Trump vows to keep bombing Iran in prime-time address that added nothing new

There was something off-kilter about President Trump’s prime time speech.

Actually, many things.

But what immediately struck me was his low-energy delivery. He supported this issue by first talking about the Artemis moon mission and then about the oil we seized from Venezuela. After that he was just reading the words in the prompt.

No one can challenge the president’s core message. Iran is the world’s leading terrorist state. With 47 years of violence and a bloody history of proxies like Hamas, something had to be done. Iran can never be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Dictators killed 45,000 of their own people (though Trump downplayed this when trying to negotiate a deal).

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But the 19-minute speech was a mass of contradictions. Trump kept saying we won, we destroyed most of the Iranian army, which is true. But he still said the United States would intensify its bombing campaign targeting Tehran’s energy facilities over the next two to three weeks.

Why is this necessary if America has already won? So will it really take less than a month?

It was clear at the beginning of the speech that Trump knew how unpopular the war was. He knows rising gas prices are hurting him at home. He knows that he falls like a rock in the face of young men who swallow the rhetoric of no to foreign wars.

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He knows that the stock market has fallen since US and Israeli warplanes attacked Iran on the last day of February, and this is very important. As we saw when the Dow reached 50,000, Trump is extremely sensitive to the market, which often spurs him to take action.

Backed into a corner by the Iranian regime, which refused to negotiate seriously, the public expected him to declare victory and withdraw. But this did not happen. Instead, Trump announced that he would bomb Iran back to the “Stone Age.”

What about the president’s own goals?

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He said the goal of the war was never regime change. But the morning after the first attack, he talked about regime change. In any case, Trump now claims that this was achieved because various levels of leadership were killed, starting with the Ayatollah.

However, the new sheriff in the city, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammed Galibaf, made a harsh statement yesterday.

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

“When it comes to defending our homeland, each of us will be a soldier of this country. If you look sideways at our mother’s house… you are facing the whole family, all of us. Armed, ready and standing. Come in, we are waiting,” he wrote in one of his posts.

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So much for regime change.

Trump has repeatedly said the war cannot end unless Iran stops blockading one-fifth of the world’s oil traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. However, he dismissed the issue in his speech on Wednesday night. We don’t trust the Strait, so who cares? It will “naturally open” on its own.

The president then berated our erstwhile European allies, saying they should show “belated courage” and “just take” Hormuz, as if it were that easy.

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As for Trump’s statement that our country is now “free from the specter of nuclear blackmail,” Iran still has about 1,000 pounds 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 respondents said they strongly or somewhat disapproved of the decision to attack Iran, a 7-point increase since the conflict began.

Many network experts criticized the address as a repetition of things Trump had said before.

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“There was nothing new in that conversation,” said the ABC’s Jonathan Karl, adding: “There’s not a lot of optimism.”

Colleague Martha Raddatz: “This added to the confusion as to why we were there.”

European leaders felt overwhelmed by the war. “When we are serious, we do not say every day the opposite of what we said the day before, and perhaps we should not talk every day,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.

President Donald Trump (R) attends the Gaza summit chaired by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with French President Emmanuel Macron in Sharm El Sheikh on October 14, 2025. (Image Association via Michael Kappeler/Getty Images)

Austria and Switzerland yesterday joined Italy, Spain and France in banning US warplanes bound for Iran from their skies. They want no part of this war. The British prime minister had done the same, but backed down after Iran retaliated.

In the first sign of intense bombardment yesterday, an airstrike destroyed a research facility in Tehran called the Pasteur Institute, Iranian officials said.

I don’t know if the timing was intentional the day after the speech, but the president changed the subject dramatically yesterday.

The media is already turning to Trump’s decision yesterday to fire attorney general Pam Bondi because she was not aggressive enough in prosecuting his political enemies and mishandled the Epstein files.

Ultimately, the conversation may be less important than what happens during the rest of April.

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If Trump ends the attack on his proposed timeline, voters can breathe a sigh of relief and move on. They will remember that Trump is going after terrorists in the Middle East, and they will relent if gas prices start to drop.

The problem is that the damage to the world economy could be far more painful and far more lasting than if the president had not started the war of his choice. And no amount of talking can change that.