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Trump in Saudi Arabia: 'My Job Is to Defend America'

May 14, 2025 · The White House · 0:01:08

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

The White House published a short clip of President Trump’s remarks during his May 2025 visit to Saudi Arabia. Trump said he believes in peace through strength, and that while it is God’s job to sit in judgment, his own job is to defend America and promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity and peace, as he phrased it.

Trump described the campaign against the Houthis in Yemen as 52 days of thunder and lightning like they had never seen, calling it a swift, ferocious, decisive and extremely successful use of military force in which the United States hit them hard, got what it came for and then got out, as he characterized the operation. He said the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by so-called nation builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits, but by the people of the region themselves, and that peace, prosperity and progress came from embracing their national traditions and heritage rather than radically rejecting them.

Why it matters

The clip distills the doctrine Trump carried on his first major foreign trip of the term: force used briefly and decisively, paired with an explicit rejection of nation-building in favor of regional self-development.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Visits Saudi Arabia: “My Job is to Defend America””, 2025-05-14 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-05-14). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.