“When I came into office, Iran had $70 billion in foreign exchange reserves. … By the time I left, they had nothing. They were broke.”
Trump’s numbers are off — Iran’s reserves were larger than he states and did not drop to zero — but he’s on point about the plummeting trend line. Iran’s foreign currency reserves fell from $128 billion in 2015 to $15 billion in 2019, which represents an even more dramatic decline in absolute dollars than Trump said. This decline is widely believed to be a consequence of the tightened U.S. sanctions under Trump and it has not reversed to any significant degree since.