A wide majority of Americans do not believe the White House has a clear plan for the future of the U.S. conflict with Iran, a dynamic possibly exacerbated by statements made by President Donald Trump and his closest allies on the issue.
In a CNN poll published on Monday, 6 in 10 respondents said that the president lacked “a clear plan for handling the situation” while a slightly higher amount, 62 percent, said that he should get congressional approval before launching further strikes.
Attacks against Iranian targets began early Saturday morning eastern time, with U.S. and Israeli forces striking locations across the country. Hundreds have now been reported killed while at least six U.S. service members and others have been killed in retaliatory strikes across the Middle East. Iran’s government confirmed the death of the country’s supreme leader on Saturday.
Those strikes closely followed two rounds of negotiations between a U.S. team headed up by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff and an Iranian delegation led by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Geneva on Thursday. An Axios report after strikes began on Saturday detailed how Witkoff and Kushner signaled the distance between the two sides’ positions after negotiations concluded, reportedly prompting Trump to authorize the attacks a day later.
CNN’s polling found that a larger share of Americans (39 percent) believe that the Trump administration’s efforts at diplomacy were insufficient than do not (27 percent).
Reports indicate that the White House presented Iranian officials with a list of demands that included an end to Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity and the surrender of all nuclear material. The Trump team was also reported to have pressed unsuccessfully for Iran to address its non-nuclear ballistic missile program.
More than half of Americans (54 percent) also believe, according to CNN’s poll, that the conflict will end with Iran remaining a continued or greater threat to American interests.
The findings follow a CBS News poll that indicated a majority of Americans would support striking Iran to stop the Iranian government from the imminent development of a nuclear weapon. The gap in polling suggests that the White House has been unsuccessful in convincing Americans that Iran’s nuclear ambitions were reignited and presented a clear and present threat after the program’s facilities in three locations were supposedly destroyed last summer.
Trump’s own approval ratings have also been slipping for months, dragged down by plummeting immigration numbers and persistent concerns about inflation.
The White House fought back against reporters who published the findings of a classified intelligence assessment of the nuclear site strikes last year after it was revealed that U.S. intelligence officials did not believe that the 2025 strikes had achieved the destruction of the three sites, Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.
In an interview on Monday, the president said that he expected the war to last about four weeks as the U.S. continued to strike military and “leadership” targets within Iran.
“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” Trump told the New York Post. “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership — 49 killed — and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”
He also dismissed criticism of the war and the suggestion that bad poll numbers could hurt Republicans in the midterms as a result of breaking his 2024 campaign promise to avoid entering new military conflicts.
“I don’t think the polling is low,” the president told the Post. “Look, whether polling is low or not, I think the polling is probably fine. But it’s not a question of polling. You cannot let Iran, who’s a nation that has been run by crazy people, have a nuclear weapon.”
But Trump and his allies have offered shifting explanations for both the extent of the operations against Iran as well as the goals of the military campaign, which has encompassed everything from once again halting the nuclear program to stoking a full-fledged civilian revolution against Iran’s government.
On Sunday, one of the conflict’s top backers in Congress rejected the idea that the president needed a “plan” at all.
“Is there a plan to make sure that happens?” NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.) on Meet the Press. “Does the the president have a plan to guarantee that [Iran is no longer a sponsor of terrorism]?”
“No!” Graham responded. “It’s not his job or my job to do this. How many times do I have to tell you? Our job is to make sure Iran is no longer the largest state sponsor of terrorism. To help the people reconstruct a new government. No boots on the ground. We don’t own – you know this idea, ‘you break it, you own it?’ I don’t buy that one bit. It’s in America’s interest to make sure the Ayatollah’s dead. He’s dead.”
A separate poll from Reuters/Ipsos over the weekend found that nearly one in four Republicans believe that Trump is too hasty to use U.S. military force as an option to solve foreign policy problems.
CNN’s poll included responses from 1,004 adults across the U.S. surveyed between Feb. 28-March 1. The margin of error is 3.9 percentage points.
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