Donald Trump answered questions from reporters publicly for the first time since the U.S. and Israel launched military strikes on Iran, and the president was pressed on why Americans were now being advised to evacuate the Middle East.

A reporter asked Trump why there wasn’t an evacuation plan.

“Well, because it happened all very quickly,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We thought, and I thought maybe more so than most…I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack others.”

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s team released a statement warning of “serious safety risks” across the region, and told Americans to “depart via commercial means.”

The warning covered American citizens who are currently in Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the UAE and Yemen.

Trump also said that Israel did not force his hand to strike Iran.

The president said, “No, I might have forced their hand. We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack if we didn’t do it.”

On Monday, Rubio told reporters that “we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps higher those killed.”

Figures like Tucker Carlson and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once some of Trump’s most prominent supporters, have spoken out against the war and have said that the U.S. was being led into it by Israel. Others, like Mark Levin, have championed Trump’s entry into another Middle East conflict.

Speaking to reporters, Trump said that the U.S. military action was devastating to Iran. “virtually everything they have has been knocked out now,” he said. “Their missile count is going way down.”

He said that the U.S. and Israel “have then very much beaten militarily.”

“I guess the worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right?” Trump said. “That could happen. We don’t want that to happen.”