President Donald Trump sought Wednesday to explain his rationale for the war against Iran at a pivotal moment at home and abroad, but he offered few new details as he amasses extraordinary executive authority to prosecute the military operation.
Notably missing from Trump’s primetime address was his oft-repeated assertion that negotiations with Iran were underway. He softened his insults against NATO allies and did not indicate he was preparing to send in ground troops, particularly to retrieve Iran’s enriched uranium. But he gave no definitive end date for the conflict.
The war is fast becoming a signature of his second-term agenda, and the speech was a capstone to a remarkable day flexing presidential power.
Trump started the morning as the first sitting president to show up for a US Supreme Court hearing, a stunning reach of the executive into the affairs of the judicial branch.
He ended with his first address from the White House about a war he launched on his own, bulldozing past Congress.
On a night when many Americans may have been looking upward as Artemis II astronauts lifted off for NASA’s return to the moon, Trump gave a nod to that historic milestone. Then he quickly refocused attention back to him — and to the conflict with Iran that has killed more than a dozen US service members and appears to have no easy exit in sight.
America, as it has been for five years under my presidency, is winning — and now winning bigger than ever before,” Trump said.
“We’re going to finish the job and were going to finish it very fast,” he added.
