Trump’s Iran war message marked by exaggerated threats and shifting, contradictory goals
By Jeremy Herb, Zachary Cohen, Natasha Bertrand, Jennifer Hansler, Kylie Atwood, CNN
(CNN) — In the weeks leading up to President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran and in the frenetic days since, the president and his administration have offered several evolving explanations — at times exaggerated or at odds with US intelligence — to justify why the attacks were necessary and what the US ultimately hopes to achieve.
Before Saturday’s joint US-Israeli military strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Trump and his top officials overstated Iran’s capabilities to attack the US and just how close Tehran was from developing a nuclear weapon, sources told CNN.
Then after the initial wave of strikes, Trump cited an “imminent threat” to the US and administration officials said that the US acted in response to potential preemptive attacks by Iran on forces in the region — claims that were contradicted in Pentagon briefings to Capitol Hill that stated Iran was not planning to attack unless struck first.
Trump’s rationale for attacking the Iranian regime has whipsawed from protecting the demonstrators who protested in the streets of Iran in January to defending the US against the risk of Iran building nuclear and long-range weapons and eliminating a regime that’s backed terrorists killing Americans for decades. He’s called for the Iranian people to take control of their country even as top officials say the war is not about regime change.
“We have seen the goal for this operation change now, I believe, four or five times,” said Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Warner spoke following a classified briefing with top administration officials on Monday, one of several opportunities the administration took within a span of hours to explain its war with Iran to the public and to Congress. The administration officials will brief the full House and Senate on Tuesday ahead of expected votes teed up by Democrats to curb Trump’s military action in Iran.
Trump’s shifting justification for undertaking “major combat operations” in Iran is especially significant because of how little time he and his administration spent making a public case for war before it started — and before it began costing American lives.
Six US service members were killed by Iranian retaliatory strikes, a number Trump already warned is likely to increase. On Monday, three US F-15E fighter jets were shot down in Kuwait due to an “apparent friendly fire incident, the US military said. All six crew members ejected safely.
The war is poised to be among the most consequential decisions of Trump’s presidency, and it’s beginning with a public already skeptical of military intervention and a Congress that did not vote to authorize military action. A CNN poll conducted by SSRS after the strikes began found nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of the US decision to take military action in Iran, as most say a long-term military conflict between the two nations is likely.
In contrast, the public initially supported President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which was authorized by Congress. But Americans soured on that war amid mounting US casualties — and faulty intelligence claims from administration officials that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Trump the messenger
In the first 48 hours after the military operation against Iran began, Trump himself delivered the initial wave of messaging to the public through videos posted to Truth Social from Mar-a-Lago — where he was hunkered down during Saturday’s military strikes — and numerous phone interviews with reporters.
Notably, no senior Trump administration officials or Cabinet members appeared on the Sunday show circuit a day after the military operation began, leaving it instead to Trump’s allies in Congress to speak on the administration’s behalf.
The Trump administration’s strategy shifted on Monday. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine briefed reporters at the Pentagon. Speaking at a Medal of Honor event at the White House, Trump detailed several reasons for taking military action, including destroying Iran’s conventional missile capabilities and its Navy, and stopping Iran from funding terrorist groups and from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered yet another explanation for the strikes on Monday afternoon before briefing lawmakers, arguing that Iran posed an “imminent threat” because it was going to retaliate against US forces when Israel attacked. The US and Israel have both been bombing Iran since Saturday.
At the Pentagon, Hegseth declined to put a timeline on the US military campaign but said that the operation was “not Iraq” and would not be endless.
“This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission: Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes,” Hegseth said. “This is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change and the world is better off for it.”
Trump, however, initially suggested different endgame goals. Speaking in two videos and a series of phone interviews with reporters, Trump said he wanted “freedom for the people” and for Iranians to “take back your country.” But he also said that he believed Iran could follow Venezuela in a “perfect scenario,” where most of the ruling government remained in power after a US operation captured Nicolás Maduro in January.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the US needed to act while the Iranian regime was weaker than ever, before Iran was able to build up its capabilities “and attack us first.”
“As President Trump said today, this was our last, best chance to strike and eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime run by terrorists,” Leavitt said.
An exaggerated threat to the US
Trump and his top officials distorted and overstated the threat that Tehran posed to the US on several occasions in the lead-up to Iran’s strikes, according to sources and unclassified intelligence assessments.
At his State of the Union address last week, Trump claimed that Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.” He repeated a similar warning in his first video after the strikes on Saturday and in his remarks on Monday.
