By Daniel Dale, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump continues to make false and unproven claims about the war in Iran.
Trump claimed Monday that “nobody” expected Iran to retaliate by targeting US allies in the region. In fact, various experts had publicly warned that Iran might or would likely respond this way – and top Iranian officials had themselves vowed that Iran would target nearby US allies if attacked.
Trump claimed that a former president had told him in a private conversation that they wished they had attacked Iran as Trump did. But aides to all four living former presidents told CNN on Monday that they hadn’t spoken to Trump about the war.
Trump also repeated his long-debunked lie that a book he released in 2000 warned that Osama bin Laden was going to commit a major terrorist attack and said the authorities needed to “get” bin Laden. In fact, the book contained no warnings or advice about bin Laden.
And Trump argued Sunday that media outlets should be charged with treason for supposedly spreading fake videos of a US aircraft carrier on fire. But the White House could not provide a single example of a US media outlet promoting the fake videos.
Here is a fact check of these four claims.
AI fakes, the media and ‘TREASON’
In a social media post Sunday night, Trump criticized Iran over fake videos, generated by artificial intelligence, purportedly depicting Iranian military successes in the war. He then suggested “TREASON” charges against media outlets that he claimed had coordinated with Iran to spread one of these fakes.
Trump wrote: “For instance, Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media, shows our great USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier, one of the largest and most prestigious Ships in the World, burning uncontrollably in the Ocean. Not only was it not burning, it was not even shot at — Iran knows better than to do that! The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!”
But there is no evidence that mainstream US media outlets promoted fake videos of the Lincoln on fire, much less that mainstream US outlets “generated” the story or coordinated with Iran to spread it.
As of Tuesday, CNN could only find mainstream US outlets that had debunked fake videos of the Lincoln, including PolitiFact, Newsweek and The New York Times. When we asked the White House on Monday for any examples of media outlets that actually promoted the Lincoln fakes, spokesperson Anna Kelly responded with links to three foreign outlets – one Israeli, one Turkish, one Saudi – that had quoted baseless Iranian statements about having struck the Lincoln.
Even these foreign reports did not include fake videos. More importantly, Trump’s “TREASON” accusation clearly implied that it was US outlets, not outlets in other countries, that had spread the Lincoln fakes; hypothetical treason can only be committed by people who owe allegiance to the US, and media outlets in other countries do not.
Kelly went on to make a claim that media outlets, including US outlets, are “constantly amplifying” Iranian propaganda. That’s a different assertion than the specific Trump assertion about the Lincoln we had asked about.
Trump’s 2000 book and Osama bin Laden
Trump repeated a lie about his national security acumen that he has been telling, in various forms, for more than a decade.
After claiming Monday that he had correctly predicted that Iran would use the Strait of Hormuz as a “weapon” in war, and that allies the US protects wouldn’t help the US in times of need, he added, “I predicted all of it. I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I made that prediction a year before he did it. I said, ‘You’d better get him, he’s a bad guy.’ I watched him be interviewed one time and I said, ‘That’s a bad guy. You’d better get him.’ One year before, exactly – I wrote it in a book. You can even check – about a year before the World Trade Center came down.”
We checked. Trump’s 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” did not make any predictions about bin Laden or offer any advice about how to deal with bin Laden. The book – which was ghostwritten by an author who worked with Trump – contained just one passing mention of bin Laden.
It said: “Instead of one looming crisis hanging over us, we face a bewildering series of smaller crises, flash points, standoffs, and hot spots. We’re not playing the chess game to end all chess games anymore. We’re playing tournament chess – one master against many rivals. One day we’re all assured that Iraq is under control, the UN inspectors have done their work, everything’s fine, not to worry. The next day the bombing begins. One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”
That’s nowhere near what Trump claimed the book said.
A supposed Trump conversation with a former president
Defending his decision to go to war with Iran, Trump claimed twice on Monday that a former president endorsed the decision in a conversation with him.
“I’ve spoken to a certain president – who I like actually – a past president, former president. He said, ‘I wish I did it. I wish I did,’ but they didn’t do it. I’m doing it,” he said at one Monday event. Asked which president it was, Trump said, “I can’t tell you that. I don’t want to embarrass him. It would be very bad for his career even though he’s got no career left.”
Trump then repeated the story at a second Monday event, claiming that the unnamed former president said, “I wish I did what you did. Could have done it.” He said the former president wasn’t George W. Bush, but he wouldn’t say whether it was Bill Clinton.
