Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been forced to publicly apologize for wrongly claiming that no Americans have been killed in President Trump’s war on Iran.
Lutnick made the shocking false assertion during an appearance on CNBC while defending his boss’ approach to the conflict. “The way the president is playing Iran, there haven’t been American deaths; it’s really just an economic choke-out,” Lutnick said.
There have, in fact, been American deaths.
Defense Department figures show 18 U.S. service members have been killed and more than 750 wounded since the United States and Israel launched their attack on Iran on Feb. 28.
“While speaking yesterday at the G20 innovation summit about AI, I answered a question about the military actions in Iran, I misspoke,” Lutnick wrote in an X post Thursday morning.
“18 members of our military have died, and to those families my heart breaks and I am so very sorry for their loss. I was thinking about the Venezuelan military operation where no service members died.”
Lutnick’s post at 8:13 a.m. ET came an hour after Trump put out his own statement about the matter on Truth Social.
“Sec. Lutnick had Venezuela on his mind when he said nobody was killed. 18 people were killed in Iran!” Trump wrote.
The operation in Venezuela that Lutnick and Trump used in their excuse involved U.S. forces capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Roughly 80 Venezuelan and Cuban military personnel and civilians were killed in the operation, while seven American soldiers were wounded. None died.
Iran has been a dramatically different story.
Thousands have been killed and tens of thousands wounded across Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, and the wider Persian Gulf region since the conflict began.
Among the 18 American dead is 19-year-old Army Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, who enlisted shortly after graduating high school. She was killed in July alongside 25-year-old First Lt. Tyler James Feehan in an Iranian missile barrage targeting a U.S. Army base in Jordan.
The deaths came after a June cease-fire between Iran and the United States collapsed, sending tensions soaring and triggering a fresh wave of airstrikes.
The latest American fatality was Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, who died July 19 while disposing of a downed Iranian attack drone at Erbil Air Base in Iraq.
Trump has faced mounting criticism over how he has discussed those deaths.
After Swinton’s death, Trump posted a grim comparison of casualties from America’s wars, writing in a Truth Social post: “Afghanistan War: 20 years, 2,000 DEAD. Iraq War: 9 years, 4,600 DEAD. Vietnam War: 19 years and 5 months, 58,220 DEAD. Korean War: 3 years and 1 month, 36,574 DEAD. Venezuela War: 1 day, 0 DEAD. Iran Military Conflict: 4 months, 18 DEAD.”
Former MAGA ally Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Trump of “bragging about killing 18 US soldiers.”
“The ‘peace president’ went to war and is killing and wounding our troops,” she added.
Trump, who has previously been heavily criticized for making insulting remarks about fallen soldiers, has also come under scrutiny during the Iran war for the way his administration has recorded deaths of American service members—especially following the removal of four deaths from a Pentagon website in July.
Trump’s blunt attitude toward U.S. casualties dates to the first deaths of the conflict, when he said: “Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is.”
The remarks are a far cry from Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to avoid “new wars.”
He also initially claimed the Iran conflict would last four or five weeks. It has now dragged into its seventh month, with no clear end in sight.
