Donald Trump’s primetime nationwide address on the war with Iran caused widespread bewilderment, with commentators voicing shock at his vow to continue bombing to “bring them back to the stone ages”.
Speculation before Wednesday’s speech from the White House Blue Room suggested that the president might be about to signal a winding up of the US military effort, which began on 28 February.
Instead, in a 19-minute address during which he several times slurred his words and stumbled over syntax, Trump said vaguely that “we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly”.
“We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.”
Trump denied that his aim had been to bring about the collapse of Iran’s Islamic regime – despite having demanded “unconditional surrender” in the early days of the war. He also insisted that he should have a say on who Iran chose as its new supreme leader after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s most powerful figure, was killed in an Israeli strike on the opening day of the conflict.
“Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change,” he said. “But regime change has occurred because of all their original leaders’ death. They’re all dead. The new group is much less radical and much more reasonable.”
In fact, Khamenei was replaced as leader by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who is widely seen as even more hardline than his father.
Trump’s speech came under attack as soon as he had finished.
On the cable network MS Now, Chris Hayes called it a “litany of lies he’s told before”.
“If you were expecting something new, you did not get it,” said Hayes, who seized on Trump’s claim that 45,000 Iranians had been killed in the regime’s brutal crackdown on mass protests in January. Although casualties from the protests have been estimated in the tens of thousands, there has been no verification of the actual death toll, with accounts from inside the country positing lower figures.
Robert Malley, who served as lead negotiator for the nuclear deal – known as the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA) – signed during Barack Obama’s presidency in 2015 – homed in on Trump’s threat to send Iranians “back to the stone ages”.
“Two takeaways from Trump’s speech,” Malley wrote on Bluesky. “1. That so many still pay attention to what he says, which has no link to reality or to what he might or might not do; 2. that he so cavalierly threatens war crimes (to bring Iran back to the stone age) on behalf of an unlawful & unjustified war.”
The “stone age’ threat was underlined by the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who posted on X: “Back to the stone age.”
Hegseth has been repeatedly criticized for the violence of his rhetoric on the war, which has sometimes seemed to glory on death and destruction being inflicted on Iran
Other commentators noted the lack of an endgame or sense of direction in Trump’s remarks.
Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of the Eurasia Group, a foreign policy thinktank, called the address “19 minutes of a rambling, unmoored and unserious commander in chief. President Trump is in way over his head.”
Even while Trump spoke, Joseph Cirincione, a veteran arms control negotiator, accused him of lying about the 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump abandoned during his first presidency in 2018.
“It is the exact opposite of his claim that with the deal ‘Iran would now have an arsenal of nuclear weapons.’ FALSE,” he wrote. If the deal were still in place today, Iran would not have any HEU (highly enriched uranium), would be 2 years away from a bomb.”
In a later post, Cirincione called on fellow arms control experts to correct Trump’s comments. “Please defend the historic agreement you fought for,” he wrote. “Please help people understand that the Deal was working: it stopped an Iran bomb and an Iran War. If you don’t; it will much harder to get such an agreement again.”
Before he spoke on Wednesday, Trump said he no longer cared about Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium, estimated to be about 440kg, arguing that it was deep underground, but raising yet more questions about his war aims.
The absence of defined goals in his speech despite the war now having raged for a month was highlighted by Brian Finucane, of the Crisis Group and a former state department legal adviser on military operations.
“On the one hand, little if any of the content was new,” he posted. “On the other hand, the fact that he merely regurgitated prior social media posts after a month of war is significant.”