Trump told reporters Sunday that the US has not lost a single soldier in the Iran war, a claim contradicted by his own Pentagon, which put the official death toll at 23 in October.
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“We won in Iran,” Trump said while speaking to reporters at the airport in West Palm Beach. “It’s just a matter of closing it out now. Maybe we’ll wait. Some of their neighbors would prefer that we keep it the way that it is.”
“Again, we haven’t lost anybody. No soldiers,” he added, comparing the conflict to the war between Russia and Ukraine and to Vietnam.
Less than four months ago, Trump stood at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and saluted as the flag draped caskets of four service members were carried off a plane. Three of them were killed when an Iranian missile hit their sleeping barracks at an air base in Jordan, and the fourth died in northern Iraq after an Iranian drone exploded. Before that ceremony on July 22, Trump called it “one of the hardest things to do as a president.” It was the third dignified transfer he had attended since the war began. The first, in March, was for six Army Reserve soldiers killed by a drone strike in Kuwait. Hundreds more service members have been injured over the course of the war.
Sunday’s comments built on a claim Trump has been testing all week. Speaking on Air Force One on Friday, he said, “We haven’t lost anybody in seven months, so I don’t think that’s a war.” That version did not hold up either, since the most recent deaths came in July, after Trump himself declared the ceasefire over. By Sunday, he had dropped the “seven months” part completely.
His declaration that the US “won” also clashes with what the administration is still doing. Last Monday, Trump told a crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, “We had a war with Iran. We won.” That same day, The Wall Street Journal reported, the US struck Iran’s Qeshm Island. Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz are still unresolved, and earlier Sunday, Trump told CNN that renewed attacks on Iran are “highly unlikely” only if talks make progress, while bragging that he has three aircraft carriers “fully locked and loaded.”
The war has become a political problem for Republicans. Voter frustration over the conflict and the gas prices that came with it helped fuel GOP losses in last week’s midterms.
Trump’s casualty claim drew immediate backlash. Quentin Ocama, state outreach officer for the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, called it “wildly disrespectful of the service members who have been killed or injured” in the conflict.
The families of the 23 service members killed in the Iran war have not publicly responded to Trump’s remarks.
