Jonathan Karl Dishes On Call With Trump Ahead of Iran Address: Also ‘Quite Eager’ to Talk About ‘His Ballroom’

President Donald Trump speaks at the Future Investment Initiative Institute’s summit Friday, March 27, 2026, in Miami Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl detailed his recent conversation with President Donald Trump on Wednesday, just hours before Trump is set to address the nation about the ongoing Iran war.

“So I had a lengthy phone call with President Trump yesterday. I’m going to try to summarize what was said over the course of about 20 minutes. First of all, obviously Iran was front and center,” Karl began in a clip posted to social media. He added:

The president expressing great confidence that everything was going to work out fine in Iran, that he was negotiating. He said that there has been effectively regime change, and that the regime that is now in place is much more reasonable, much more moderate. And I asked him specifically if he was talking to the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, and he said yes, and he said that the guy was quite reasonable.

I pointed out that he had been going back and forth on social media, criticizing President Trump, sometimes seeming to mock him. And Trump said he’s been much better lately. But then he added what was clearly a threat to him — to this person he says he’s negotiating with, the Iranian speaker of the Parliament — saying, “We know where he lives, let me put it that way.”

Politico reported on Wednesday afternoon that Trump is set to tell Americans that the war is “winding down” and that other countries need to be responsible for getting Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz – the key global energy hub.

“But the conversation touched on a whole bunch of other issues, and I have to say one thing that Trump was quite eager to talk about was his ballroom,” Karl continued, adding:

During the course of talking to him over the phone, he sent me — or had one of his aides send me — images of artists’ renderings of what the ballroom will look like. This was just hours before a judge ordered a halt to the construction of the ballroom. But he sent me that, and then he was talking about how his signature is going to be on the dollar bill.

He was excited that the airport in Florida and Palm Beach is going to be named after him, and he also wanted to know if I had seen the images of the renderings of the Trump library that will eventually be built — he says in Florida. He told me it’d be 82 stories, it’s the best location, and it was going to be a five-star hotel.

Anyway, the bottom line is, over the course of this entire discussion, what struck me more than anything is that Donald Trump seems to have like no concerns. He seems extremely confident — supremely confident — that things will work out in Iran.

We talked about the midterms and the bad poll numbers that he’s seen, and he said he’s not worried about that, not worried about that. He said, “I can only do what I have to do.” And again, generally, just over the whole course of it, it just seemed like — you know — he wanted to have a conversation. He did not seem like a president struggling through the very difficult circumstances of a war in the Middle East.

Watch the clip above.

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