After releasing a video statement in the early hours of Saturday revealing that U.S. forces were carrying out a series of airstrikes on Iran, President Donald Trump quickly turned to one of his favorite pastimes – complaining about his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden.
At 2:30 a.m., Trump announced that the U.S. was joining with Israel to attack Iran. He justified the attack by claiming it would “protect Americans.”
“Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people,” Trump said in a video he posted concurrent with the strikes.
Both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored Iranians to use the chaos to revolt, before Trump offered a third justification — one going back to 2020.
In a post around 4 a.m., Trump shared a message complaining about Iran’s alleged interference in the 2020 and 2024 U.S. presidential elections.
“Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” he wrote on Truth Social alongside a link to a far-right media site.
The post was a reference to charges brought against three members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who allegedly hacked Trump’s campaign in 2024. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said that Iran’s cyber operations aimed at the U.S. had grown more aggressive around the election.
Just a few minutes after referencing the hack, Trump shared another post from the same right-wing website.
The article Trump shared was headlined “As Georgia prosecutor pursued Trump, Biden DOJ ‘invited’ her to get lucrative grant, memos show.”
Trump has never gotten over his defeat in 2020, and still makes the baseless claim that he only lost due to widespread voter fraud. Multiple investigations and court cases sparked by his claims have failed to come up with any evidence to support his claims.
During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, he again insisted, without providing evidence, that the Democrats were cheating to win elections.
“The cheating is rampant in our elections. It’s rampant. … They want to cheat. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat and we’re going to stop it,” Trump said.
He also bitterly noted that he was in the first year of his second term, and said it “should be my third term.”
U.S. presidents since the 1950s have been constitutionally barred from serving more than two full terms.
Trump and Netanyahu’s attack on Iran reportedly targeted Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. The leader’s status as of this report is unknown.
It has also prompted an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, scheduled for 4 p.m. EST on Saturday.
Iran has retaliated against the strike by attacking Israel and U.S. assets in the immediate region, primarily military bases and military targets.
