A weary-looking and exhausted-sounding President Donald Trump spent 17 minutes on national television slurring and rambling through a disjointed address to the nation in which he repeated many of the same justifications for the month-old bombing campaign he has waged against Iran while claiming the U.S. is “getting very close” to winding up combat operations.
The prime time 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 war he started against Iran while providing details on how and when the conflict would end.
Instead, the president spent nearly 20 minutes speaking from a lectern in the White House’s main foyer, rarely sticking to his prepared text and offering non sequiturs followed by boasts about previous actions he has taken dating back to his first term in office five years ago.
He 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 about how “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,” he said before claiming that the country was “winning and now winning bigger than ever before” as a result of his decision to attack Iran in the midst of negotiations on February 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.
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.
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