President Donald Trump has made his first public comments after launching strikes on Iran this weekend, saying that the country’s long range missiles and nuclear weapons program posed as “intolerable threat” to the United States.
Speaking from the East Room at the start of a ceremony to award the Medal of Honor to a trio of U.S. Army soldiers who’d served in the Second World War, the Vietnam War and Afghanistan, the president said Iran’s ballistic missile capability would have “soon” been able to reach beyond hitting American bases in the Middle East and Europe to hit “our beautiful America” while making it “extraordinarily difficult” for future airstrikes to halt the nuclear weapons program he claimed to have “obliterated” last June.
“An Iranian regime armed with long range missiles and nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat to the Middle East, but also to the American people. Our country itself would be under threat, and it was very nearly under threat.”
It was Trump’s first public comment on the ongoing campaign since American and Israeli warplanes began what he’d described as “major combat operations” in a video posted to social media in the wee hours of Saturday.
Over the first few days of the conflict, U.S. and Israeli forces have struck numerous targets associated with Iranian leadership, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and other top military and government officials.
Trump’s brief remarks came amid ongoing Iranian retaliation against both military and civilian targets across the Middle East that has included rocket attacks against Israel by Hezbollah and waves of suicide drone attacks that have left luxury hotels and residences in Dubai and Bahrain in flames.
Trump appeared to justify his decision to unilaterally send American forces into battle without Congressional authorization by claiming the Iranian nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs would have presented “a very clear, colossal threat to America.”
The president also claimed the attacks were necessary despite the lack of an imminent threat to the U.S. because it was the “last best chance to strike ... and eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime.”
He added that American forces were “destroying Iran's missile capabilities” on an “hourly basis” and crippling Iran’s navy while “ensuring” that Tehran “cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders” in the future.
His remarks diverged from what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had told reporters hours earlier during a rare press briefing when he was pressed with further questions about the goal of the operation, how many U.S. troops were involved and when officials anticipated its end.
Speaking alongside Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Dan Caine, Hegseth mocked the query on the operation’s time frame as a “typical NBC gotcha-type question” while claiming that Trump “has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take.”
Four American service members have lost their lives since combat operations began Saturday, with several others wounded, and Caine told reporters that more casualties were expected.
The U.S. has thus far lost several F-15 Strike Eagle aircraft that were shot down accidentally by Kuwaiti surface-to-air missiles Monday with the pilots ejecting to safety.
At the East Room ceremony to honor the Medal of Honor recipients, Trump said he grieved America’s latest four war dead and was sending “love and support to their families” while vowing to continue the fight in their names.
“In their memory, we continue this mission with ferocious, unyielding resolve to crush the threat this terrorist regime poses to the American people,” he said.
While Trump claimed the U.S. was already “substantially ahead of our time projections” for the potential length of the conflict while predicting that it could be over in “four to five weeks” he also vowed to continue it longer if needed.
“We also projected four weeks to terminate the military leadership, and as you know, that was done in about an hour. So we're ahead of schedule there by a lot,” he said.
Before Trump’s public appearance at the Medal of Honor ceremony, he sounded off on the war to a number of reporters from mainstream news outlets in brief phone calls.
In one phone interview with CNN, he bragged that U.S. forces were “knocking the c**p” out of Iran and opined that the war was “going very well” thus far.
Urging Iranian citizens to stay inside, Trump also boasted that “we haven’t even started hitting them hard”, warning: “The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon.”
Separately, he told the New York Post he wasn’t categorically ruling out sending American ground forces into Iran — a move that would potentially invite pushback from Congress and a backlash from parts of his MAGA Republican base who have thus far supported his foreign military actions because it has not required the U.S. troops being deployed on foreign soil.
“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 Post.
Trump later added to the Post that he did “the right thing” and suggested that polling shows support for his decision to attack Iran. But public polling released since the joint American-Israeli operation began on Saturday by Reuters/Ipsos found only 27 per cent of Americans approve of the strikes compared with 43 per cent who said they disapproved and 29 per cent who said they weren’t sure.
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