“Somebody said, I wonder why they don't protest. Well, well, it's a little hard when you got machine guns at the end of the street shooting you down,” he added.
Iran has killed at least 75,000 protesters over the last eight months, US President Donald Trump claimed during a rally in Kansas on Monday.
"They did a lot of killing. And by the way, in the last eight months, they've killed 75,000 minimum protesters,” he said.
“Somebody said, I wonder why they don't protest. Well, well, it's a little hard when you got machine guns at the end of the street shooting you down,” he added.
Trump also claimed that the Iranian regime hangs the people it kills from cranes "for all to see," adding, "A very, sad thing. Rough group."
Trump claims NATO request was test for allies
Later on during the rally, Trump alleged that his request to NATO allies to aid the United States in its war against Iran had been a test.
"When we ask for help and Iran help, which we didn't need, we didn't need - but I wanted to, I was testing, I wanted to find out," he said.
“Because we spend so much money in NATO, so we asked for help that we didn't need. I wanted to see they weren't there to help. They said, it's just something that we can never really forget, " he added.
“You know, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on NATO protecting them. But when we said, would you like to help? No," he said.