slaughtering. They are slaughtering left and right. They are imprisoning left and right, that is the regime. I cannot think of any reason not to take this regime out.
It won't be easy, but it is not China, it is not Russia, it is not even North Korea. They are weaker than they ever were. Now is the time.
Levin closed his broadcast that night by saying of Trump: “I trust him to make the right decisions as president, as commander-in-chief, and tomorrow is Presidents' Day, so I want to wish the president a happy President's Day and God bless you, sir!”
Levin’s sycophancy seemingly helped him win a June 2025 battle with other MAGA media figures for Trump’s ear. He reportedly convinced the president over a lunch at the White House that Iran was just days away from getting a nuclear weapon, a claim contradicted by Trump’s formal foreign policy advisers.
After Trump announced a few weeks later that the U.S. military had bombed several Iranian nuclear sites, the Fox host took credit, saying: “To be perfectly honest about this, there were a handful of us who encouraged this night, who said that we needed to take military action to bring about this result. It is not so much that we had to convince President Trump — he knew what to do, he instinctively knows what to do, he is a brilliant, brilliant man.”
