{"id":590699,"date":"2026-09-05T05:26:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T05:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/590699\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T05:26:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T05:26:11","slug":"not-a-big-thing-trump-calls-iran-conflict-small-potatoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/590699\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Not a big thing’: Trump calls Iran conflict ‘small potatoes’"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump said the conflict in Iran is \u201csmall potatoes\u201d as he defended Vice President JD Vance for asserting that months of on-and-off attacks in the Middle East are not a \u201cwar\u201d.<\/p>\n

Asked during an Oval Office exchange about Vance\u2019s comments made a day earlier, Trump noted that US strikes on Iran are now \u201cintermittent\u201d and seemed to downplay the intensity of a war<\/a> that’s cost US taxpayers more than US$37.5 billion and left 18 US service members dead.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can understand what he\u2019s saying,\u201d said Trump. He added, \u201cI call it a military conflict because it\u2019s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing.”<\/p>\n

Vance on Thursday, during a White House press briefing, rejected the use of the word \u201cwar\u201d to describe the US fighting with Iran and steered clear of predicting that the 6-month-old conflict would be over by November\u2019s midterm elections, in which Republicans are trying to hang on to their narrow majorities in Congress.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t call it a war,\u201d Vance said after being asked during a White House press briefing about whether the fighting could end before voters cast their ballots in the November 3 congressional elections. \u201cRight now, there is no active shooting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vance\u2019s assertion came even as Iran fired at US Gulf ally Kuwait on Thursday in retaliation for rounds of US strikes on Iran<\/a> earlier in the week.<\/p>\n

\"Debris<\/p>\n

Debris is scattered across the courtyard of a building that Iranian media said was hit by a U.S. strike while a wedding celebration was taking place there, in Kuhestak, southern Iran. (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n

Trump in Friday’s exchange with reporters added that the US death toll in the Iran conflict is relatively lower than some other recent US wars. The US, along with Israel, have only carried out air strikes in the Iran war<\/a>, which began on February 28, and has not deployed troops into the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did Venezuela, and we did this. In Venezuela, we lost nobody,\u201d said Trump, referring to the January US military operation to seize former Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and spirit him to New York City to face federal drug trafficking charges. \u201cAnd this, we lost 18 people. And, in Vietnam, we lost 100,000 people. And in other conflicts, we lost tens of thousands of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

A total of 58,220 members of the US armed forces died during the Vietnam War, according to records from the US National Archives.<\/p>\n

Pressed by a reporter on describing the conflict as \u201csmall potatoes” when 18 US service members have been killed, Trump responded by reiterating his argument that the conflict\u2014one that he said at the outset of the war would last a matter of weeks\u2014has led to the defanging of Iran’s nuclear program.<\/p>\n

\u201cIran will not have a nuclear weapon because if they did, you probably wouldn\u2019t be standing here,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump said the conflict in Iran is \u201csmall potatoes\u201d as he defended Vice President JD Vance…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[65,42,5107,43,64,40,38,41,39,66],"class_list":["post-590699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-donald-trump","tag-headlines","tag-middle-east","tag-news","tag-north-america","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-us-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}