Trump Is Botching the Bombing of Iran
His lies and gaffes are making a mess of the mission and its aftermath.
DONALD TRUMP’S FLUFFERS say he’s the genius behind Saturday’s bombing of the Iranian nuclear program. “The order we received from our commander-in-chief was focused, it was powerful, and it was clear,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared at a Pentagon briefing on Sunday morning. Minutes later, on Meet the Press, Vice President JD Vance bragged that the strike showed what America’s armed forces could accomplish “in the hands of capable presidential leadership,” unlike the “dumb presidents” of the previous twenty-five years.
“This is not a game-playing president,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio added on Face the Nation. Trump “does what he says he’s going to do. And that’s what happened here.”
No, that’s not what happened. To the extent this strike succeeded, it was despite Trump, not because of him. His babbling, bumbling, and bluster undermined the mission and its chances of long-term success.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS MADE three fundamental claims about the bombing. The first is that it was prompted by a change in Iran’s behavior between March—when Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, testified that Iran was “not building a nuclear weapon” and hadn’t authorized a resumption of its nuclear weapons program—and the middle of May.
Trump “decided probably by mid-May that this process was not going anywhere,” said Vance, referring to talks between Iran and the United States about winding down Iran’s nuclear program. “By mid-May, everybody in our intelligence community and the president’s senior team” concluded that Iran’s negotiators were “not being serious.” That “was the real catalyst,” said Vance, behind “what the president ultimately decided to do.”
Second, the administration promised it wasn’t trying to overthrow Iran’s government. “This mission was not and has not been about regime change,” Hegseth pledged, reading from a script at the DOD briefing. The strike “had three objectives, three nuclear sites,” said Rubio. “This wasn’t a regime-change move.” Vance agreed: “We don’t want a regime change.”
Third, with respect to the damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear program, U.S. officials described their goals and the mission’s results in modest, achievable terms. “We’ve substantially delayed their development of a nuclear weapon,” said Vance. “That was the goal of this attack. That’s why it was a success.” Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters it was “way too early” to assess the damage. Rubio agreed that as to the extent of the destruction, “no one will know for sure for days.”
Trump has wrecked each of these talking points.
First, well after the time frame in which his national security team supposedly concluded that Iran was no longer negotiating in good faith, Trump continued to insist in public—as he does with fruitless trade negotiations and cease-fire talks—that everything was going swimmingly. “We had some very good talks with Iran yesterday and today,” Trump told reporters on May 25. “I think we could have some good news on the Iran front.” Three days later, he claimed again that “we’re having some very good talks with Iran” and “we’re very close to a solution.” Even on June 12—the day before Israel attacked Iran to thwart its nuclear weapons program—Trump continued to argue that the U.S.–Iran talks were going well enough that such an attack might unwisely jeopardize them.
As to Vance’s story about the shift from March to May—that Gabbard’s initial testimony was correct but was undercut by Iran’s subsequent betrayal—Trump wrecked that story by making it clear that he had paid no attention to her assessment and had no interest in it. Last week, when a reporter pointed out that Gabbard “testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon,” the president scoffed, “I don’t care what she said.”
On Friday, a reporter reminded Trump that “your intelligence community has said they have no evidence” that “Iran is building a nuclear weapon.” Trump replied: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter answered, “The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Without hesitation, Trump shot back, “She’s wrong.”
THE PRESIDENT’S DEFENDERS might argue that his happy talk about the Iran negotiations in late May and early June was a clever feint, concealing from the enemy his intention to bomb the nuclear sites. But behind-the-scenes reporting, coupled with Trump’s public comments, shows he had no such intention. It was Israel’s successful attack on June 13, not Iran’s behavior in the preceding months, that drove his decision.
“By the morning of Friday, June 13, hours after the first Israeli attacks, Mr. Trump had changed his tune,” the New York Times reported in a backstage account of his reversal. “He marveled to advisers about what he said was a brilliant Israeli military operation” and began “hinting that he had much more to do with it than people realized.” The next day, June 14, Trump told an adviser that he was inclined to drop massive bombs on Fordo, Iran’s deepest nuclear site—exactly what he did a week later.
Trump’s posts on Truth Social documented his mental shift. Initially, he denied responsibility for Israel’s strikes: “The U.S. had nothing to do with the attack on Iran, tonight.” But two days later, he claimed co-ownership of the war: “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran. . . . Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.” At a White House event, he bragged, “We’ve totally captured the air.”
While military planners tried to keep the bombing mission secret, Trump all but blurted it out. On June 17, when Trump left a G-7 meeting early to fly back to Washington, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested, mistakenly, that it was to work on a ceasefire in Iran. Trump could have used this, or at least allowed it to stand, as an ideal cover story. Instead, in a feat of jaw-dropping idiocy, he rebuked Macron and signaled that he was about to do something bold. Macron “has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that,” Trump wrote. “Stay Tuned!”
According to the backstage Times account, Trump’s “public pronouncements generated angst at the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command, where military planners began to worry that Mr. Trump was giving Iran too much warning about an impending strike.” After the bombing, one military official told the paper that Trump’s big mouth had been the “biggest threat to opsec”—the mission’s operational security.
In the days before the strike, despite his advisers’ consensus that the United States shouldn’t talk about regime change, Trump escalated his threats against the Iranian government. On June 17, he boasted that he knew the location of Iran’s supreme leader and could easily kill him. Three minutes later, Trump posted a demand for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” The next day, when reporters asked Trump what he meant, he repeated those two words. “We’re not looking for a ceasefire,” he added. “We’re looking for a total, complete victory.”
On Sunday—a day after the strike, and just a few hours after Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth had sworn it wasn’t about regime change—Trump invited Iranians to overthrow their leaders. “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’” he wrote on Truth Social, “but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???”
Having shifted from negotiations to bombing, Trump switched his happy talk from overselling the negotiations to overselling the bombing. “Iran’s key nuclear-enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” he declared in a TV address three hours after the strike. On Sunday, as no proof of such eradication turned up, he insisted, “Obliteration is an accurate term!” By Monday, he was piling on more bluster: “The sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it. Only the Fake News would say anything different.”
The president’s lies, gaffes, and exaggerations left an enormous mess for his senior officials to clean up. In one particularly awkward exchange, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Vance how Trump’s “totally obliterated” claim could be squared with a Times report that Fordo was “severely damaged but not fully destroyed.” Without a flicker of shame, Vance replied: “Severely damaged versus obliterated—I’m not exactly sure what the difference is.”
Meanwhile, Trump stumbles on, spewing more hype and fiction. On Monday evening, he used his Truth Social account to unilaterally announce, “It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE.” (He asserted—implausibly, to say the least—that “Israel & Iran came to me, almost simultaneously, and said, ‘PEACE!’”) The “agreement” was news to some of Trump’s own officials. It was soon denied by Iran’s foreign minister, remained unconfirmed by Israel, and failed to stop more missile launches from Iran.
Maybe the putative ceasefire will materialize and hold. Maybe damage assessments from the bombing will show that it really did set back Iran’s nuclear program for years. And maybe, if we’re really lucky, Iran will agree to a deal that gives weapons inspectors reliable access to its nuclear sites. But don’t count on it. The only thing you can count on is that even if everything goes right, Trump will do his best to fuck it up.