Social media videos and surprise phone calls: How Trump told the world about Iran

By Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — President Trump is coming under increasing pressure to explain his military campaign in Iran to the American people.

So far, the president has not delivered a prime-time address or held a press conference. He ignored shouted questions from reporters as he flew from Florida to Washington on Sunday. “Pre-recorded social media clips won’t cut it,” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons remarked.

The White House said Monday morning that Trump will make brief remarks about the conflict at the beginning of a previously scheduled Medal of Honor ceremony at 11 a.m. ET.

But Trump is communicating on his own terms — in ways that didn’t even exist for past presidents in wartime. He is posting updates to the social media platform he controls; chatting with reporters who call his cell phone; sharing links to supportive op-eds; and even cracking a joke at the Iranian Navy’s expense.

Trump has projected strength but has also sent mixed messages about the objectives of the military strikes. The New York Times, after a brief phone interview with Trump, said he offered “several seemingly contradictory visions” about a transition of power in Iran.

Earlier, when Trump spoke with an Axios reporter on Saturday, he suggested the military campaign might not take long: “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days.”

Then, on Sunday, he told the Daily Mail that “it’s always been a four-week process,” and he told The Times “we intended four to five weeks” for the joint US-Israel attacks in Iran.

In another phone call, this one with reporters from MS NOW, Trump — a cable news obsessive — indicated that he’d been watching news coverage of the combat operations. He said he had seen “celebrations” of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death both inside Iran and on the streets of Los Angeles.

That call, MS NOW said, was less than a minute long. It reflects Trump’s scattershot approach to communicating about the conflict — a Truth Social post here, a phone call there.

“There’s no better communicator than our president,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a press conference Monday morning.

During the first weekend of fighting, Trump’s main messages came via two web videos recorded and published by the White House.

The first video, early Saturday morning, announced the combat operations and called on Iranians to topple their leader. The second, on Sunday afternoon, highlighted Khamenei’s death and said the US and Israel were acting “to ensure security” for the world.

The videos totaled 14 minutes and contained claims that fact-checkers and government sources have challenged.

The taped video format gave Trump an unusual amount of control — the opportunity to record more than once, for instance, and to edit out remarks.

The videos were an end run around the news media and a break from presidential tradition, as CNN’s chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins noted on air.

“Typically,” she said, US presidents deliver speeches “in front of the White House press pool,” with reporters there to bear witness and try to ask questions.

In another break from tradition, Trump did not deliver an Oval Office address announcing the outbreak of war, a format past presidents have utilized to amass the country’s attention and influence public opinion.

“By eschewing an address to the nation, Trump clearly has no plan or intention to explain to the American people why we went to war with Iran, what happens next, and what victory looks like,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for President Barack Obama, told CNN.

“By offering a different spin to every reporter whose call he answers, he comes across as making it up as he goes, which is probably the case,” Pfeiffer added.

In a Sunday night tweet, Trump communications director Steven Cheung ridiculed talk of an Oval Office address by linking it to “failed policies of the past.”

As a practical matter, Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida when the strikes began, hundreds of miles from Washington.

But Cheung said Trump “spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders,” and he called Trump’s two web videos “multiple addresses to the nation” that “garnered hundreds of millions of views.”

His estimate of the view count is no doubt true, given the enormity of the news Trump announced.

Trump’s Truth Social site is tiny by the standards of the modern social web. In January, the site registered only 23.8 million visits while X had 4.5 billion. But Trump’s videos were almost instantly reshared by the White House on other platforms, like X, and were rebroadcast by TV networks around the world.

The US Agency for Global Media, which Trump sought to dismantle last year but is still in partial operation, promoted the fact that it translated his Saturday morning video into Persian and beamed it into Iran.

Trump’s next post on Truth Social, after that video, was a link to a right-wing news article titled “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States.”

The US intelligence community has previously assessed that Iran carried out covert influence campaigns to undercut Trump’s candidacy in both 2020 and 2024.

But the invocation of that fact on Saturday morning, as Trump announced strikes, perhaps suggested a more personal motivation on the president’s part.

Later, in a Sunday night phone call with ABC’s Jon Karl, Trump referenced an Iranian plot to kill him in 2024. “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well, I got him first,” Trump said.

When three US servicemembers were killed in an initial stage of the war, the announcement was made by US Central Command on X.

Trump did not respond when reporters shouted questions to him about the military deaths on Sunday night.

But when Trump had a chance to brag about a military accomplishment, he did just that, writing on Truth Social that “we have destroyed and sunk 9 Iranian Naval Ships, some of them relatively large and important.”

He also asserted that “we largely destroyed their Naval Headquarters,” then quipped, “Other than that, their Navy is doing very well!”

Members of Trump’s inner circle have also been active on social media platforms.

Daniel Torok, the chief White House photographer, pointed out on X that his photos of Trump in a classified briefing about the strikes were taken “around the 15 hour mark of his ~17 hour workday” on Friday and into Saturday.

Torok’s photos were part of the administration’s effort to shape public opinion – though many commentators pointed out that those efforts have paled in comparison to past American war efforts.

Trump only devoted a few paragraphs of his February 25 State of the Union address to Iran. “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy,” he said then. “But one thing is certain, I will never allow the world’s No. 1 sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon, can’t let that happen.”

Some critics have charged the Trump administration with failing to make the case for war.

“I never in my life thought that I would feel nostalgic for being lied to by George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg said on MS NOW last month, “but this is an administration that doesn’t even feel the need to propagandize the population, because it doesn’t feel like it needs the consent of the governed at all.”

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