Trump and His Advisers Can’t Get The Message Straight on Regime Change in Iran

Early Sunday, after Donald Trump entered the United States into the conflict between Israel and Iran with airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites, top administration officials tried to play down the attacks: This wasn’t the beginning of the kind of military quagmire Trump had railed against on the campaign trail, they insisted, but a careful strike that would advance American diplomatic goals in the region. “This wasn’t a regime change move. This was designed to degrade and/or destroy three nuclear sites related to their nuclear weaponization ambitions,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on CBS News’ Face the Nation. “We’re not at war with Iran,” Vice President JD Vance added, on NBC News’ Meet the Press. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”

“Our view has been very clear,” Vance added, “that we don’t want a regime change.”

But the administration’s position became less clear just a few hours later, when Trump himself weighed in on Truth Social: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’” the president posted. “But if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???”

It is tempting to say that Trump’s comments muddied the administration’s message on the Iran strikes. But, of course, the only message that has ever really mattered in the Trump administration is the one coming directly from him. Especially this second time around, the government speaks with one voice, and it is his.

Assurances from Vance, Rubio, and others may provide some political cover for those trying to square the strikes with Trump’s supposed “America First” agenda. “This is a surgical strike, operated perfectly,” wrote the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, typically a critic of foreign interventionism. “President Trump acted with prudence and decisiveness.” But, ultimately, the outcome depends on Trump, who has dismissed even his own hand-picked intelligence officials in moving ahead with the weekend bombings: “She’s wrong,” he said Friday of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence who had previously assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” (Rubio, in his appearance on Face the Nation, put an even finer point on it: Asked if the US had seen intelligence that Iran was, in fact, building a nuclear weapon, he replied, “That’s irrelevant.”)

Who was Trump listening to, in joining Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign in Iran? As the New York Times reported, Trump spent the lead up to the strike monitoring Fox News, where guests egged Trump on to go “all in” against Tehran. “Wouldn’t the world be better off if the ayatollahs went away and were replaced by something better?” Lindsey Graham said, during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s program Thursday.

Trump’s decision has kicked up some notable dissent within the typically unified MAGA movement. “American troops have been killed and forever torn apart physically and mentally for regime change, foreign wars, and for military industrial base profits,” Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote. “I’m sick of it.” Added Thomas Massie: “This is not America First folks.” But one gets the sense that Trump’s next move will be informed more by those cheering him on than by his critics.