Trump Tries to Rebrand His War With Iran as a ‘Little Excursion’

President Donald Trump called the United States and Israel’s ongoing war with Iran a “tremendous success” that was “going to be finished pretty quickly,” in a marathon series of remarks to lawmakers and reporters on Monday.

He also downplayed the conflict by describing it as a “little excursion,” notably omitting the word “war” from his remarks despite having discussed it as such for more than a week.

“We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil,” Trump told Republican lawmakers assembled at his Doral, Florida, golf club. “And I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion.”

The president had not, up until this point, shied away from branding the conflict a war — breaking with many of his allies on Capitol Hill, who throughout the last week and a half have argued to reporters that America is not at war with Iran.

Trump declined to give a precise timeline for the conflict’s resolution, telling reporters that it would not end this week and that “we’re ahead of our initial timeline by a lot.”

“We’re achieving major strides toward completing our military objective, and some people could say they’re pretty well complete,” Trump said.

“We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” he continued. “We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long-running danger, once and for all.”

The president and his allies have offered contradictory explanations for the war’s genesis. On Monday, Trump said the Iranians were “100%” ready to attack the United States, Israel and “all of the Middle East,” adding that “if they had a nuclear weapon, they would have used it on Israel, and this was going to be a major attack.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, however, said last week that U.S. forces “have only just begun to fight.”

Asked to reconcile the secretary’s comments with his estimation that the conflict would be over soon, Trump told reporters: “Well, I think you could say both. It’s the beginning of building a new country.”

Trump said that, despite hitting thousands of major targets thus far, U.S. forces were leaving “some of the most important targets for later.”

“We are waiting to see what happens before we hit them,” he said. “We could take them all out in one day, but it’s all resulting in a 90% decline in various things, but in particular, Iranian missile launchers, and 83% drop in drone launches.”

Eight U.S. service members have died since the war started.

“As I said before, when you have conflicts like this, you always have death,” Trump told reporters, adding that the parents of those killed had urged him to “please finish the job.”

The conflict would only reach a resolution, Trump said, “when basically, I can see that they will no longer have any capacity whatsoever for a very long period of time of developing weaponry that could be used against the United States, Israel or any of our allies.”

In his remarks, Trump made only a passing mention of spiking oil prices that have spooked both markets and members of Congress.

“I knew oil prices would go up if I did this, and they’ve gone up probably less than I thought they’d go up, but I don’t think anybody thought we were going to be this quickly successful,” Trump said.

“I don’t want to brag, but … no other president could do some of this shit I’m doing,” Trump told lawmakers. “No other president.”