One week into the war with Iran, the central questions about the conflict remained largely unanswered: what would constitute victory, how long the crisis might last and whether the United States was responsible for a deadly strike on a girls’ elementary school that has come to embody the war’s early controversy. On Saturday, leaning against the bulkhead outside the press cabin as Air Force One cruised toward Florida, Donald Trump still struggled to clarify his own message.
Trump has generally preferred the informal setting of an in-flight gaggle and so it felt at times that his meandering answers offered an unusually direct window into his uncertainty about what he wanted from Iran. As a Guardian White House correspondent, I was onboard to hear it as part of the press pool traveling with the president that day.
Trump appeared at the front of the press cabin accompanied by his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and special envoy Steve Witkoff. And next to him, the two TV screens that had been playing Fox News until then had already swapped to the customary image of the presidential seal centered over an undulating American flag.
Trump had previously said he wanted Iran to accept “unconditional surrender”, though what that meant in practical terms has remained unclear. “I said ‘unconditional’.
It’s where they cry uncle or when they can’t fight any longer and there’s nobody around to cry uncle – that could happen too,” Trump said, a vague response that offered no more indication of whether he expected the Iranian regime to give up power or negotiate an end to the conflict. On the timeline for the war, Trump had just days before said in interviews that he expected the US campaign to be completed in four or five weeks, or possibly even sooner.