Donald Trump called the killing of two U.S. service members by Iran a “very sad thing” on Saturday but the president’s focus remained out of Washington this weekend as his war with Iran once again spiraled into open conflict.
The president spent the day golfing Saturday at his Bedminster, N.J., resort even as news broke that two U.S. service members were killed by an Iranian attack on a base in Jordan, with a third declared missing in action.
Trump’s only statement on the incident came in the form of a brief phone call with a NewsNation reporter. Calling their deaths “a very sad thing,” the president went on to dismiss any semblance of concern over Iran’s declaration that the ceasefire deal was broken.
“I couldn’t care less,” he told NewsNation.
Trump’s Truth Social account, which remained active over the weekend, tweeting about the SAVE America Act and pushing for Iran to be added to a Russia sanctions bill being debated by Congress, bore no mention of the attack.
And on Sunday, he was still scheduled to attend the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina — kick-off is set for 3 p.m. ET, at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
The two U.S. service members killed in the attack Friday were the first deaths since combat ceased in early April under the promise that a ceasefire and a permanent end to the war was on the way.
Donald Trump and his allies in the administration have insisted since it began in February that the war would only last a few weeks, but the breakdown of two ceasefire agreements has left the White House and the Pentagon essentially at square one, with control of the Strait of Hormuz uncertain and commercial shipping traffic unwilling to take the risk of coming under attack.
The resumption of the war means that there will be even more pressure from the White House for Congress to pass more funding for the Pentagon, which Congress plans to do as part of a third budget reconciliation package this summer. But Republican leadership in the Senate is openly skeptical about the bill’s future of passage, with the president’s own splintering alliance in the Senate largely to blame.
It also means that the administration’s predictions of the war’s end were once again wrong. The president openly celebrated just last month when he cheered, “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” after a 60-day extension of the decaying U.S. ceasefire with Iran was signed and oil markets began to cool off, but this latest news means that the tumult that has engulfed the world shipping economy is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
The end of the ceasefire altogether puts the U.S. and Iran back to the point they were in before the first deal was signed in April. The U.S. still has no agreement in place to secure the remainder of Iran’s enriched uranium, which is believed to be buried under rock and rubble at the site of a nuclear site struck by U.S. forces last summer.
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains paused or significantly restricted at best, and other stated U.S. goals like weakening the Iranian government or ending its capacity to fire rockets and drones have been abandoned.
Trump is now barreling towards election season with a new Middle East conflict on his plate and the signs of a new “forever war” growing, a direct contradiction of his 2024 campaign promises to extract the U.S. from such conflicts and end the sapping of resources by limitless foreign entanglements.
The president has rejected the idea that he has betrayed those campaign promises and insisted that the threat of Iran’s nuclear program — which he claimed to have ‘obliterated’ last summer — was too potent to ignore.
