A month after the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran, President Donald Trump addressed the nation in a prime-time speech on April 1, saying the military operation was “getting very close” to completing its mission. Trump repeated some false and questionable claims we’ve written about before.
- Trump said the U.S. “totally obliterated” three nuclear facility sites in Iran last June. Experts and a classified U.S. intelligence report said the sites were damaged and Iran’s uranium enrichment program was set back, but the sites and the country’s nuclear capabilities weren’t completely destroyed.
- The president said that Iran was “right at the doorstep” of “a nuclear bomb.” Arms control experts have said that there’s a lack of evidence that Iran was rebuilding its nuclear program before the U.S./Israeli military operation and that a nuclear weapon wasn’t “imminent.”
- Trump claimed that before the U.S. attacked, Iran “would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland,” but arms control experts have disputed Trump’s claim.
- Trump criticized an Obama-era agreement that he said “would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran” if Trump hadn’t ended it in his first term. That’s Trump’s opinion. One arms control group estimated the withdrawal from the agreement sped up the time it would take for Iran to produce weapons-grade uranium.
- The president falsely suggested that the U.S. became the “No. 1 producer of oil and gas on the planet” because of his leadership. The U.S. became the top producer of both natural gas and petroleum, which includes crude oil, even before Trump’s first term as president.
- He falsely claimed to have turned a “dead and crippled” economy into the “strongest in history.” Many economists measure the health of an economy by the rate of growth in real gross domestic product, which was lower in the U.S. in 2025 than it was the year before Trump started his second term.
Last June’s Airstrikes
The president said the U.S. “totally obliterated” three nuclear facility sites in Iran last June in a U.S. airstrike operation called Midnight Hammer. Experts and a classified U.S. intelligence report said the sites were damaged and Iran’s uranium enrichment program was set back, but the sites and the country’s nuclear capabilities weren’t completely destroyed.
In a March 18 congressional hearing, however, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard backed up Trump’s claim, saying that it was the assessment of the Intelligence Community that last year’s airstrikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
Trump has repeatedly used the description “totally obliterated” in describing the success of the operation, starting the night of the attack in a televised address. As we’ve written, a five-page, preliminary, classified report from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said the bombing sealed off entrances of two facilities and set back Iran’s nuclear program by a few months, CNN and the New York Times reported last June.
On June 25, CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued a statement saying it would take “years” to rebuild key facilities. “CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes,” he said. “This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”
Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on arms control and national security issues, told us in March that “it is clear that it would take Iran years to fully rebuild its enrichment plants” that were “severely damaged” in June. But the operation didn’t “remove or help account for 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent U-235 that Iran already had stockpiled, and that the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] reported this week is buried [at] Iran’s nuclear complex near Isfahan,” one of the three sites hit in last year’s airstrikes.
To be weapons-grade, the uranium would need to be enriched to 90%.
Iran’s Nuclear Capability
The president went on to say that Iran “sought to rebuild their nuclear program at a totally different location, making clear they had no intention of abandoning their pursuit of nuclear weapons.” He said the country was “right at the doorstep” of “a nuclear bomb, a nuclear weapon, a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before.”
The phrase “right at the doorstep” is vague, but arms control experts have said that there’s a lack of evidence that Iran was rebuilding its nuclear program before the U.S./Israeli military operation and that a nuclear weapon wasn’t “imminent.”
As we reported last month, Kimball told us that “[w]hile Iran’s nuclear program remains a medium- to long-term proliferation risk, there was and is no imminent Iranian nuclear threat; Iran is not close to ‘weaponizing’ its nuclear material so as to justify breaking off negotiations and launching the U.S.-Israeli attack.”
Eliana Johns, a senior research associate with the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, told us that “if Iran enriches uranium to weapons-grade, they will need to weaponize the material and develop a nuclear device with other sensitive components. It’s relatively easy to put various payloads on a missile; however, while Iran certainly has ballistic missiles that could theoretically be used for this purpose, there are still challenges with designing a nuclear device that can be mated with the intended missile, will detonate when desired, survive reentry, and arrive accurately at its target.”
In her prepared remarks for the March 18 congressional hearing, Gabbard said: “As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement. We continue to monitor for any early indicators on what position the current or any new leadership in Iran will take with regard to authorizing a nuclear weapons program.”
Asked by Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff whether it was “the assessment of the Intelligence Community that there was an ‘imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime,’” as the White House had said, Gabbard said, “The intelligence community assessed that Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability.” Under repeated questioning on the issue, Gabbard said that the president was “the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat.”
Iranian Missile Range
Trump claimed that before the U.S. attacked, Iran was “rapidly building a vast stockpile of conventional ballistic missiles, and would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland, Europe and virtually any other place on earth.” But arms control experts have disputed Trump’s claim about missiles “soon” reaching the U.S.
As we wrote when Trump made a similar comment in his State of the Union Address on Feb. 24, while “soon” is a subjective term, experts say the threat of Iran developing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland of the United States was not particularly imminent. One expert put the time frame at several years, while others have said it would take Iran a decade or more to develop a functioning ICBM.
“Iran’s missile arsenal remains one of the pillars of its security strategy,” Emma Sandifer, program coordinator at the nonpartisan Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us in an email. “However, there is little evidence that Iran could build missiles that reach the United States in the near future. Recent estimates determined that not only does Iran have no intercontinental ballistic missile capability, but the country appears to have maintained its self-imposed missile range limit of 2,000 km.”
