8 months into the war with Iran, Trump remains ignorant about U.S. fatalities and costs

On the eve of Election Day 2026, Donald Trump did a live telephone interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, and when the discussion turned to the ongoing war with Iran, the president said something unexpected. “This is not much of a war, Sean, because there hasn’t been shooting for months,” he said. The Republican made similar comments several hours earlier during a bizarre pre-election event at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where he declared, “We had a war with Iran, we won.

We had a war with and, you know, I don’t know if you even call it a war, because we haven’t been doing any fighting for months.” Trump’s timing could have been better. As The Wall Street Journal was the first to report, “The U.S. attacked Iran’s Qeshm Island on Monday, U.S. officials said, in the latest of a series of limited strikes Washington has secretly carried out against the country in recent weeks.” Observers were left to wonder whether the American president was trying to deceive the public with his rhetoric on the same day, or whether he simply didn’t know about the latest U.S. military operations in the war he initiated eight months ago.

Making matters slightly worse, in the Hannity interview, Trump also said, “I heard a very stupid congressman on Fox, on, I think it was ‘Fox & Friends,’ saying about we spent $30 billion on this war with Iran. Well, that’s peanuts.” Putting aside the fact that $30 billion is a lot of money, it’s just as notable that every cost estimate of the conflict, including the Trump administration’s, is far in excess of $30 billion. Hours before the Hannity interview, The New York Post’s Miranda Devine released her latest podcast interview with the president, in which he also tried to talk about the number of U.S. fatalities in the war with Iran. https://bsky.app/profile/thebulwark.com/post/3mze2zusa5t2x “We’re at 18 people,” Trump said.

“They’re 18 great warrior souls. But still, somebody else would lose thousands of people and nobody would even say anything about it. We lost 18 people; we’re in for seven months.” Right off the bat, let’s note that the war began eight months ago, not seven. It’s also worth noting that when “thousands” of American soldiers were killed during previous wars, plenty of people “said things about it.” But most importantly, Trump keeps saying that 18 U.S. service members have died as part of the war with Iran, but according to his own administration’s own tally, the actual total is higher.

Taken together, over the course of just one day — a 24-hour period that immediately preceded the midterm elections — Trump misstated the number of U.S. fatalities in the war, the financial cost of the war, the duration of the war and the latest U.S. military strikes as part of the war. That’s an unsettling amount of ignorance, in a very short amount of time, from a president who launched a conflict he apparently has no idea how to end.