WASHINGTON — In his first formal address to the nation since launching a war on Iran more than a month ago, President Trump on Wednesday night repeated a familiar list of claimed successes — and brushed aside setbacks caused by the war — while providing little clarity on a clear path to end a conflict that he said will be over “shortly.”

“We are going to finish the job, and we’re going to finish it very fast. We are getting very close,” the president said from the White House.

Trump said Iran is “no longer a threat,” yet spoke of potentially needing to increase bombings on Iran’s energy and other infrastructure if it continues to fight back and signaled a willingness to escalate the conflict if necessary.

“If during this period of time, no deal is made, we have our eyes on key targets,” he said. “If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants, very hard and probably simultaneously. We have not hit their oil, even though that’s the easiest target of all, because it would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding. But we could hit it, and it would be gone, and there’s not a thing they could do about it.”

Trump this week has said he expects to pull American forces from Iran within three weeks, and emphasized that the United States does not have to be in the Middle East but that it is only there to “help our allies.” Trump did not lay out a specific timeline for an exit strategy, and instead focused on what he described as a military operation that he characterized as a “decisive, overwhelming victory.”

“We have all the cards, they have none,” he said. “It’s very important that we keep this conflict in perspective.”

It was Trump’s first formal address to the nation since the U.S.and Israel launched military strikes against Iran on Feb. 28, though he has spoken about the war extensively at public events. The speech was a key messaging moment for the president, who, 33 days into the war, has struggled to clearly explain the scope and objectives of a conflict that has killed hundreds of people in Iran and neighboring countries and disrupted global markets.

Trump repeatedly insisted that the U.S. is doing great, is “in great shape for the future,” and doesn’t need the oil that Iran has put a stranglehold on in the Strait of Hormuz, ignoring the clear implications of the war and its interruption of oil through that channel on the U.S., including on gas prices.

The conflict, however, has begun to expose fractures among some of his supporters. Some have expressed frustration with the administration’s decision to enter a new conflict in the Middle East, concerns that could become a political liability for Republicans ahead of the high-stakes midterm elections in November.

In his remarks, Trump appeared to be speaking to those who have criticized him for deviating from his campaign promises by entering the war, saying that “from the very first day I announced my campaign for president in 2015,” he promised to never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Trump has repeatedly downplayed the economic pressure the war has placed on Americans, including rising gas prices, arguing that the short-term financial strain is necessary for national security. He has also promised that gas prices will “come tumbling down” when the conflict ends.

“Gas prices will rapidly come back down,” Trump repeated on Wednesday. “Stock prices will rapidly go back up. They haven’t come down very much. Frankly, they came down a little bit, but they’ve had some very good days.”

Prior to the nationally televised address, much of the president’s messaging came from less formal settings. Trump consistently maintained an upbeat tone about the war, while offering shifting and sometimes unclear accounts of what his administration aimed to achieve, or how long and what it would take to meet those objectives.

Those inconsistencies were evident even hours ahead of the address. In an interview with Reuters, he said he was not concerned about the enriched uranium held by Tehran — a statement that appeared to undercut a central justification for the war: preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“That’s so far underground, I don’t care about that,” he told Reuters, adding that the U.S. military will be “watching it by satellite.”

In public remarks ahead of the address, Trump said the war was launched to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, but also that the U.S. had completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capabilities months prior, in separate attacks over the summer. He also said he was worried about Iran’s enriched uranium, wanted the U.S. to take it, and that he would even consider sending U.S. forces inside Iran to collect it.

There were also mixed messages on whether one of the objectives of the war was achieving regime change. The first U.S.-Israeli-led strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leaving a leadership vacuum that was filled by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, a 56-year-old hard-line cleric who Trump initially called an “unacceptable choice.”

As Iran’s clerical rulers maintained a firm grip on the country, Trump administration officials, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, argued that U.S. war objectives had “nothing to do” with Iran’s leadership. But Trump in recent days has repeatedly talked about how “regime change” was achieved.

On Wednesday, Trump said a deal remained within reach. In recent days, he has insisted that the United States and Iran are actively negotiating and claimed Iranian officials were “begging” for an end to the war. But Iranian officials have repeatedly denied that characterization, though they have acknowledged indirect talks through intermediaries and suggested it is the United States that is scrambling to find a way out of the conflict.

At the same time, Trump has maintained a deal could be reached because the United States has effectively “destroyed” Iran’s military. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday acknowledged that Iran retains the ability to launch offensive missiles.

On Wednesday, Trump said Iran’s “ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed, and their weapons factories and being blown to pieces.” He said “very few of them left.”

Hours before Trump was to deliver his speech, Rubio posted a video which he began by saying, “Many Americans are asking, ‘Why did the United States have to attack Iran now?’” — an apparent acknowledgment that Trump’s own answers to that question may have failed to resonate.

Rubio also pushed another rationale for the war that the administration has floated on and off for the past month — saying Iran was building up an arsenal of missiles and drones to shield its nuclear ambitions, and that the war was the “last best chance” for the U.S. to eliminate those weapons capabilities before it was too late.

“We were on the verge of an Iran that had so many missiles and so many drones that nobody could do anything about their nuclear weapons program in the future,” Rubio said. “That was an intolerable risk.”

Others also tried to frame the war narrative Wednesday.

Prior to Trump’s speech, Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a public letter denouncing what he described as “a flood of distortions and manufactured narratives” from the U.S., and arguing Iran is not a threat and has only ever defended itself against U.S. aggression.

He called on the American people to “look beyond the machinery of misinformation” from the Trump administration and reach their own conclusions about the war and its purpose, at one point echoing a question also being asked by some in Trump’s base: “Is ‘America First’ truly among the priorities of the U.S. government today?”

Pezeshkian wrote that the “Iranian people harbor no enmity toward other nations,” including the U.S., and that the claim Iran is a threat to the U.S. was a “product of political and economic whims of the powerful — the need to manufacture an enemy in order to justify pressure, maintain military dominance, sustain the arms industry, and control strategic markets.”

He noted Iran was in the midst of nuclear negotiations with the U.S. when the U.S. attacked it “as a proxy for Israel,” and accused U.S. leaders of committing a “war crime” by targeting Iran’s energy and industrial facilities.

“Exactly which of the American people’s interests are truly being served by this war?” he asked.

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