Trump delivers jaw-dropping and slurred Iran address that offers no end in sight to unpopular war

A weary President Donald Trump slurred his way through a disjointed national TV address Wednesday night in which he repeated the same justifications for his war with Iran that he’s been posting on social media throughout the month-long conflict.

The primetime speech, which pre-empted scheduled television programming on all broadcast networks at the request of the White House, had been billed as a major address in which Trump would finally lay out the justifications for the military action he started against Iran — one that would finally provide details on how and when the conflict would end to an American populace that has grown weary of it.

Instead, the president spent nearly 20 minutes speaking from a lectern in the White House’s main foyer, in prepared marks that often repeated, word for word, his Truth Social posts, and offered contradictory statements about the war, Iran and the now bogged down Strait of Hormuz, while repeatedly having trouble pronouncing words like “enemies,” “Venezuela” and “battlefield.”

Addressing both the cameras and an audience of cabinet members who’d been summoned to offer support — including Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — Trump began by claiming the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury,” had “delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield, victories like few people have ever seen before” before repeating many of the same claims he has made about damage to Iran’s military capabilities for the last month in appearance after appearance.

He bragged about Iran’s navy being “gone,” their Air Force “in ruins,” and crowed that “most” of the country’s leaders are “now dead” from decapitation strikes in the opening days of the war while claiming that Tehran’s ballistic missile capability has been “dramatically curtailed.”

“Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating, large scale losses in a matter of weeks,” Trump said before claiming that the U.S. was “winning and now winning bigger than ever before” as a result of his decision to attack Iran in the midst of negotiations on Feb. 28.

He then pivoted to bragging about oil production in both the U.S. and Venezuela and claimed the country is now “totally independent of the Middle East.”

“We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil. We don’t need anything they have, but we’re there to help our allies,” he said.

The president’s rambling address took place just hours after a new CNN poll revealed that Americans have largely soured on the war, with just 34 percent of respondents voicing approval of it. The poll also found a super-majority of 66 percent of Americans disapproving of the war, with 43 percent of those reporting that they strongly disapprove.

Trump proceeded to change subjects once more by launching into another series of grievances as justification for launching the war, including blatantly false claims about Iran’s alleged culpability for the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole for which al-Qaeda terrorists are preparing to go on trial before military commissions at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

He later returned to discussing present events by repeating his oft-used lines about America’s purported objectives of “crippling” Iran’s military capabilities and said he was “pleased” to say the “core strategic objectives are nearing completion.”

Without offering any evidence, he claimed that the families of the 13 American service members who’ve been killed since the start of the conflict had each asked him to “finish the job” while suggesting that failing to “complete the mission” would dishonor the fallen soldiers and airmen.

And inexplicably, he boasted that U.S. “has never been better prepared economically” to deal with the skyrocketing gasoline prices his war has caused while blaming the sky-high energy costs solely on Iran “launching deranged terror attacks against commercial oil tankers in neighboring countries that have nothing to do with the conflict.”

“We were a dead and crippled country after the last administration, and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world, by far with no inflation, record setting investments coming into the United States — over $18 trillion and the highest stock market ever, with 53 all time record highs in just one year. It all positioned us to get rid of a cancer that has long simmered. It’s known as the nuclear Iran, and they didn’t know what was coming,” he said.

The president’s non sequitur on the U.S. economy and gas prices came as his advisers reportedly brace for oil prices to surge past the $150-a-barrel mark as the Iran war stretches into its second month and the Strait of Hormuz — a vital trade chokepoint through which 20 percent of the world’s oil flows — remains largely closed.

Because Iran has refused to allow most oil tankers passage through the key chokepoint, global oil supplies have been squeezed, leading to the massive price increases on the global oil market.

Yet Trump, seemingly ignorant of the interconnected nature of petroleum trading, appeared to dismiss the war’s effect on oil prices and claimed the U.S. is somehow immune from the effects of the war he started because of what he called his administration’s “drill baby drill” program.

“There’s no country like us anywhere in the world, and we’re in great shape for the future. The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future. We don’t need it. We haven’t needed it, and we don’t need it,” he said.

He then appeared to repeat, verbatim a Truth Social post he’d made earlier this week in which he urged other nations to put their naval power towards forcing the strait to be reopened to maritime traffic.

“They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They can do it easily. We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on,” he said.

“So to those countries that can’t get fuel, many of which refuse to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion: Number one, buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much. And number two: Build up some delayed courage … go to the Strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done, so it should be easy,”

Trump added that when the conflict ends, the disputed waterway would “open up naturally” and predicted that the economic damage from the war he started would reverse itself.

“It will resume the flowing and the gas prices will rapidly come back down. Stock prices will rapidly go back up … our economy is strong and improving by the day, and it will soon be roaring back like never before. It will top the levels that it was a month ago,” he said.

His remarks were no different from anything he’s offered over myriad public appearances since the start of the war, despite hopes that he would provide a timeline for winding down the unpopular military operation.

Instead, he claimed the war would continue for “the next two or three weeks” while U.S. forces “bring [Iran] back to the Stone Age where they belong” and threatened indiscriminate attacks on Tehran’s electrical generation capacity — something that would be a war crime under U.S. law.

“We are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously, we have not hit their oil, even though that’s the easiest target of all, because it would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding. But we could hit it and it would be gone. And there’s not a thing they could do about it,” he said.