Pushing back against the president’s claim, some Democrats have pointed to a Defense Intelligence Agency report released last May that stated, “Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily-viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.” The report, which assessed missile threats that might be faced by a Trump-proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, projected Iran could have 60 ICBMs by 2035.
“So basically, the U.S. intelligence agencies have said that Iran would need 10 years to build ICBMs capable of hitting the United States militarily if they chose to do so,” Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank advocating restraint in U.S. foreign policy, told us. “And it did not necessarily say that there was evidence that Iran had chosen to do so.”
However, Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on global security at Middlebury College, warned that many were misreading the context of the DIA report.
“The question wasn’t ‘When will Iran have an ICBM’, it was ‘What will the threat environment look like in 2035 when Golden Dome is to be fully operational,’” Lewis wrote on X.
A March 2 article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Lewis “said that even if Tehran wanted to pursue building the weapons, it would likely take two to three years at least to build a single missile based on the history of how other nations developed similar missiles.”
“US officials have been saying since the late 1990s that Iran is a little over a decade away from developing an ICBM and is pursuing that capability,” Johns, of the Federation of American Scientists, told us. “However, building an ICBM capable of accurately striking the US mainland would require overcoming substantial technical hurdles with propulsion, guidance, and reentry, among other things. And there is little evidence to indicate that Iran has this capacity or intends to pursue it.”
Obama Nuclear Deal
The president again criticized a multilateral nuclear agreement negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration that was intended to restrict Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Trump, who withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in his first term, said the nuclear deal “would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran. They would have had them years ago, and they would have used them.”
As we’ve written before, we can’t say what would have happened if the agreement had remained in place, and Trump noted that this was his “opinion.” But the deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and also signed by China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and Germany, put restrictions on uranium enrichment by Iran for 15 years and required inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities. In exchange for Iran abiding by the deal, the other countries agreed to lift sanctions on Iran.
The agreement took effect in 2016, but Trump withdrew the U.S. from it in 2018.
The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimated that Trump withdrawing from the agreement led to Iran accelerating its nuclear program. As of November 2024, the center estimated that the “breakout time,” or the time Iran would need, if it chose to do so, to produce weapons-grade uranium that could then be used for one bomb, was two to three months before the nuclear agreement and was 12-plus months during the agreement. After the U.S. withdrew, the breakout time was a couple of weeks.
However, as we’ve explained, after producing the highly enriched uranium, it would take much longer for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.
Trump also said that “Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash … in an attempt to buy their respect and loyalty but it didn’t work.” As we explained in a 2016 article, the $1.7 billion payment, made in 2016, settled a claim that Iran had filed against the U.S. in an international tribunal in The Hague. It concerned a decades-old dispute over Iran paying the U.S. $400 million for military equipment, and the U.S. refusing to provide it after the Shah of Iran was overthrown during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
The $1.7 billion included the original $400 million and “a roughly $1.3 billion compromise on the interest,” according to a statement by John Kerry, the secretary of state at the time.
Oil and Gas
Trump falsely suggested that the U.S. became the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas because of him.
“Under my leadership, we are No. 1 producer of oil and gas on the planet, without even discussing the millions of barrels that we’re getting from Venezuela,” Trump said. “Because of the Trump administration’s policies, we produce more oil and gas than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. Think of that. Saudi Arabia and Russia combined, and that number will soon be substantially higher than that.”
As we’ve written, the U.S. has been the world’s No. 1 producer of petroleum, which includes both crude oil and refined petroleum products, such as gasoline, since 2013, and it has produced the most crude oil, including lease condensate, since 2018, as was long predicted. The International Energy Agency said in a 2012 energy outlook report that the U.S. was projected to become “the largest global oil producer” by “around 2020” due to advances in shale extraction technology.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has been the leader in natural gas production even longer — since 2009, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The U.S. overtook Russia to become the top producer of natural gas, and it has produced more of it than Russia and Saudi Arabia, combined, in all but one year since 2014.
Saudi Arabia and Russia had produced the most petroleum and crude oil until the U.S. surpassed them years ago. The U.S. has produced more petroleum than Saudi Arabia and Russia together since 2024, but it does not produce more crude oil than those two countries combined.
The Economy
Trump repeated his false claims about turning around a country that was “dead and crippled” economically.
“We built the strongest economy in history,” he said. “We’re going through it right now, the strongest in history. In one year, we’ve taken a dead and crippled country, I hate to say that, but we were a dead and crippled country after the last administration, and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world by far, with no inflation, record-setting investments coming into the United States over $18 trillion and the highest stock market ever, with 53 all-time record highs in just one year.”
Trump didn’t create the “strongest” economy in his first or second term as president. Economists generally measure a nation’s health by the growth in real (meaning inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product. In his first year back in office, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said that real GDP grew at an annual rate of 2.1% in 2025, which was down from the annual rate of 2.8% in 2024 under his predecessor.
In addition, as of February, the unemployment rate in the U.S. had increased to 4.4% — up from 4% when Trump took office in January 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
There is also still inflation, even though the annualized rate, based on the Consumer Price Index, did decline from 3% in January 2025 to 2.4% as of February. Overall prices may have increased further since then. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland is predicting that the annual inflation rate in March was back up to 3%, largely because of the impact that the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran is having on energy prices.
And Trump continues to inflate the total amount of investments he has secured from foreign companies and countries. The White House’s own website puts the figure at $10.5 trillion — not $18 trillion. But as we’ve written, even that number cannot be substantiated because it includes pledges and planned investments that may not materialize, as well as some investments that may not be due to Trump.
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