Trump offers opponents of war in Iran an extreme endgame: “Let them hit us with a nuclear weapon”

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DDonald Trump presented Americans with an improbable choice on Monday: a rise in gas prices or nuclear annihilation.

The president spoke to reporters at the White House as he announced construction of a new $15 billion steel mill in Iowa, a lifeline for Republicans in that state and other Midwestern states. But his most interesting remarks focused, as usual, on the more than six-month-old war in Iran, which has now significantly undermined the U.S. economy and pushed gasoline prices to new highs, as Trump and his party face voters in the midterms.

He tried to paint a picture of the hardships needed for Americans with these remarks, but polls show his similar warnings have largely fallen on deaf ears. Asked by a reporter whether motorists should expect rising gas prices to persist through October, Trump responded that the real “turmoil” Americans should worry about is a nuclear attack.

“If you want to see unrest and travesty, let them destroy a nuclear-armed city,” the president warned. “I’m not just talking about Israel and much of the Middle East, but letting them hit us with a nuclear weapon.”

However, in the same breath, Trump claimed that the threat of Iran’s nuclear program had already been averted – likely thanks to the first US strikes earlier this year, or thanks to the “annihilation” he had previously promised and which US forces would have unleashed in the summer of 2025.

And therein lies the central question for the president and his team, facing a growing skepticism about the war shared by the average American. Nearly three in four American adults say they don’t believe Trump has a plan to end the war, and the majority also don’t believe Trump’s stated (and contradictory) position on starting war: the imminent threat allegedly posed by Iran’s nuclear program. A Quinnipiac poll from March found that more than half of Americans did not believe the administration then. The White House numbers on Iran have only gotten worse since then.

The president and his team have provided no evidence in congressional hearings or other settings that, since the February strikes, Iran’s nuclear facilities were being replenished. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, testified under oath to the contrary in March. The administration’s entire war premise rests on a completely unproven assertion that, unlike the controversial Bush-era explanation for the invasion of Iraq, the Trump machine doesn’t even bother to address this issue.

So why does the president, a master in the art of moving away from controversy, continue to talk about it?

Trump gave a vague answer to another foreign policy question at Monday’s news conference, insisting that he knew whether the suspects arrested at a British air base used to support the U.S. war effort against Iran were in any way connected to the Iranian government, but he couldn’t tell us. The president instead insisted he would not have supported releasing the suspects on bail, as the five suspects arrested for terrorism and explosives offenses at RAF Fairford were on Monday.

“We know everything about them,” the president said. At a meeting of reporters on the tarmac Sunday evening, Trump appeared to nod when asked if the suspects were migrants, although British police said the five men were actually British nationals living in London. The Iranian embassy has denied any involvement.

The president took office in 2025 with the aim of making foreign policy one of the priorities of his second term. Largely delegating domestic policy to the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, Trump has focused on efforts to establish his global leadership credentials, including sending deputies to orchestrate (or simply get involved in) efforts to restore peace around the world. At the same time, he launched an aggressive military campaign against small ships accused by the U.S. military of facilitating drug trafficking in the Caribbean, and launched a wave of U.S. strikes against several key Iranian nuclear facilities.

These efforts resulted in his failed bid for the Nobel Peace Prize, a prize he had long coveted since it was awarded to Barack Obama shortly after Obama became president. The 44th president’s efforts to begin extracting the United States from Iraq, a more than decade-long effort, as well as his efforts to revive diplomacy with the Muslim world were cited as reasons for Obama’s selection as the 2008 Peace Prize winner. Trump largely stopped talking about his efforts to end the war after losing the 2025 Peace Prize, and what was once expected to be a weeks-long military attack on Iran is now a conflict with no end in sight more than six months later.

Trump may just be trying to resurrect that image now. Although Republicans still largely say they approve of his overall job performance, according to issue polls, he has suffered considerably – and even more so on Iran. Only about half of Republicans surveyed in a CNN/SRSS poll last week said Trump’s actions helped America’s standing in the world, and only 55 percent of Republicans (Trump’s own voters!) say they currently think the war was “worth it.” This is not just a group of people who believe they are facing an imminent nuclear attack.

As the midterms approach, Democrats are likely hoping that the president’s message on Iran remains unclear and unconvincing, even in the eyes of Republicans. As a result, more front-line members of his party are breaking ranks and calling on Trump to find a way to resolve the conflict and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which would lead to a rise in gas prices, by November.

For many Republicans, that hope may be their only way to survive the midterm elections, which are only 36 days away.