It’s easy to imagine a political environment in which an American president delivers a prime-time address to the nation about an ongoing war, explaining the value and importance of the mission, outlining a plan and clear objectives, all while assuring the public that there are steady hands at the wheel.
On April Fools’ Day, however, Donald Trump chose to follow a very different kind of path.
It wasn’t at all clear why the president even bothered to deliver remarks from the White House on Wednesday night. He presented no plan. He offered no coherent vision. The rambling Republican meandered from dubious point to dubious point, peddled a contradictory message about a possible endpoint, leaving many viewers more concerned, not less, about the war.
The New York Times’ Helene Cooper summarized, “Trump has concluded speaking after 19 minutes. … This was a rehash of his Truth Social posts over the past month.”
Perhaps most importantly, however, many Americans likely tuned in to the national address hoping to hear the truth about a war that’s being fought in their name, by their fellow countrymen and -women, with their money and resources.
The public clearly deserved the truth, but the president offered something very different.
Trump said Iranians, before the war began, “were also rapidly building a vast stockpile of conventional ballistic missiles, and would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland, Europe and virtually any other place on Earth.” That wasn’t true.
He said, “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future. We don’t need it. We haven’t needed it, and we don’t need it.” That might have sounded nice, but it was wrong.
Trump said, “Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred.” It really hasn’t.
He said, “We were a dead and crippled country after the last administration and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world by far, with no inflation.” He actually inherited the strongest economy on the planet in early 2025, and there’s plenty of inflation.
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Trump said, “We’re now totally independent of the Middle East. … We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil. We don’t need anything they have.” As consumers struggle to pay for increased energy costs, there’s ample evidence to the contrary.
He said, referring to the families of fallen U.S. troops, “I was with them and their families, their parents, their wives, their husbands. We salute them. And now we must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives. And every single one of the people, their loved ones, said, ‘Please, sir. Please finish the job.’ Every one of them.” No, that’s not what happened.
Trump said he was responsible for “record-setting investments coming into the United States, over $18 trillion.” This remains an entirely made-up figure, which is at odds with assessments from his own White House.
He said, in reference to the 2015 international nuclear agreement with Iran, “Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash.” That’s not what happened — and Trump himself just eased Iranian oil sanctions, which allowed a lot more than $1.7 billion to flow into Iran’s treasury.
Referring to the Obama-era agreement, Trump said, “His Iran deal would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran. They would have had them years ago, and they would have used them, would have been a different world. There would have been no Middle East and no Israel right now, in my opinion, the opinion of a lot of great experts, had I not terminated that terrible deal.” All of this turned reality on its head.
He claimed Iran launched a “race for a nuclear bomb, a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before.” That sounded scary, but this wasn’t true, either.
Toward the end of the president’s remarks, he added, “The whole world is watching, and they … just can’t believe what they’re seeing.” Oddly enough, he might as well have been referring to his own speech.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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