Trump vowed to continue bombing Iran in a prime-time speech that offered nothing new

There was something about President Trump’s speech that didn’t add up.

Several things, actually.

But what immediately struck me was his low power delivery. He backed away from it, and started talking about Artemis’ moon mission and then the oil we’re taking from Venezuela. After that, he would just read the words that came out of his mouth.

No one could argue with the president’s core message. Iran is the world’s leading terrorist country. Something should have been done during its 47-year history of violence and murderous proxies like Hamas. Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Dictators killed 45,000 of their own people (although Trump did this while trying to negotiate a deal).

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But the 19-minute speech was full of contradictions. Trump kept saying we won, we brought down the Iranian military, which is true. However, he said the US would intensify its bombing campaign in the next two to three weeks, targeting Tehran’s power centers.

Why is that necessary, if America has already won? And will it really last less than a month?

It was clear from the speech that Trump knows how unpopular war is. He knows that rising fuel prices are hurting him at home. He knows that he is falling like a stone with the young men who have bought his talk of not fighting wars.

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You know – and this is serious – the stock market has changed since US and Israeli warplanes attacked Iran on the last day of February. Trump is very sensitive to the market, as we saw when the Dow reached 50,000, and that often spurs him into action.

Having backed himself into a corner with an Iranian regime that refuses to negotiate, the public was expected to declare victory and walk out. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Trump announced that he would bomb Iran back to the “Stone Ages.”

What about the president’s intentions?

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He said the purpose of the war was never to change the regime. But he spoke of regime change the morning after the first attack. In any case, Trump now says it has been accomplished because several levels of leadership, starting with the Ayatollah, have been killed,

But the new sheriff in town, the Speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Ghalibaf, lashed out yesterday.

Presidential candidate Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf speaks during a campaign event in Tehran, Iran on June 26, 2024. (Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via Reuters)

“When it comes to protecting our country,” he said in the post, “every one of us will be a soldier of this country. If you look at the asance at our mother’s house … you are facing the whole family, all of us. We are armed, ready and standing. Come in, we are waiting.”

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So much for the regime change.

Trump has repeatedly said the war will not end until Iran stops blocking a fifth of the world’s oil supply through the Strait of Hormuz. But in a speech on Wednesday night, he washed his hands of the matter. We don’t trust the strait, so who cares? “It will open naturally,” itself.

The president then lashed out at our European allies, saying they should show “the courage to delay” and “just take” Hormuz—as if it were that easy.

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As for Trump’s declaration that our country is now “nuclear-weapon-free,” Iran still has about 1,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium — and further enrichment could lead to a nuclear weapon.

In a CNN poll released just before the speech, 66 percent of those polled said they opposed or disapproved of the decision to attack Iran, a 7-point jump since the conflict began.

Many network pundits criticized the address as a rehash of Trump’s previous statements.

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“There was nothing new in that speech,” said ABC’s Jonathan Karl, adding: “There wasn’t much hope.”

Colleague Martha Raddatz: “It added to the confusion of why we were there.”

European leaders felt blindsided by the war. “When we take important things,” said French President Emmanuel Macron, “we don’t say the opposite of what we said the day before every day, and maybe one shouldn’t say it every day,”

President Donald Trump (right) participates in the Gaza summit led by Egyptian President Adel Fattah el-Sisi and French President Emmanuel Macron in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, on Oct. 14, 2025. (Michael Kappeler/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

Austria and Switzerland yesterday joined Italy, Spain and France in barring US warplanes from their airspace towards Iran. They want no part of this war. The British prime minister did the same but retaliated after Iran retaliated.

In the first sign of an escalation in the bombings yesterday, Iranian authorities said airstrikes had destroyed a research center in Tehran called the Pasteur Institute.

I don’t know if the timing was intentional, the day after the speech, but the president changed the story a lot yesterday.

The media is already moving on to Trump’s decision yesterday to fire Pam Bondi as attorney general, because she was not aggressive enough in prosecuting her political enemies, and mishandling the Epstein files.

In the end, the talk may not matter much about what happened in April.

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If Trump ends the attack on the timeline he proposed, voters may breathe a sigh of relief and move on. They will remember that Trump went after terrorists in the Mideast and will be cut back if the price of gas starts to drop.

The problem is that the damage done to the country’s economy may be more painful, and last longer, than if the president had not launched his war of choice. And no single speech can change that.