The White House continued to offer a conflicting and rapidly evolving rationale for why Iran presented such an imminent threat to U.S. forces and their allies across the Middle East that President Donald Trump needed to use military force, as the joint U.S. and Israeli campaign concluded its fourth day on Tuesday.
A disjointed messaging effort appears to be hindering the administration’s ability to sell the war to the American people though, as polling indicates that a majority of Americans do not yet understand why the U.S. is at war with Iran now — or simply do not accept the White House’s reasoning.
On Tuesday, the president offered his longest remarks to date on the matter. At a bilateral meeting with Germany’s chancellor, he claimed without any proof that Iranian forces were preparing to attack U.S. forces before the U.S. or Israel launched any attacks at all.
“We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” said the president. “They were going to attack if we didn't do it. They were going to attack first, I felt strongly about that.”
That explanation directly contradicted what Secretary of State Marco Rubio said to reporters a day earlier. Rubio, speaking ahead of a briefing with congressional leadership, said Monday that an imminent Israeli attack forced the U.S. to act in order to prevent retaliatory strikes against American forces.
“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,” said Rubio on Monday.
The administration’s explanations for why it launched such a massive military campaign have shifted rapidly since the first strikes took place Saturday morning. The reasons have ranged from a necessity to deal with a reconstructed Iranian nuclear weapons program to longer-held frustrations that Iran was building up its ballistic weapons stockpile and refusing to address it with negotiators. Then Rubio’s assertion on Monday that Israel planned to launch its own military action before the president made his decision was shot down by Trump a day later.
“Based on the way that the negotiations was going, I think that they were going to attack first. And I didn't want that to happen,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “So if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand. But Israel was ready and we were ready.”
Many retaliatory Iranian strikes have taken place in the days since, and six U.S. service members are confirmed dead as the conflict has exploded across the region. Numerous countries across the Gulf region have been targeted by Iranian strikes, including Qatar, Oman, the UAE and even Cyprus as U.S., Israeli and NATO targets have come under drone and missile attack.
Explosions rang out Tuesday in Tehran and in Lebanon, where Israel retaliated against Hezbollah. And the American embassy in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. consulate in the United Arab Emirates were attacked by Iranian drones. Meanwhile, Iran has fired dozens of ballistic missiles at Israel, though most of it has been intercepted. Still, 11 people in Israel have been killed since the conflict began, the Associated Press reported.
But four days in, the White House continues to provide a limited picture of the conflict’s possible resolution, similar to how the Trump administration offered a murky view of it’s plan for dealing with the remainder of Venezuela’s government in the wake of the raid to capture Nicolas Maduro. Trump has said that he is not ready to negotiate with Iran, in a post on Truth Social ,and on Tuesday told reporters that he has no idea who will take over the government after U.S. strikes killed the most likely candidates.
“Most of the people we had in mind [to lead Iran] are dead,” he said. “Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”
The president was frank about the lack of certainty surrounding Iran’s future leadership, admitting that the “worst case” scenario “is we do this and then somebody takes over who is as bad as the previous person.”
He added that “five years” from now, the U.S. could be looking back and realizing that his actions were a mistake.
“That could happen. We don’t want that to happen.”
His secretary of Defense was far more optimistic about the prospect for positive regime change on Monday, at an early-morning press conference at the Pentagon — his first in months.
“This is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change, and the world is better off for it,” he said.
If there’s one common thread linking the reasonings provided by various Trump administration figures, it’s the threat that Iran’s ballistic missile program presented and the idea that it would soon reach a “point of no return”, where efforts to dislodge it or Iran’s nuclear sites wouldn’t be feasible.
That explanation has been overshadowed by the drumbeat of war Trump himself has encouraged for months, and initial statements in the wake of the strikes from White House officials blaming the supposed imminent threat of an Iranian nuclear program which they angrily claimed in 2025 to have obliterated and set back by years.
Polling shows that Americans largely disapproved of the idea of going to war with Iran in the days leading up to the strikes, following Trump’s threats to do so in January over Tehran’s violent and sometimes deadly suppression of protesters around the country. Thousands are confirmed to have been killed after security forces and militias put down a round of demonstrations sparked by plunging currency values.
That same polling now shows that Americans are similarly unconvinced by the evolving rationalizations put forward by the administration over the course of Saturday to Tuesday.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll over the weekend found that only a quarter of Americans approved of the U.S. airstrike campaign while disapproval was much higher, at 43 percent. In that same poll, nearly one in four Republicans said that Trump was too hasty to use military force and deploy U.S. service members abroad.
Adding to the list of uncertain terms of Trump’s war with Iran, the White House and sympathetic members of Congress briefed by the administration on its plans have not completely ruled out American boots on the ground in Iran, only saying a “large-scale” force will not be deployed.
In fact, Trump told the New York Post this week, that he was not ruling out the possibility of sending in troops. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump told the outlet. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ (or) ‘if they were necessary.’”
On Monday, CNN published a poll which found that 6 in 10 respondents believed 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.
As Trump and his allies hurtle towards the midterms, the ability of the White House to get its story straight and bring the war to a close could be key to averting a devastating political division that puts him on the wrong side of independents and even members of his own base.
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