Trump’s White House Just Admitted the Truth

After weeks of fearmongering about Iran, the administration quietly said there was never a threat.

Over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has tried to sell the American public on a familiar story.

You’ve heard it before.

Republicans go on television. They warn about a looming danger. They insist action must be taken immediately. They say the threat is “imminent.” And if we don’t act now, catastrophe is right around the corner.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same playbook used in the early 2000s to justify the Iraq War.

The problem for this administration is that their own press secretary just accidentally undermined the entire argument.

Let’s start with one of the most absurd claims Republicans have been repeating.

Senator Tom Cotton recently said that Iran has posed an “imminent threat” to the United States for 47 years.

Read that again.

An imminent threat for forty seven years.

That’s not how the word “imminent” works. An imminent threat is something immediate. It’s a car speeding toward you. It’s a missile about to launch. It’s danger that requires instant action.

If something has been happening for nearly half a century, it’s not imminent anymore. It’s just history.

And Cotton isn’t alone. Other Republicans have been using the same language. Representative Brian Mast made a similar argument, claiming Iran has been an imminent threat “year in and year out.”

Year in and year out.

Again, that’s not imminent. That’s just a talking point.

But here’s where things get interesting.

After weeks of Republicans insisting the United States had to act because of an imminent Iranian threat, Trump’s own press secretary Karoline Leavitt stepped in to respond to a news report about potential Iranian retaliation.

ABC News reported that the FBI warned California police departments about a possible drone retaliation from Iran targeting the West Coast. According to the alert, the information was based on a tip that had been shared with local law enforcement.

Leavitt was furious about the report. She blasted ABC and demanded the story be retracted.

But in doing so, she said something that completely blew up the administration’s entire justification for the war.

Her statement included this line:

“To be clear, no such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did.”

Let that sink in.

No threat to the homeland.
And it never existed.

That’s not coming from a critic of the war. That’s coming from the White House.

For weeks the administration and its allies have been arguing that military action was necessary because Iran posed an imminent threat to Americans.

Now their own press secretary is saying there was no threat at all.

You can’t have both.

Either Iran was an imminent danger that required immediate military action, or there was never a threat in the first place.

Those two positions cannot coexist.

Senator Chris Murphy immediately pointed this out after Leavitt’s statement. If Iran posed no direct threat to the United States, then why exactly are we at war?

It’s a fair question.

And it becomes even harder to answer when you look at what’s happened since this conflict began.

Eight U.S. service members have already died. Hundreds of civilians have been killed overseas. Oil prices have surged. Gas prices in the United States have jumped by roughly fifty to seventy cents in some places.

Meanwhile, Russia is benefiting massively from the situation. Higher oil prices mean Moscow is pulling in huge amounts of additional revenue. Reports indicate Russia could make billions in extra oil profits this month alone.

So American consumers are paying more at the pump while geopolitical rivals rake in cash.

Then Donald Trump tried to explain the situation himself.

He posted that rising oil prices are actually good for the United States because America is the largest oil producer in the world. But in the same breath he said his real motivation is stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

That’s yet another shift in the administration’s justification.

First it was an imminent threat.
Then it was retaliation.
Now it’s nuclear weapons.

The story keeps changing.

And when the explanation keeps changing, people start asking obvious questions.

If there was no imminent threat, why did we launch military strikes?

If the goal is stopping nuclear weapons, why was that not the central argument from the beginning?

And if the administration truly believes the American public is smart enough to follow along, then they should probably stop contradicting themselves every few days.

Because right now the biggest problem for the White House isn’t the media.

It’s their own words.