As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran escalates, President Donald Trump and his Cabinet have offered a litany of dizzying updates on the conflict.
During a phone interview with CBS News on Monday, Trump said the war with Iran is “very complete, pretty much.” Speaking from his Doral, Florida, golf club, the president claimed “[Iran has] no navy, no communications, they’ve got no air force. Their missiles are down to a scatter. Their drones are being blown up all over the place, including their manufacturing of drones.” He added, “If you look, they have nothing left. There’s nothing left in a military sense.”
However, during a CBS 60 Minutes interview taped Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that he wanted viewers to know “this is only just the beginning.” His words were echoed by the Defense Department’s rapid response X account on Monday morning, which posted a video of what appeared to be American strikes targeting various, unidentified sites alongside the caption, “This is just the beginning—we will not be deterred until the mission is over.” A few hours later, the same Defense Department account posted on X, “We have Only Just Begun to Fight,” with a photo of what seemed to be a missile in the air superimposed with the words “No Mercy” and no further context.
Later on Monday, Trump appeared to shift from his stance from earlier in the day. During a news conference, a reporter confronted the president, and stated, “You said the war is ‘very complete,’ but your defense secretary says, ‘this is just the beginning.’ So which is it?
“You could say both,” replied Trump. “It’s the beginning of building a new country. … We could call it a tremendous success right now — as we leave here, I could call it — or we could go further, and we’re going to go further.”
Last week, after a closed-door classified briefing over the U.S military campaign against Iran, many House Democrats expressed exasperation with the Trump administration and said the president and his team had not offered a sufficient justification for the attack on foreign soil.
In a social media video posted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at the time, she directly addressed those watching and said, “It is so much worse than you thought.” Warren continued, “You are right to be worried. The Trump administration has no plan in Iran. This illegal war is based on lies, and it was launched without any imminent threat to our nation. Donald Trump still hasn’t given a single clear reason for this war, and he seems to have no plan for how to end it either.”
When Time magazine recently asked Trump whether Americans should be worried about retaliatory attacks in the U.S., the president replied, “I guess.” Trump said, “We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”
