Donald Trump’s war on Iran is now in its third week. Thirteen American service members have been killed, along with hundreds injured. Yet the president and members of his administration are barely bothering to try to explain the bloody, costly offensive that is roiling energy markets and threatening the stability of the gulf region. The president even suggested during a press conference at the White House on Monday that the U.S. is attacking Iran “out of habit, which is not a good thing to do,” claiming the United States doesn’t need any oil.
He suggested the same while speaking to reporters on Air Force One. “You could make the case that maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all,” he said of the Strait of Hormuz, noting that America has plenty of oil. “It’s almost like we do it for habit.”
Instead of offering Americans anything resembling a coherent justification for the war, Trump and his administration have focused on their time and energy on their favorite domestic rival: the media.
On Sunday night, Trump spent hours posting a series of lengthy screeds on Truth Social covering everything from his rage at the Supreme Court over their decision to rebuke his tariff regime, to anger at lower courts and the federal reserve, to, of course, the “Fake News,” which he accused of committing “treason” in reporting negatively about the war, while threatening to have the FCC revoke their broadcast licenses.
“Iran has long been known as a Master of Media Manipulation and Public Relations. They are militarily ineffective and weak, but are really good at ‘feeding’ the very appreciative Fake News Media false information,” Trump wrote, going on to claim that outlets had been disseminating AI-generated images of the U.S.S. Lincoln being struck by an Iranian boat. (There doesn’t seem to be any documented instance of a major American media outlet circulating such images as if they were authentic.)
“I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations,” Trump continued. “They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows.”
The comments followed a Friday press conference in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth berated the media for their coverage of the war. Hegseth insisted that news networks should instead frame Iran as “desperate,” even as American losses climbed and the supposed one-off assault continues with no end in sight.
Trump addressed the conflict again on Monday while speaking at the White House during a board meeting for the Kennedy Center, which Trump has taken over as another vanity project to remodel and name after himself. Amid musing about building renovation projects taking credit for events like the Olympics, the World Cup, and America’s 250th anniversary celebration, the president attacked reports that his administration had underestimated Iran’s willingness to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and the impact it would have across the globe.
“I knew the strait would be a weapon. I predicted it a long time ago. I predicted all of this stuff,” Trump said. “I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I wrote it in a book.” (Trump did not, in fact, predict the September 11 terrorist attacks, but has made the false claim in the past.)
Even if Trump was aware that the strait would be shut down, it’s clearly an issue his administration is struggling to solve. American allies have largely refused a request from the United States to intervene and send support troops to the region. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that given that Germany had not been consulted by the U.S. and Israel on the decision to start the war, they felt no obligation to intervene now. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the U.K. would not be “drawn into the wider war” but expressed a desire to have the strait reopen soon. The European Union has withheld a commitment until the United States provides more detail as to their plans to actually end the conflict, something the Trump administration has yet been unable to do for anyone.
Trump was asked at the White House on Monday about the supposed coalition being created to open the strait, and asked if he had spoken to French President Emmanue Macron. “I mean, sure I think he’s gonna help,” Trump said. “I don’t do a hard sell on them because my attitude is we don’t need anybody. We’re the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world. We don’t need them.”
That message will likely come as a relief to Europe and other NATO allies, who have hedged on committing to another quagmire in the Middle East on behalf of the United States as they watch the war initiated by the U.S. and Israel continue to expand.
On Monday, Israel announced that it had begun “limited” ground operations within Lebanon, where roughly a million civilians have been displaced and fighting between the insurgent group Hezbollah and Israeli forces has intensified.
“It takes two to tango,” Trump said of the possibility that the U.S. could simply force the strait open and bring an end to the war. But there are far more than two parties involved in this debacle, which is predictably proving to not be quite as simple as the president and his administration imagined when they started attacking the nation of 90 million earlier this month.
