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Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hew, and I can think of no one better to do an extended review of the president's speech than Eli Lake.

Eli is a correspondent for the free press, a columnist for the free press.

He's got a great new free press column out.

No taco from Trump this time about last night's speech.

He's also the host of the wonderful podcast, Breaking History.

Eli, welcome.

Let's start with your overview on the president's speech last night.

Well, I think it was a, in some ways you could argue we should have given it at the beginning of the war,

but it was an explanation for how we got here. He laid out the history of his own policies and the history

of Iran's threats. He explained, I think, a very important concept, which has not been

as prominent in the media as I think it should be, which is that regardless of the progress that

was set back in Operation Midnight Hammer, what Iran was doing was essentially building a kind

of conventional weapons force field so that they would have so many missiles and would be able to

threaten so much of the Middle East and even further,

we now know because of their ability to hit Diego Garcia,

that it would be that much harder to take out the nuclear program that they were just dead set on continuing.

Even after Midnight Hammer, there was an important line in which Trump says that he wanted to negotiate after the 12-day war, but then they started moving things to another site, and they were just dead set on acquiring a nuclear weapon.

So in that respect, I think it was very important for everybody to get that overview.

He made it clear that he was going to finish the job.

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