The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran continued to upend markets, cause death and destruction across the Middle East and elude any diplomatic resolution heading into its fifth week on Friday — even as President Trump claimed victory and a coming end to the conflict.
“We’re doing really well in Iran, just so you understand,” the president insisted to a group of farmers gathered for a White House agriculture event. “I mean, how good is our military? How good is our military?”
“Our Military Operation in Iran is going GREAT!” he posted to social media shortly after, on his way to deliver an economic speech in Miami. “We saved the Middle East,” he said in that speech.
The number of U.S. deaths in the conflict has held steady for days — at 13 — but an Iranian missile attack Friday left at least 10 American service members wounded at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, according to the Associated Press, citing two U.S. officials familiar with the situation. Two of the troops were seriously wounded, one of the officials said.
Trump’s remarks — echoing others on Thursday in which he claimed the U.S. had “already won the war” — came as Israel continued bombarding Iran, and as Iran reported fresh strikes on its nuclear facilities and accused both Israel and the U.S. of harboring a “clear intent to commit genocide.”
His remarks came after U.S. stocks fell sharply again Friday as Wall Street approached the end of its fifth straight losing week — the longest such streak in nearly four years — and as oil prices were again on the rise.
Iran contradicted Trump’s claims that the two countries were having productive negotiations to end the war, continued its own retaliatory strikes, and warned workers at U.S.-aligned industrial companies in the region to leave their workplaces lest they be injured or killed in forthcoming strikes.
Iran also furthered its stranglehold on the vital Strait of Hormuz — where reports indicated that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had begun enforcing a steep toll on oil ships hoping to pass through.
Trump administration officials have since the start of the war accused the news media and others of ignoring U.S. wins on the battlefield. At the same time, Trump has painted an overly rosy picture of a war won and winding down, even as ongoing fighting and defiant messages from Iranian officials suggest the opposite is true.
He has consistently done so using a flippant, casual tone — a sharp departure from past wartime presidents.
For weeks, Trump has batted away criticisms of the war campaign and questions about why it was justified and how long it will last. He has derided reporters for asking questions about tactics and whether he’ll deploy boots on the ground as inappropriate and foolish, and repeatedly met concerns about the human toll of the war by shrugging them off or changing the subject.
On Thursday, during his first Cabinet meeting since launching the war, Trump spent 10 minutes talking about the price of ceremonial White House pens — which he claimed to have brought down, from $1,000 to $5, by switching to his favored Sharpie brand.
Trump was trying to make the point that he’s a great money saver. He seemed chipper, joking with the other leaders of his administration at the table.
Later on Thursday, when asked on “The Five” on Fox News about whether Iranian people have access to basic necessities such as drinking water and food, Trump complimented the looks of Dana Perino, the Fox host who’d asked the question, compared to when he’d met her years before.
“Now I’m not allowed to say this, it’s the end of my political career, but you may be even better looking, OK?” Trump said. “You’re not allowed to say a woman’s beautiful anymore.”
He then talked about Iranian authorities killing protesters, but said he’d been pleased with them more recently because they had given him a “present” by allowing oil ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, the war has cost the U.S. billions of dollars and depleted its global reserves of critical weapons systems such as Tomahawk missiles, which cost millions of dollars each and are needed to maintain U.S. security around the world, according to the Washington Post.
Markets have fluctuated based on Trump’s changing messages on an end to the war, planned and then postponed U.S. strikes on Iran’s power plants, strikes on oil and gas infrastructure across the Middle East and Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of global oil usually passes.
Trump has talked in recent days about an impending deal to end the war, but so far it has not materialized, with Iran downplaying the seriousness of the negotiations and ramping up its efforts to control the strait.
On Friday, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization reported that both the Shahid Khondab Heavy Water Complex in Arak and the Ardakan yellowcake — or concentrated uranium — production plant in Yazd Province were struck, though it said there were no casualties and no risk of contamination.
Speaking by video during a Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva on Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accused the United States and Israel of harboring a “clear intent to commit genocide” in Iran, claiming that more than 600 schools had been damaged or demolished and more than 1,000 students and teachers “martyred or wounded.”
The discussion related in part to a Feb. 28 strike on an elementary school in Minab that killed more than 165 people, most of them children, which evidence reportedly suggests was the work of the U.S. and which the U.S. says is under investigation.
Casualties also continued in Gulf nations allied with the U.S., where Iran continues to strike U.S. military installations and other infrastructure, and in Lebanon, which Israel has invaded and bombed relentlessly in its own war with the Iranian-aligned Hezbollah force.
And yet, Trump continued Friday bouncing between speaking engagements and more formal meetings with an apparent lightness — seeming unbothered by the weight of the conflict and acting as if U.S. victory were already at hand.
A woman speaks on the phone as emergency workers sift through rubble of a residential building that was hit in an airstrike early Friday in Tehran.
(Majid Saeedi / Getty Images)
“We’ve already won the war. Militarily we’ve totally won the war,” he told “The Five” on Thursday.
After Trump’s exchange with Perino, fellow host Greg Gutfeld began to change the topic, saying, “I’m debating whether to be serious or not serious.”
“Do you think Biden would do this interview? Can you imagine? You think Biden — Sleepy Joe — he would do it?” Trump said.
He called the war a “little bit of a detour” from what he said were his otherwise winning economic policies, and asserted again — without providing evidence — that Iran was on the cusp of having a nuclear weapon and would have used it to cause devastation across the Middle East and to the U.S. if the U.S. hadn’t struck first, including when it bombed Iran’s nuclear sites last summer.
“You can’t let a madman or you can’t let a mad ideology have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.
He repeated his long-pushed lie that he won the 2020 election, and suggested his support among his MAGA base remains at 100%.
An AP-NORC poll this week found that most Americans believe that the U.S. military campaign in Iran has gone too far — including about a quarter of Republicans — and that many are worried about gas prices.
During his Cabinet meeting Thursday, Trump seemed supremely confident, but also aware that the conflict was far from settled.
He said that the U.S. was “extremely — really a lot — ahead of schedule” in its war effort, and that “the Iranian regime is now admitting to itself that they have been decisively defeated.” But he also said that “even now, we don’t know if there are any mines” in the Strait of Hormuz, despite the U.S. having wiped out Iran’s “mine droppers,” and acknowledged that “if you think there may be a mine, that’s a bad thought and it stops things up.”
He said the U.S. has “decimated” about 99% of Iranian capabilities, but “the problem with the strait” is that the remaining 1% threat “is unacceptable, because 1% is a missile going into the hull of a ship that cost $1 billion.”
“If we do a 99% decimation, that’s no good,” he said.
During “The Five” interview, Trump was also asked if the CIA had told him that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — who took on the Iranian leadership role after his father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in initial strikes — is gay, which would be a crime under Iranian law.
“Well they did say that, but I don’t know if it was only them. I think a lot of people are saying that. Which puts him off to a bad start in that particular country, you know?” Trump said, in a stunning acknowledgment of a previously rumored intelligence briefing.
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