Aboard Marine One, a Phone Call and the Decision to Strike Iran
Trump and his advisers have said the strikes were a targeted campaign to impede Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
WASHINGTON—President Trump was flying over the palatial estates that neighbor his New Jersey golf club on Saturday when he made one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency.
As he barreled toward a nearby airport on Marine One, before flying to Washington, Trump received a call from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It was time to make a final decision: move forward with U.S. strikes on Iran or abort the mission. The president, who had grown convinced that diplomacy alone wouldn’t prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, gave Hegseth the greenlight, according to people familiar with the matter.
Hours later, B-2 bombers targeted nuclear sites in Iran, the culmination of a frenetic week of behind-the-scenes deliberations marked by covert plans to keep the operation secret.
Trump and his advisers have said the strikes were a targeted campaign to impede Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. But the move threatens to drag the U.S. into a broader conflagration in the Middle East, potentially further dividing Trump’s political coalition.
Ultimately, Trump saw the operation as a way to assert U.S. dominance. “Our country is hot as a pistol,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in a brief interview on Sunday. “Six months ago, our country was cold as ice. It was dead,” he said, calling the strikes “a great victory for our country.”
Trump had been under pressure for weeks from his advisers and opposing wings of his MAGA coalition. Hawks, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, were pushing the president to take military action, while some well-known conservatives, such as Tucker Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), warned that hitting Iran was a mistake.
The hawks ultimately won out, as diplomatic efforts sputtered. Steve Witkoff, an influential Trump adviser who had long held out hope for a nuclear deal with Tehran, told the president that the Iranians were stringing the White House along. Israeli officials, meanwhile, argued that the air superiority they had established over Iran made an operation a much lower risk, administration officials said.
Graham, in an interview, said he told Trump that authorizing strikes in Iran would give the U.S. an opportunity to repair damage done to America’s reputation abroad after the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. “You’ll be a new sheriff in town, and this will reset our relationship with the rest of the world,” Graham said he told the president.
Trump spent much of Sunday tracking news coverage of the strikes. His aides gave him a compilation of positive statements from supporters on social media, according to administration officials. He also stewed about Rep. Thomas Massie’s criticism of the strikes, discussing with advisers a primary challenge against the Kentucky Republican who called the U.S. attack on Iran unconstitutional.
Democrats have called the Iran strikes unlawful, arguing that Trump should have sought a War Powers Resolution from Congress before approving the military action. And they have alluded to the faulty intelligence that was a basis for the Iraq war, saying the administration failed to offer a detailed rationale for the timing of the strikes.
“We saw no evidence that Iran had made the decision to build a bomb or was actually affirmatively building the mechanism, which takes time,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “So in the absence of that, you don’t order a strike like this.”
Trump’s decision to launch U.S. strikes came after mounting frustration over the pace of negotiations with Iran, according to administration officials. The president and Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, were bullish that they could reach a nuclear deal with Iran. But in recent months, Witkoff and Trump soured on the talks as Iran continued to move ahead with its plans to build a nuclear weapon. In late May, Trump told advisers that he was convinced the Iranians were “tapping them along,” according to a person who heard his comments.
The president was leaning heavily toward moving forward with U.S. strikes by the time White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Thursday that Trump would make a final decision over the next two weeks. Trump, frustrated by reports that he was preparing to authorize strikes, instructed Leavitt to announce the two-week timeline in part because he believed it would help obscure his plans, administration officials said.
As the U.S. moved closer to an attack, Trump and his team were in regular touch with Israeli officials. He also repeatedly asked his advisers to lay out what, if anything, could go wrong with the attack, according to the officials.
On Saturday, Trump’s aides gathered secretly in the Situation Room, where they went over attack plans and reviewed maps of the region. Another set of B-2 planes flew from the U.S., in a ruse meant to throw off Iranian officials. Administration officials think the timing of the strikes caught Iran off guard.
The backlash from Trump’s political base has so far been muted, despite private misgivings from prominent supporters of the president. But some Republicans warned voter frustration could spread if the U.S. gets drawn into a sustained conflict in the region.
“If the base feels betrayed, then they’ll be more apathetic during the midterms, and it will be his own undoing,” Massie said in an interview. Greene, the Georgia lawmaker, wrote on X, following the strikes: “Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war.” She added in her post, “this is not our fight.”
Trump and his advisers continued to make their case publicly and privately on Sunday. In phone calls, Trump told supporters his actions align with his America First views and said he has been consistent in his goal of Iran not getting a nuclear weapon, a senior administration official said.
Trump has said in recent days that he has no intention of overthrowing Iran’s regime. But he appeared to signal on Sunday that he is open to that outcome. “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???” he wrote on Truth Social.
Responding to concerns that the U.S. was entering another war abroad, Vice President JD Vance said Americans were understandably “exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East.”
“But the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives,” he told NBC News. “So this is not going to be some long, drawn-out thing.”
Vance, however, acknowledged that further military action in Iran is possible. “If they decide they are going to attack our troops, if they decide they are going to continue to try to build a nuclear weapon, then we are going to respond to that with overwhelming force,” he said.
Iran’s foreign minister on Sunday played down chances of further diplomacy, saying “they have proved that they are not men of diplomacy and that they only understand the language of threat and force.”
As a candidate in 2016, Trump was a frequent critic of the second Iraq war, which was launched by Republican President George W. Bush. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he blamed Joe Biden for allowing wars in Ukraine and Gaza to continue. In his Milwaukee convention speech, Trump said he could “stop wars with just a telephone call.”
But foreign-policy matters have already consumed much of his early months in office, as lawmakers debate his legislative priorities and some in his base are frustrated with the slow pace of deportations, a key campaign promise. Trump tried on Sunday to shift the focus back to his legislative agenda, saying in a social-media post: “Now let’s get the Great, Big, Beautiful Bill done.”
Other top administration officials, including Vance and Hegseth, are also veterans whose experience in the war on terrorism made them skeptical of America’s security role abroad. In a 2023 opinion column in The Wall Street Journal, Vance argued Trump’s best foreign policy was “not starting any wars.”
Write to Tarini Parti at tarini.parti@wsj.com, Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com, Siobhan Hughes at Siobhan.hughes@wsj.com and Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com
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