White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt holds a press briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 29, 2025. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon
President Donald Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the controversial Iran War to AlterNet, arguing that it was “ground in a truth.”
“President Trump’s courageous decision to launch Operation Epic Fury is grounded in a truth that presidents for nearly 50 years have been talking about, but no president had the courage to confront: Iran poses a direct and imminent threat to the United States of America and our troops in the Middle East,” Leavitt said in a statement to AlterNet. “The rogue Iranian Regime under the evil hand of the Ayatollah has killed and maimed thousands of American citizens and soldiers over the years – and that ends with President Trump.”
Leavitt was responding in part to a recent comment by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a fierce critic of the Iran War who on Thursday argued to Fox News that the lack of congressional approval renders the entire operation illegal.
“The people have been robbed of a public debate,” Paul wrote. “Let me inform the public that this evasion is intentional.”
He added,”The congressional leadership — resigned to their own irrelevance — will gladly hand the president the power to initiate war in exchange for plausible deniability. Congressional leaders want to make the case to voters that they are not to be held accountable at the ballot box because they played no role in the decision to go to war. That is not statesmanship. That is shameful.”
Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill,), who was once so loyal to Trump he vowed to use “muskets” if he lost to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, argued in February that Trump supporters are in a “cult” if they still back him despite his warmongering.
“I thought you wanted him to end wars all over the world,” Walsh declared. “You said you wanted him to end American entanglement in conflicts and wars around the world. America shouldn’t be involved in these wars, you said. That’s why you’re voting for Trump, you said.” For this reason, Walsh said Trump’s belligerence toward Greenland, Venezuela and Iran should discredit him to those supporters — but for the most part, it has not.
“And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters?” Walsh asked. “What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”
On Thursday, referring back to his 2016 post about grabbing a “musket,” Walsh said that opposing Trump’s unconstitutional behavior has kept him “at war” so continuously, he is exhausted.
“Every day, I feel like I grab my musket and I walk out to that battlefield out there,” Walsh said. “And from eight in the morning till eight or nine at night, I'm just at war.”
Observing the toll this has taken on his health, Walsh said that “I'm not a kid. It's exhausting. I'm tired every night.”
Like Paul and Walsh, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) used to support Trump but argued on Sunday that his attack on Iran violates his supposed anti-war principles.
"This b—— is celebrating the death of American military members and thanking their families for their blood sacrifice,” Greene wrote in response to a pro-war post by a Trump supporter, influencer Laura Loomer. “But this is who Trump takes late night calls from and laps up her praise and worship. … And now Americans are once again coming home in flag draped coffins from another stupid pointless foreign war for foreign regime change on behalf of Israel.”
Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host who remains influential in far right circles, outright accused Trump of being controlled by Israel, saying “this happened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel’s war.” The Hodge Twins, a pair of popular MAGA influencers, also argued “we are at war for Israel.” On the other side of the ideological spectrum, University of St. Andrews strategies professor and historian Phillips Payson O’Brien told The Atlantic in March that Trump’s Iran invasion could presage a decline in America’s global military dominance.
“When a complex system starts to decay, the first signs are usually subtle,” O’Brien said. “In the third century, after the Roman empire had reached its geographic maximum, literacy began to decline across Roman society. Education levels fell not only among soldiers, but among officers, aristocrats, and even emperors. The Roman army still looked formidable for years afterward. It had good equipment and could march well. Yet it was no longer as advanced relative to Rome’s enemies as it had once been. It fought as hard as ever, but less effectively.”
The U.S. military remains still far superior to Iran’s, O’Brien added, but the American bombing campaign against Iran is showing signs of strain, such as the deaths of six U.S. soldiers (at the time of O’Brien’s interview) or an Iranian drone that destroyed the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Confronting Leavitt about the soldiers’ deaths on Wednesday, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked her about a remark indicating that the “press should not prominently cover the deaths of U.S. service members?”
“The press does only want to make the president look bad,” Leavitt replied. “That’s an objective fact. Especially you and especially CNN.”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2024 regarding a historian, the New School’s Federico Finchelstein, comparing Trump’s “rhetorical violence” to Adolf Hitler’s oratory, Leavitt replied that “it's been less 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."