CNN’s Jake Tapper didn’t have to say much to call out President Donald Trump’s inconsistency over his war on Iran. He just let the president’s words speak for themselves.
“The status of the Iran war, as told by the Trump administration, seems to many an ever-changing tale,” Tapper, 57, said to kick off the segment during Monday’s episode of his program, The Lead.
The anchor explained that Trump, 79, had started the day by saying the U.S. was engaged in serious talks with “a new and more reasonable Iranian regime,” but, within the same breath of a Truth Social post, threatened to “obliterate” civilian infrastructure within the Middle Eastern country.
“Wow! A lot to unpack here,” Tapper said. “First, experts say that attacking civilian infrastructure could constitute a war crime under current international law.”
The journalist then pointed out how White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed that concern during Monday afternoon’s press briefing.
“Of course, this administration and the United States Armed Forces will always act within the confines of the law,” Leavitt, 28, said. “But with respect to achieving the full objectives of Operation Epic Fury, President Trump is going to move forward unabated, and he expects the Iranian regime to make a deal with the administration.”
Tapper pivoted to the fact that the administration has not been clear about exactly who the U.S. is negotiating with, a point corroborated by a statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“It’s very opaque right now. It’s not quite clear how decisions are being made inside of Iran,” Rubio said during a video interview with Al Jazeera on Monday.
However, during another interview with ABC, also on Monday, Rubio appeared frustrated with the news media for being confused by the administration’s objectives in the region, Tapper said.
“I’ll repeat them to you now because I hear a lot of talk about ‘we don’t know what the clear objectives are.’ Here they are, you should write them down,” Rubio said condescendingly.
“Number one, the destruction of their air force. Number two, the destruction of their navy. Number three, the severe diminishing of their missile launching capability. And number four, the destruction of their factories so they can’t make more missiles and more drones to threaten us in the future,” he concluded. “All of this, so that they can never hide behind it to acquire a nuclear weapon.”
Tapper noted that those four things were not the only things considered objectives by other administration officials, such as the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the retrieval of nuclear material from within Iran.
The anchor moved on to Trump’s delayed threats to “keep bombing our little hearts out” that he has extended twice now, most recently by 10 days.
“Now, one can support the goals of this war and also acknowledge the confusing messages,” Tapper said. “President Trump has declared victory while arguing that the mission is not complete. On regime change, the president said that this would be the Iranian people’s best shot to take their country back.”
“Then in recent weeks,” he continued, “President Trump said it was too dangerous for a popular uprising to happen. And then yesterday, he said regime change, that has already happened.”
On Sunday, Trump told reporters, “We’ve had regime change, if you look, already, because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody has dealt with before.”
The anchor noted that though the former Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead, his “arguably more hardline” son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is now in charge, “we think.”
And despite the U.S. being seemingly close to achieving its goal of destroying the nation’s military capabilities, he said, the Trump administration is sending thousands of troops to the region in preparation for a ground assault.
“Again, one can want a denuclearized and democratic Iran and still wonder if President Trump is kind of making some of this up as he goes along,” Tapper said. “One can support President Trump and wonder if he’s fully aware of how often wars spiral out of control little by little with unanticipated responses by the enemy requiring increasing commitment.”
“President Trump said he would end the Iran war when? When he, quote, ‘feels it in his bones.’ When so many lives are on the line, that is a remarkably vague and impulsive metric.”
The Daily Beast reached out to the White House for comment.
