In Wednesday's speech, Trump claimed the US was “very close” to victory and vowed that “we are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.”
Western media, however, were mostly unimpressed by what the White House described as a “powerful primetime address,” remarking that the president said nothing new and failed to provide a clear vision for an end to the conflict.
Recent polling shows Trump’s approval rating slipping below 40%, with disapproval climbing above the mid-50s as voters sour on both the war and its economic fallout.
• In an open letter to the American people, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian described the strikes on US bases in the region as “a measured response grounded in legitimate self-defense,” and argued that the US had entered the war as “a proxy for Israel.”