NEW: President Trump issues joint statement with Prime Minister of Iraq

President Trump welcomed Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi of Iraq to the White House today—the Iraqi leader’s first visit since assuming office in May.

“We’re down to a very small number of soldiers in Iraq now. We defeated the ISIS caliphate in Iraq and Syria,” President Trump said. “I think our relationship [with Iraq] now is better than ever before.”

President Trump: “We knocked out 100 percent of the ISIS caliphate.”

America is leading the way to a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East—without fighting endless wars and without making terrible deals that harm our national security.

Just last week, President Trump secured a landmark agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, as the UAE became the first major Arab country to recognize Israel in over a quarter-century.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, while the disastrous Obama nuclear deal funneled billions of dollars to Iran—the world’s number one state sponsor of terror—President Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign is isolating and crippling the Iranian regime.

“Iran doesn’t have so much money to give to the world anymore—to the terrorists, to give to al Qaeda and various other groups of people that they were funding,” President Trump said. “They have to keep their own regime together, and it’s not easy for them.”

Like Ronald Reagan, “peace through strength” is President Trump’s approach to foreign policy. “Peace through stability” is another way to put it, Daniel McCarthy writes in The American Conservative this week.

“Bush’s war and Obama’s idea of peace both built-up Iranian power,” McCarthy says. “Donald Trump can succeed where the others fail because he is transactional, not ideological, and he looks out for the American interest.”

President Trump is bringing our great American soldiers home!

READ: Joint Statement from President Trump and Iraqi Prime Minister

Before President Trump, America witnessed the slowest ‘recovery’ in decades

“We inherited the worst, slowest economic recovery since, I don’t know, probably the Great Depression,” National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said today.

“In 2016 . . . the economy was teetering very close to recession,” he added. Then, President Trump’s “policies of low taxes, deregulation, unleashing energy, free- and fair-trade deals to improve exports for manufactures and farmers—those policies generated a tremendous boom.” Unemployment plummeted to 3.5 percent as a result.

Now, the Great American Comeback from COVID-19 is already underway. Last week, President Trump shared six graphs that reveal the fastest recovery in history: