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.
