Everyone’s most hated Senator flubbed one of the president’s main justifications for attacking Iran this weekend.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has admitted that the risk of Iran threatening the U.S. with nuclear missiles isn’t quite the imminent threat President Donald Trump has claimed. Asked on Face the Nation Sunday about what was being done to secure Iran’s supposed nuclear armory, Cruz responded: “Look, the quantity of nuclear material, I didn’t say anything one way or another on that, what I said is they were building nuclear weapons a year ago and our bombing took that out.”
After noting that the U.S. and Israel’s 2025 Twelve-Day War “took out” Iran’s nuclear assets—with Trump at the time celebrating their complete destruction—Cruz added of Iran, “They also had an ongoing desire to rebuild them.”
The senator then admitted that, as far as he was aware, the Iranian regime hadn’t achieved their rebuilding goal.
“I don’t have present-day intelligence on what progress they had made towards rebuilding nuclear weapons since we bombed their facilities,” he told host Margaret Brennan.
“I have no indication that they were anywhere close to getting nuclear weapons, because our bombing was devastating. And, Margaret, that’s one of the reasons I urged President Trump, ‘Now is the time.’”
In a complete contrast to Trump’s claimed motivations for war, Cruz concluded: “You know, dictatorships survive because they’re perceived as invulnerable. In this instance, Iran decisively lost the Twelve-Day War. That weakened the regime and set up what the president is doing now.”
While Cruz argued that now was the time to strike Iran due to the country’s weakness, Trump himself has said the opposite.
In the Truth Social video announcing his and Israel’s joint war efforts Saturday morning, Trump suggested that Iran was building missiles that “could soon reach the American homeland.”
The president described the war as a means of stopping a “very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.”
As his key goal, Trump vowed: “We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.”
Despite the president’s words, an assessment from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency undertaken in May 2025 judged that Iran would need a decade to create missiles capable of reaching the U.S.
The report, titled “Current and Future Missile Threats to the U.S. Homeland” and carried out a month before the Twelve-Day War, stated that the Iran had the potential ability to create a “militarily-viable” intercontinental ballistic missile by 2035, “should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”
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