US President Donald Trump arrives at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida last Friday local time. Photo / Mandel Ngan, AFP
Former United States President George W. Bush used a solemn address from the Cabinet Room to tell Americans that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had been captured. President Barack Obama spoke to cameras when he announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed.
After President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran killed its supreme leader on Saturday, he used a different messaging strategy - a written post on Truth Social.
Trump has taken an approach to selling U.S. citizens on military action in Iran that sharply contrasts with his predecessors.
He devoted three minutes of his 108-minute State of the Union address to the issue, spoke to Americans through social media posts and a pair of videos recorded at Mar-a-Lago.
But he has made no public appearances since a Friday local time rally in Corpus Christi, Texas.
The strategy might afford him flexibility in the coming days and weeks to avoid what former US secretary of state Colin Powell told Bush was the Pottery Barn rule - if you break it, you own it.
From the outset, Trump has been careful to declare limits around the US attack, saying he wanted to overthrow the current regime, but telling Iranians it was up to them to seize the opportunity to write their country’s next chapter.
His communication strategy has reinforced those limits by creating a bit of distance - at least in imagery - between the President and the fighting.
At the same time, however, Trump has adopted expansive rhetoric about the reasoning for his intervention that recalled the justifications used for earlier US forays into the Middle East.
“They have waged war against civilisation itself,” Trump said in a six-minute video posted to Truth Social in which he left the precise goals of the attack flexible.
“We’re undertaking this massive operation not merely to ensure security for our own time and place, but for our children and their children, just as our ancestors have done for us many, many years ago. This is the duty and the burden of a free people.”
It was his first on-camera acknowledgment of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death nearly 24 hours after he made his first written post about it.
“I call upon all Iranian patriots who yearn for freedom to seize this moment to be brave,” Trump said.
“I made a promise to you, and I fulfilled that promise. The rest will be up to you, but we’ll be there to help.”
Middle East experts said Trump’s strategy could end up politically successful, pairing an airstrike-only approach with a flexible definition what would constitute victory.
“We have escalation dominance in Iran. We control the pace, the focus, the intensity of military conflict,” said Aaron David Miller, who advised Democratic and Republican administrations on Middle East issues.
“We can escalate when we want, and we can presumably prevent Iranians from escalating, and so we can own Iran without the Pottery Barn rule going into effect. That’s what makes this so Trumpian.”
Richard Haass, who was the director of policy planning at Powell’s State Department in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War, said Trump was “calling for regime change, but is not assuming the responsibility for it”.
“It gives him an off-ramp, not having to see it through. So if it happens, he gets credit for it, if it doesn’t happen, he doesn’t get the blame for it,” said Haass, who is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Still, there may be political risks to Trump’s sweeping rhetoric if the situation deteriorates, especially if the number of dead US troops rises. So far in the operation, three have been killed and five injured, the US Central Command announced yesterday.
“Sadly there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is,” Trump said in his video.
White House officials say they owe nothing to past communications practice and that the President’s videos and written statements on Truth Social have reached a vast audience.
If Trump had pursued a strategy similar to Bush’s approach to Iraq, in which he laid out an extensive argument for war, “the Ayatollah [Khamenei] would probably still be alive, because we would have been spending weeks and months leading up to this tipping off our adversaries, which would not have led to the killing of the Ayatollah yesterday”, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
“Operational secrecy and security is the number one priority for the president,” she said.
In addition to leaving the objectives flexible, the Administration has also been vague about its justification for the attack, including in classified briefings for members of Congress.
During a closed-door briefing with congressional staff today, some aides said the Administration provided no intelligence on an imminent or pre-emptive threat posed by Iran, according to people in the room who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing.
When asked directly about potential threats, one briefer said Iran was prepared to retaliate against the US, but such warnings fall short of the traditional tests for a legal basis to launch a pre-emptive attack on a country or decapitate its political and military leadership.
US officials told reporters at the weekend that Iran’s ballistic missile programme posed a threat. International law would not typically support a military assault based on a country’s maintaining a conventional weapons programme of that nature.
Trump may have been more restrained in the lead-up to Saturday’s attack because he was giving more space for negotiations than Bush had offered Iraq, even as the US military presence in the Middle East ramped up in recent weeks to the largest massing of force since the 2003 Iraq invasion.
But for a president who rose to power in part on the shoulders of supporters who were weary of decades of US wars in the Middle East, there may be political risk in launching major foreign actions and not bringing his supporters along.
Last week, a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that among Trump voters, 46% supported the prospect of the President’s using the US military to force changes in other countries while 22% were opposed and 30% had no opinion.
White House officials have taken a far more restrained approach this year than last towards how they highlight the President’s foreign policy-related engagements.
In 2025, he had a foreign leader in the Oval Office almost every week, ushering in reporters and taking questions in impromptu news conferences that highlighted his central role on the world stage.
But since the beginning of the year, that practice has stopped, as the White House tried to steer closer towards a domestic agenda that would highlight positive aspects of the President’s economic record.
Leavitt said the President put out the initial announcement about Khamenei’s death in the form of a written statement because he “was very busy yesterday in the situation room all day, monitoring it all night, and he was on the phone with our allies around the world and talking to other countries. And so the most effective way for him to get that message out yesterday was by a Truth [Social post], and obviously it was a statement heard around the world.”
Trump’s video address yesterday offered a more traditional approach to Khamenei, embracing the victory on camera.
“This wretched and vile man had the blood of hundreds and even thousands of Americans on his hands,” Trump said.
“All over Iran, the voices of the Iranian people could be heard cheering and celebrating in the streets when his death was announced.”
Administration officials make television appearances on Sunday morning shows nearly every week, but none made the rounds this time.
A senior White House official said that wasn’t an effort to distance the Administration from the fighting, but rather a measure of their need to monitor military operations from the Situation Room and from the President’s side at Mar-a-Lago. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal strategy.
Rather than put Administration officials in front of the cameras, the White House co-ordinated a message with congressional Republicans to speak on the shows, offering Secretary of State Marco Rubio to brief them.
“I thought the President’s eight-minute video yesterday was outstanding,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) told CBS. “It laid out Iran’s 47-year campaign of terror and revolutionary violence against the US and our people and really, the civilised world. I’m sure the President will speak more in the coming days, will have briefings to Congress.”
Classified briefings to Congress are planned for tomorrow.
Some supporters of tough action against Tehran said that it may take time to judge the final outcome of the military action - longer than the actual time-frame of the bombing.
“The question is going to be whether it’s good policy, and that will turn in part on American casualties,” said Elliott Abrams, who worked on Iran issues during the first Trump administration and on foreign policy in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.
But, he said, “I caution critics that if this war ends in a week and the regime is still in place, it’s really too soon to say it failed ... If the regime falls in six months or 10 months or next year, everyone will have to acknowledge that this war brought it a lot closer and in retrospect, it will have been a great success, because I think getting rid of that regime will really change the Middle East.”
- John Hudson, Ellen Nakashima and Noah Robertson contributed to this report.
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