President Donald Trump made the unusual move of publicly correcting his own commerce secretary after he claimed no Americans had died in the Iran war, a conflict that has killed 18 U.S. service members.
The correction came in a Truth Social post published about 7:30 a.m. Thursday. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had appeared on CNBC the day before and said the war had resulted in no American deaths, while arguing to investors that the conflict would be good for the bond market.
“I think the way the president is playing Iran, right, there’s not — there haven’t been American deaths,” Lutnick said. “It’s really just an economic choke out, which the administration is now executing more broadly, and I think it’ll be very effective.”
Lutnick used the phrase to describe squeezing Iran’s economy rather than defeating it on the battlefield. He told CNBC that the strategy was working, and he tied it to his forecast that borrowing costs would fall.
“So I’m very optimistic that the bond market will treat us very well,” Lutnick said, predicting in the same interview that interest rates would stabilize within a couple of months. The war, which began on Feb. 28, is now in its seventh month.
On Thursday, Trump insisted that Lutnick had been thinking about a country that the commerce secretary never named.
“Sec. Lutnick had Venezuela on his mind when he said nobody was killed. 18 people were killed in Iran!” Trump wrote.
Trump’s reference to Venezuela pointed to a different operation, in which U.S. forces struck targets across that country on Jan. 3 and captured President Nicolás Maduro with few American casualties, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Lutnick had named Iran directly. He also credited the administration’s handling of Iran with his optimism about the bond market, according to the interview transcript. The Pentagon’s casualty database contradicts the claim, listing 18 service members killed and 757 wounded since the war began, CNN reported last month.
The military quietly added 60 injuries to the count in a single week in late August, The Intercept reported.
That raised the combined total of dead and wounded to 776. Some 345 of those casualties have come since a second ceasefire collapsed on July 7, according to the outlet. One U.S. government official called the sudden increase “an accounting trick” and accused the Pentagon of slow-walking the number.
Mario Nawfal, who runs a large news aggregation account on X, posted the clip roughly half an hour after Trump’s message and called it a “SERIOUS flub.”
“[P]eople in the administration like Lutnick can easily forget, or intentionally ignore, the men and women who’ve been killed or wounded,” a USA Today opinion column argued.
Trump’s own allies made a nearly identical charge against President Joe Biden during the 2024 campaign. Biden falsely said at a CNN debate that no American troops had died on his watch, Fox News reported.
“[T]he stumbling, bumbling buffoon that we have in the White House had the audacity to say that under his watch that no military members have died,” Darin Hoover, the father of a Marine killed in the 2021 Kabul airport bombing, told Fox News Digital.
Two years later, support for the war Trump ordered has fallen to 31 percent, its lowest level since the early weeks of the fighting, Al Jazeera reported, citing a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Pollsters found 83% of those surveyed said they expect the fighting to continue for a long time. Gasoline now costs more than a dollar a gallon above pre-war levels, the outlet reported.
Trump’s overall approval stands at 32 percent, with 64 percent disapproving, in a national poll released Monday by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“With the midterm elections just two months away, the clock is ticking for President Trump and the Republican Party to offer solutions to the nation’s most pressing problems,” said Tatishe Nteta, the poll’s director and a political science professor at the university.
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