President Donald Trump took to the nation’s airwaves Wednesday night in his first prime-time White House address since US-Israeli strikes on Iran triggered a fresh wave of Middle East tensions.
The White House had said nothing about what was coming. Trump said plenty, not all of it supported by facts.
On the ground, the picture is murkier. Iranian strikes did spike dramatically, crossing 100 in a single day on March 1, before settling to around 50 a day. US bases across the region are still vulnerable.
Experts caution that a slowdown is not the same as a surrender. Iran, they say, may simply be rationing its arsenal. Trump, for his part, added another bold claim to the pile — that capturing the Strait of Hormuz, with allied support, would be straightforward.
On regime change, Trump was quoted as saying the goal was never to topple Iran’s government, yet argued it had happened anyway.
“Regime change was not our goal. We never said ‘regime change,’ but regime change has occurred because of the deaths of all of their original leaders. They’re all dead,” he reportedl said.
What he left out: after the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his son Mojtaba stepped in as the new Ayatollah. The clerical establishment, backed by the IRGC on the ground, remains intact.
Trump also claimed the US imports almost no oil through the Strait of Hormuz and would not be importing any in the future either. Data from the US Energy Information Administration contradicts this. Around 7% of US crude oil and 2% of petroleum liquids still flow through that chokepoint.
The White House had kept the speech’s contents tightly under wraps ahead of the address. It’s reported that Trump might announce a scaling down of operations in Iran. This is likely to happen within two to three weeks. His former advisor Steve Bannon predicted Trump would effectively declare victory and begin drawing down the ongoing campaign.
When a section of the media asked Trump about the anticipated address, specifically whether he planned to announce a decision on the Iran war, he reportedly dodged the query. He said he planned to tell the nation how great he was.
“Tonight, I’m making a little speech at nine o’clock, and basically I’m gonna tell everybody how great I am, what a great job I’ve done, what a phenomenal job, what a phenomenal job I’ve done,” Trump said on a lighter note. “But seriously, if you, if you didn’t have me, if you had some different type of a president, you wouldn’t have Israel.”
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