Senior White House officials are reportedly having “buyer’s remorse” over the Iran war as the realization sets in that President Trump was “high on his own supply” when he launched it.
That bombshell is buried inside a new Axios dispatch. It lays bare a deep fracture inside Trump’s inner circle, now navigating week three of a bloody conflict that has claimed at least 13 American lives, left more than 1,400 Iranians dead, and produced one of the worst civilian atrocities attributed to the U.S. military in decades.
A source close to the administration told the outlet that key officials had not been fully on board with Trump’s plans before the 79-year-old president overruled them all. “He ended up saying, ‘I just want to do it,’” the source said. “He grossly overestimated his ability to topple the regime short of sending in ground troops.”
The same source said the president had grown dangerously overconfident on the back of what looked like a string of quick wins—last summer’s strikes in Iran and January’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “He saw multiple decisive quick victories with extraordinary military competence,” the source said.
A senior administration official told Axios that Iran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz was only making Trump “more dug in.” This has raised the specter of what the outlet terms an “escalation trap,” in which a stronger force keeps attacking to assert dominance as the returns diminish and the exit narrows.
Unlike the first Trump administration—plagued from day one by insider grumbling, warring factions, and tell-all memoirs—Trump’s second term has thus far remained an administration where officials do not leak doubt but instead project certainty, close ranks, and attack critics.
Such dissent makes the Axios report all the more striking.
Trump’s war began on Feb. 28 when the U.S. and Israel launched surprise strikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Within hours, a suspected Tomahawk missile had reduced a girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran’s Hormozgan province, to rubble, killing at least 170 people, the vast majority schoolchildren.
Trump initially blamed Iran, suggesting the country “also has some Tomahawks”—a claim military experts dismissed. When pressed this week, he said: “I don’t know about it.”
Investigations by multiple media outlets have all concluded the U.S. was most likely responsible, as the result of outdated targeting intelligence that still had a Revolutionary Guard naval base at the school’s location.
A Pentagon 15-6 investigation is underway. The inquiry will establish not whether a mistake occurred, but how.
On top of the 13 confirmed U.S. military deaths, six crew members were killed when a refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq on March 13.
More than 1,100 children have been injured or killed across the region since the war began, according to UNICEF figures from March 12.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the Daily Beast that any talk of a split was “totally false,” and that “the entire administration is united behind President Trump and the Department of War.” She added: “The President listens to a host of opinions on any given issue, but ultimately decides based on what is best for our country and US national security.”
On Truth Social on Friday night, Trump declared that Iran was “totally defeated and wants a deal—But not a deal that I would accept!”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Pentagon for comment.
