President Donald Trump has attracted strong criticism from Democrats over his response to the deaths of three American servicemembers in the opening stages of the attack on Iran.
The U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes against the aspiring nuclear state Saturday morning as part of Operation Epic Fury, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and bringing a wave of retaliatory strikes from Tehran against other Gulf nations.
After U.S. Central Command announced that three servicemembers had been killed and five others seriously wounded by shrapnel Sunday, Trump put out a video on his Truth Social platform in which he called the dead “true American patriots” and expressed “our immense love and eternal gratitude” to their families.
But he continued by saying, “Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is. [There will] likely be more but we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case.”
Subsequently speaking to The New York Times in a brief phone interview, the president addressed the casualties again and said: “Three is three too many as far as I’m concerned. If you look at projections, they do projections, it, you know, it could be quite a bit higher than that. We expect casualties.”
Since then, Kuwait has announced that three U.S. fighter jets were brought down in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, raising the possibility of further American combat deaths.
Trump’s attitude drew an angry reaction from Democrats, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who took to X (Twitter) to compare his comments unfavorably with past remarks made by Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan about soldiers making the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
Also taking to X was Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, herself a veteran, who wrote: “‘That’s the way it is,’ says the five-time draft dodger to our military families who fear their loved one in uniform could be next,” she wrote, alluding to Trump’s five draft deferments from the Vietnam War. “What a disgrace.”
Another former soldier, Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, appeared on CNN’s Out Front with Erin Burnett to say: “I’m absolutely furious, because Donald Trump is very cavalier with other people’s lives.
“He loves pounding his chest and acting tough and talking about the costs of war, but he knows nothing about the cost of war.”
New York Rep. Pat Ryan, likewise an Iraq War combatant, also guested on CNN Sunday and told Kaitlan Collins that he was particularly incensed by Trump’s refusal to take questions on the U.S. casualties that have occurred so far, a detail revealed by the network’s White House correspondent Kristen Holmes on the same show.
“For the president to not answer those questions, to have nothing to say to those family members, is pathetic,” said Ryan.
“It’s pathetic. And it’s because he doesn’t have answers. There’s not a plan here, or if there is, he’s not sharing it with the American people.
“This certainly rhymes with past ill-conceived, half-baked regime change wars that sound good until they start, and then all of a sudden, no one knows what the heck is going on, and it’s young American men and women that pay the price. And that p***es me off.”
During his short NYT interview, Trump said the Pentagon expects to sustain the assault on Iran for “four to five weeks” and said the U.S. military would not find it difficult to maintain the present intensity of its bombing campaign.
“We have tremendous amounts of ammunition,” he said. “You know, we have ammunition stored all over the world in different countries.”
The president said he had “three very good choices” in mind for Iran’s next leader but declined to name them, citing January’s operation to remove Nicolas Maduro from power in Venezuela as his idea of a successful regime change operation.
“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” he said. “Everybody’s kept their job except for two people.”
He further urged the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to lay down their weapons and said of the prospect of the Iranian public mounting an uprising to overthrow the government in Tehran: “That’s going to be up to them about whether or not they do. They’ve been talking about it for years so now they’ll obviously have an opportunity.
“The country has been very substantially weakened, to put it mildly.”
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