Donald Trump’s Muddled Iran Message Thickens the Fog of War | Analysis
President Donald Trump said on Monday that the U.S. attack on Iran represented the “last best chance to strike” to disable its missile capabilities and prevent a “sick and sinister regime” from building a nuclear weapon.
But it was at least the third explanation in as many days about the stunning military attack that sent the Middle East into turmoil after killing Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei and 40 of his top officials. Trump has cited the uprising by Iranian people, the nuclear threat, the missile threat and Iran’s support for terror groups in the region as shifting explanations for the war.
And on Monday he then pivoted to talk about the gold drapes at the White House and building the “most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world” before exiting an East Room Medal of Honor ceremony without taking reporters’ questions.
Even by Trumpian standards it was a jarring set of remarks and underscored how the president is ducking the scrutiny expected of an elected leader in wartime. Rather than announcing the U.S.-Israel strikes in an Oval Office address, Trump delivered a 2:30 a.m. ET video from Mar-a-Lago, wearing a USA baseball cap. He has yet to hold a formal news conference on the war, instead giving brief phone interviews to reporters from more than a dozen outlets before his public remarks Monday.
His sporadic remarks and avoidance of public questioning have helped thicken the fog of war rather than cut through it.
Trump has long communicated in unorthodox ways, but his messaging on the rationale for striking Iran amid public disapproval has been particularly “scattershot,” as CNN’s Brian Stelter put it.
The ramifications of Trump’s fragmented media strategy — whether calculated or not — are significant in allowing him to sidestep scrutiny at a moment when clarity and accountability are necessary. Trump’s willingness to personally take reporters’ calls offers the impression of accessibility, but brief phone hits are no substitute for public questioning.
After the East Room ceremony, he ignored shouted questions, skipping an opportunity to engage in a back-and-forth about his decision-making, the military’s progress, whether regime change is the ultimate objective and how the strikes square with his America First agenda.
“I’ve never seen something so important go unexplained for so long,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote Monday on X. “The decision to put our service members at risk is the most solemn that any president can make, and it’s just totally unheard of to have such shifting, contradictory and weak explanations.”
Announcing a war, taking calls
In his initial Saturday video, Trump told the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is in hand” and that they should “take over” the government after the bombing. Shortly after 4 a.m. ET, Trump told the Washington Post that “freedom for the people” is the goal of the military operation.
Trump continued taking calls from reporters at ABC News, CNN, Fox News, MS NOW, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Washington Post, Axios, The New York Post, Politico, The Telegraph, Daily Mail and Israel’s Channel 14 News. The conversations appeared brief: MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell recalled getting about a minute with the president when she called just before 11 p.m. ET on Saturday.
“On such a consequential day, for not just the United States, not just the world, but also President Trump himself, it was curious that he had not done any press conferences or taken questions widely from reporters,” she said regarding her and a colleague’s motivation for calling.
The next morning, The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer got a hold of Trump, who told him the Iranian government “want[s] to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” a potentially groundbreaking development. That same day, Trump told The Daily Mail’s Nikki Schwab: “They want to, they want to talk, but I said you should have talked last week not this week.”
Trump also told Schwab the military campaign is expected to last around four weeks, a timeline he also suggested Sunday to The Times’ Zolan Kanno-Youngs.
But Kanno-Youngs indicated the nearly six-minute call didn’t clarify the situation at hand, writing that Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government” and “was vague on the question of who should be in the top ruling position in Iran after the ayatollah’s death, or even who should decide.”
While Trump made headlines through brief phone hits, no Trump cabinet members or senior officials appeared on the Sunday morning public affairs shows to discuss the case for war and ongoing operations at length.
When the Pentagon held a news conference on Monday, its first in months, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was combative with reporters. He framed a straightforward question about Trump’s stated “four-week” timeline as a “gotcha,” while insisting that the military operation was not a “democracy-building exercise” like two decades ago in Iraq, or a “so-called regime change war.”
Trump made more news Monday. In a nine-minute call with CNN’s Jake Tapper, the president said, “We haven’t even started hitting them hard,” that “the big wave hasn’t even happened” and “the big one is coming soon.”
He also didn’t rule out U.S. troops on the ground, telling the Post: “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.”
The White House has defended how Trump is communicating to the public. When Times’ reporter Peter Baker noted that Trump didn’t rush back to the Oval Office to “rally the nation” but instead “stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser,” communications director Stephen Cheung accused him of being “so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past.”
Cheung noted that Trump’s videos had “garnered hundreds of millions of views” and that he “took dozens of calls with reporters, including many from Peter’s own outlet.”
HuffPost reporter S.V. Dáte, who has infuriated the White House in the past, wasn’t one of them, and took issue with the president’s media engagement in recent days.
“Rather than talking to the press pool or doing a news conference about Iran, Trump instead called/accepted calls from individual reporters,” he wrote on X. “Why? Multiple reporters can follow-up on each others’ question. A phone interview can be ended instantly if the questions get hard.”
Or as Vox’s Astead Herndon put it: “Trump understands access drives framing in legacy outlets, who are competing with each other. So you get a wall of ‘exclusive’ interviews, all with contradictory claims, but each are treated earnestly in its silo.”
Some uncertainty is inevitable at the start of a war: The military cannot reveal classified plans, and few Western journalists are on the ground in Iran, where there has been an internet blackout. But Trump has only thickened the fog.
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