U.S. President Donald Trump delivers an address to the nation about the Iran war at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. April 1, 2026. Alex Brandon/Pool via REUTERS
Former Republican Tom Nichols wasn't impressed with President Donald Trump's speech, but worse, he noticed just how bad Trump looked standing behind the podium.
In his write-up of the speech, the conservative retired professor from the U.S. Naval War College noted that the man who once gave 90-plus-minute speeches was faltering.
"His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air — brisk by Trump’s standards — Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago," wrote Nichols.
The international affairs expert observed that Trump's bragging about his successes in Venezuela indicated he was "perhaps hoping to make listeners believe that the Iran war will be a similarly short operation." The war is heading into its second month.
He blasted the speech text itself, which he said was just a repetition of "the same lines" Trump used when he announced in the middle of the night that he'd attacked Iran.
In another "strange moment," Nichols said, Trump rambled about "green, green" cash that "Barack Hussein Obama" gave to Iran, which he falsely claimed emptied out all of the banks in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. The money Trump says was "given" to Iran was their own money, not from the U.S. It was frozen during Iran sanctions. Now Trump is supporting the same thing, with a "$14 billion windfall," the New York Times reported late last month.
Another of Trump's problems in the speech that Nichols mentioned is that the president never provided the justification for the war in the first place. Since last summer, Trump has been bragging that they "obliterated" every ounce of the nuclear program in Iran. But, "Trump presented no evidence that Iran was nearing the nuclear threshold. Instead, he simply asserted that the Iranian mullahs were going to get a nuclear weapon and that the United States had to stop them: In other words, he admitted to launching a preventive war based on something that might happen one day."
Then, Trump "undercut" his own claims with a bizarre excuse that there was "nuclear dust" buried in the mountains in Iran, Nichols explained.
Probably one of Trump's challenges, Nichols said, is that he said some things "that might come back to haunt him." He pledged that none of America's "friends" in the Persian Gulf would "get hurt or fail in any way, shape, or form."
He closed by saying that Trump probably did more harm than help.
"The president seems lost. Perhaps he should have stayed off the podium for a bit longer, rather than display how adrift he is to the American public and the world," the column closed.
