Feb. 22, 2026, 4:01 a.m. ET
President Donald Trump has been warning Iran for weeks that an American “armada” of warships was on the way, trying to leverage the threat of military strikes into a deal for Iran to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons.
Trump casts the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to the Middle East. He’s probably right about that.
But Trump also insists that his last military strikes on Iran, eight months ago, “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program. And his White House team denounced as “fake news” reports that the June strikes on three sites only set back Iran’s nuclear program “by a few months.”
Just this past week, Trump twice spoke of Iran’s nuclear program as a thing of the past, while also threatening new military strikes to destroy what he claims to have already destroyed.
Which Trump are we supposed to believe here? And – yes – I think not believing either version is an option.
Trump’s ‘magnificent’ claims on Iran keep shifting
The president used his Feb. 19 introductory speech at the first meeting of his ironically named new “Board of Peace” to brag about America’s “magnificent” B-2 bombers, which were used in the June 21 strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities.
“It went into Iran and it totally decimated the nuclear potential,” Trump said of the bombers. “When it decimated that, all of a sudden, we had peace in the Middle East.”
So, job done, right? Not so fast.
Trump, speaking later that day to journalists on Air Force One, said he was setting a “pretty much maximum” deadline of 10 to 15 days for Iran to make a deal, while flatly refusing to say whether the goal of military action would be to eliminate the country’s nuclear program.
If he sticks to that timeframe – always a crapshoot with this impulsive president – America will have a deal or a war with Iran by March 6 at the latest. That could give Trump some time to get his story straight.
I would not bet on that happening.
Trump’s White House also issued a Feb. 16 statement celebrating Presidents Day that lavishly praised his leadership on many issues, including “remarkable military actions, including destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons capability.”
Trump on Feb. 16, while speaking to journalists on Air Force One, threatened to send B-2 bombers to Iran “to knock out their nuclear potential” if the country resisted his efforts at a deal.
So twice in one week, Trump has bragged about knocking out Iran’s nuclear program while threatening to knock out Iran if it doesn’t drop its nuclear program. This is startling cognitive dissonance from a politician threatening war.
And it’s not just Trump. This sort of doublespeak has been flowing for months from his Cabinet members who would be dialed in on military strikes.
Trump set the tone in a social media post after the bombs fell on June 21 in “Operation Midnight Hammer” – no, really, that’s what they called it – that declared “Bullseye!!!”
“Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images,” Trump posted on June 22. “Obliteration is an accurate term!”
Are Iran’s nukes ‘obliterated’ or not?
The White House dutifully collected and collated statements, interviews and social media posts from Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others, echoing Trump’s message of obliteration. That’s still available in statements on the White House website.
Several of those statements take issue with a preliminary intelligence assessment that leaked from the Pentagon only days after the bombs fell that said Iran’s nuclear program was only set back a few months because the 30,000-pound “bunker buster” munitions did not reach depths deep enough to destroy the underground facilities.
The White House statements included a link to a Rubio interview, where he said that it was “a false story, and it’s one that really shouldn’t be re-reported because it doesn’t accurately reflect what’s happening.”
They also linked to a Hegseth interview, where he said, “Anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the president and the successful mission.”
And they linked to a social media post from Gabbard, who accused the “propaganda media” of trying to “undermine President Trump’s decisive leadership” while insisting that all three Iranian nuclear facilities had been destroyed.
“If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities … entirely, which would likely take years to do,” Gabbard wrote in that post.
Looks like we don’t have to wait “years” to see if that’s true. It’s been eight months since America dropped bombs on Iran that allegedly obliterated that country’s nuclear facilities.
Do eight months equal “a few months,” as the initial intelligence report suggested? I’d say it does when Trump and his team told us all that Iran had been set back years in its quest for nuclear weapons.
Which leaves us with a question that comes up so often in Trump’s second term as president: If he and his team claimed a mission was accomplished eight months ago, and reiterated that again just this past week, while telling America it’s now time to accomplish the mission, why would you believe anything they say about anything at all?
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.
