Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump took credit for the prisoner exchange between Iran and the U.S. that returned four Americans, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, saying that he thought he "had something to do with it."
"So I've been hitting them hard and I think I might have had something to do with it," Trump told a crowd of at the South Carolina Tea Party Convention, according to CBS News. "You want to know the truth? It's a part of my staple thing, I mean, I go crazy when I hear about this, you go absolutely wild because how is it possible?"
"I have been going wild for years about the prisoners. I call them the 'hostages.' Our four people," he added, Business Insider reported
Iran has often been a part of Trump's stump speech, including the deal that Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated in 2015, for which the real estate called Kerry "incompetent," according to NBC News.
But, before long, Trump also condemned the deal, saying, "It's horrible, it should have happened years before," according to The Los Angeles Times. He also said that it was a bad deal because the Iranians get more out of the deal than the U.S. does. "They're getting seven people, so essentially they get $150bn plus seven, and we get four," Trump said, The Guardian reported.
Among the Republican 2016 field, Marco Rubio was the first to speak out on Saturday, reiterating his position on CBS' Face The Nation. "It proves once again now that nations and enemies of America around the world know there's a price for Americans," Rubio told host John Dickerson in the interview, which aired on Sunday. "If you take an American hostage, Barack Obama will cut a deal with you, whether it's Bergdahl, what he did with the Castro brothers and now what he's done with Iran."