We certainly can’t say definitively whether a supposed private conversation happened or not. But aides to all of the living former presidents – Clinton, Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden – all told CNN on Monday that these men hadn’t spoken to Trump since the war began, let alone told him they wished they had attacked Iran. Even after CNN informed the White House of these denials, it didn’t respond to another request to identify the president who supposedly made the claim.
Trump has a long history of describing supposed private conversations that never occurred.
Predictions of Iran striking other countries in the region
Trump claimed Monday that Iran wasn’t “supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East.” He said, “So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”
Asked later Monday whether he was “surprised that nobody briefed you ahead of time that that might be their retaliation,” Trump said, “Nobody, nobody, no, no, no. No, the greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit – they were – I wouldn’t say friendly countries, they were like neutral. They lived with them for years.”
But it’s simply not true that “nobody” expected Iran to retaliate against nearby countries. Numerous analysts had long said that such an Iranian response was possible or likely – and Iran itself had warned that it planned to target US allies in the region if attacked.
“Iran said it was going to do it. I expected it. Everyone who follows Iran to any extent expected it,” Alan Eyre, a fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank and former State Department official, posted on X on Monday in response to Trump’s comments.
“Everyone” is too strong; some analysts were skeptical Iran would respond this way. But many certainly thought it would or could happen. Eyre himself had posted in February that “Iran sees no value in a calibrated, limited response, but rather sees regional destabilization as the only way to restore its degraded deterrence.”
Arta Moeini, managing director of the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy think tank, posted on X on Monday: “We ALL said this is exactly what was going to happen: a hardened Islamic Republic, a region-wide war to break (Gulf Cooperation Council) economies, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to precipitate a global energy crisis.”
Again, not everyone said that, but many did. Moeni had warned in February that the initiation of a war on Iran would mean “all-out regional war” and that Iran’s then-supreme leader Ali Khamenei had “decided he prefers regional war that could re-establish Iranian deterrence to a bad peace.”
Iran threatened regional attacks
Iran had not made any secret of its intentions.
In late January, a commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was quoted in the country’s semi-official Fars news agency as saying, “Neighboring countries are our friends, but if their soil, sky, or waters are used against Iran, they will be considered hostile.” In early February, The Associated Press reported that Ali Khamenei had told a crowd in Tehran: “The Americans must be aware that if they wage a war this time, it will be a regional war.” Then, on February 19, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations sent a letter declaring that, if Iran was attacked, “all bases, facilities, and assets of the hostile force in the region would constitute legitimate targets in the context of Iran’s defensive response.”
US allies in the region were concerned about the possibility of facing attacks. Politico reported in February that “according to four Arab officials from two countries, the president and top aides have listened to their concerns about a US attack on Iran leading to counter-attacks on neighboring countries that could spark a protracted regional conflict,” while a February article in a prominent Israeli newspaper said, “For the Gulf states, the most immediate danger is an Iranian response directed at their territory. Energy infrastructure, desalination facilities, ports and, above all, US military bases hosted on their soil would likely be prime targets.”
Experts warned that Iran could attack US allies in the region
Various experts had warned in pre-war public comments that Iran could respond to a US attack with attacks on neighboring countries.
In February, Nate Swanson, a former State Department official who served as Iran director on the National Security Council between 2022 and 2025, wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that “if conflict with the United States deepens, Iran may seriously consider targeting the Gulf Arab states’ energy infrastructure directly” – among other regional retaliation.
Also in February, NBC News quoted Joseph Votel, a retired Army general who was commander of the US forces in the Middle East from 2016 to 2019, as saying, “What could be different this time is that they do try to regionalize this, as opposed to just going after Israel or going after US bases.” NBC wrote that Votel said one possibility was that “Iran would try to target oil refineries in the Persian Gulf states in a bid ‘to drag everybody into this and turn this into a much more protracted conflict.’”
Former Pentagon official Bilal Saab wrote in a February article in the London-based magazine Al Majalla: “The strategy for Iran in a potential confrontation with the United States is simple: withstand the first volley of US strikes, respond by targeting symbolic US and allied assets in the region, inflict casualties on US forces, and drag out the conflict.”
Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the British think tank Chatham House, wrote in The Guardian newspaper in February that a war like the one the US and Israel ended up launching “would probably trigger Iranian regional escalation ranging from attacks on US bases, shipping lanes and Israeli cities, and maybe even some proxy mobilisation across the Gulf.” And the International Crisis Group nonprofit warned in February that Trump’s adoption of rhetoric favoring regime change in Iran increased the likelihood that Iran would, among other consequences, “target other US Middle Eastern partners” and “lay waste to critical infrastructure.”
That’s just a sample of such warnings.
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