That assertion is not backed up by US intelligence, however, sources told CNN.
An unclassified assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2025 said that Iran could develop a “militarily-viable” intercontinental ballistic missile by 2035 “should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”
There is no intelligence to suggest that Iran is pursuing an ICBM program to hit the US at this time, two sources said. Rubio last week would not address the DIA report, saying he wouldn’t “speculate as to how far away they are” from a missile that could hit the US.
“Suffice it to say that it’s a threat. We can see that it’s possible,” he said at a press conference.
Trump officials have also exaggerated the potential advancement of Iran’s nuclear program, which Trump said was “obliterated” following US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last year.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy who took part in the diplomatic talks with Iran in recent weeks, said in a Fox News interview that Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bombmaking material.”
A source told CNN that the intelligence shows Iran is actively trying to build back its enrichment capability, including installing additional centrifuges, getting back online centrifuges that survived the military strikes last year, and rebuilding facilities — many of which were damaged or destroyed — needed to weaponize the enriched uranium.
But sources and experts say that work would take much longer than a week.
That doesn’t mean, of course, Iran posed no threat to the US and its troops stationed in the Middle East. Iran possesses an arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles, which were used to target US bases and personnel in the Middle East after Saturday’s initial wave of strikes.
Senior administration officials have also said one reason the US attacked was that Iran was preparing to launch preemptive strikes against US forces in the region.
“We had indicators that they intended to use it potentially, preemptively, but if not, if not simultaneous … with any actions against them, immediately against us,” a senior administration official said in a call with reporters on Saturday. “And the president decided he was not going to sit back and allow America’s forces in the region to absorb attacks from conventional missiles.”
But one day later, Pentagon briefers acknowledged to congressional staff in a briefing that Iran was not planning to strike US forces or bases in the Middle East unless Israel attacked Iran first, undercutting the administration’s claims, sources told CNN.
Hegseth said at Monday’s briefing that one reason for the US military operation was that Iran was building “powerful missiles and drones to create a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions,” though Iran has possessed an arsenal of missiles and drones for several years.
Protecting protesters and crippling Iran’s nuclear program
In January, Trump floated taking military action in Iran in response to Tehran’s violent crackdown on protestors who had taken to the streets.
Trump warned that if Iran killed peaceful protesters, “the United States of America will come to their rescue,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
Later in January as Iranian protests grew, including plans for a high-profile execution of a 26-year-old protester, Trump urged the Iranian people to “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS” in a Truth Social post, adding that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”
Trump was briefed on potential options for striking Iran. But the president held back.
As the US began talks with Iran that included Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the US also began amassing forces in the region. Trump turned his focus on the threat of military action against Iran to its nuclear program. (On Monday evening, the White House put out a press release titled, “74 Times President Trump Has Made Clear That Iran Cannot Have a Nuclear Weapon.”)
The military buildup continued into February in the days leading up to Saturday’s strikes. Trump suggested he wanted regime change, saying it “would be the best thing that could happen” in Iran.
The war’s unclear length and endgame
Trump made headway toward that goal with Saturday’s military action, as Khamanei and dozens of other senior Iranian officials were killed in joint US-Israeli missile strikes.
But speaking in a series of brief phone interviews with reporters in the days since the strike, Trump has been muddied in suggesting what comes next, both in the length of the US military campaign in Iran and who might take over the country.
In an interview with Axios Saturday, Trump said that he could “go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days.”
On Sunday, he said in an interview with the Daily Mail it would “be four weeks or so.” In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday, Trump said: “I don’t want to see it go on too long. I always thought it would be four weeks. And we’re a little ahead of schedule.”
Trump has similarly offered different explanations for what the US plan is in Iran now that Khamenei is dead.
The president said that he had several good choices to lead Iran next, though he has yet to name them. And in an interview with ABC, he said that those options may have also been killed on Saturday.
“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”
Trump has suggested that US military action in Venezuela — where US forces captured Maduro and then his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, became the country’s acting president amid pledges to work with the US — would work for Iran, too.
“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Trump told The New York Times, suggesting something short of regime change in Iran.
During Monday’s Pentagon briefing, Hegseth pushed back on the notion that the president had to lay out the length of the military campaign publicly.
“President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take, four weeks, two weeks, six weeks. It could move up. It could move back,” Hegseth said. “We know exactly where his headspace is, and he will communicate as he should, exactly what he would like, and we will follow those orders.”
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CNN’s Kristen Holmes, Sarah Ferris, Lauren Fox and Manu Raju contributed to this report.
