Inside Trump's Search for a Way Out of the Iran War

Donald Trump was in the Oval Office during the third week of the Iran war when a group of his most trusted advisers came to deliver some unwelcome news. 

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His longtime pollster, Tony Fabrizio, had conducted surveys that indicated the war Trump launched was growing increasingly unpopular. Gas prices had surged past $4 per gallon, stock markets had tumbled to multi-year lows, and millions of Americans were preparing to take to the streets in protest. Thirteen American service members had been confirmed killed. Some of Trump’s key public supporters were criticizing a conflict with no clear end in sight. It fell on White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and a small group of aides to tell the President that the longer the war dragged on, the more it would threaten his public support and Republicans’ prospects in November’s midterm elections. 

For Trump, the stark warning was unsettling. The President has begun many recent mornings watching video clips compiled by military officials of battlefield successes, according to a senior Administration official. He has told advisers that being the commander in chief to eliminate the nuclear threat posed by Iran could be one of his signature achievements. But Wiles, according to two White House sources, was concerned aides were giving the President a rose-colored view of how the war was being perceived domestically, telling Trump what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear. She had urged colleagues, the officials say, to be “more forthright with the boss” about the political and economic risks.

—Illustration by Tim O’Brien for TIME

The meeting reflected a reality the White House can no longer ignore: time is running out before the President, his party, and the American public pay an even steeper price. Trump had promised to revive the economy and keep the U.S. out of foreign conflicts. Now he has started a war he had not gotten a mandate to wage, and the economic pain may only be beginning. A month into the largest oil shock in modern history, global growth forecasts are being slashed, shortages are emerging across Europe and Asia, and energy traders warn the world has yet to feel the full severity of the disruption. A prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that is the primary exit route for oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, could tip the global economy into recession. 

The President was left frustrated by the predicament, at odds with some of his own officials, and fuming at the negative impressions of the war. The mounting political and economic toll has left him looking for an off-ramp, according to two advisers and two members of Congress who have spoken to him during the last week. Trump told them he wants to wind down the campaign, wary of a protracted conflict that could hobble Republicans heading into the midterms. At the same time, he wants the operation to be a decisive success. Allies say he is searching for a way to declare victory, halt the fighting, and hope that economic conditions stabilize before the political damage hardens. “There’s a narrow window,” says a senior Administration official, who like others interviewed for this account of Trump at war was granted anonymity to provide candid observations about the President’s thinking.

Trump tried to thread the needle in a primetime address to the nation on April 1. He trumpeted the military triumphs and said the operation was “nearing its completion,” while also saying the U.S. would strike the Islamic Republic “extremely hard” over the next two to three weeks, threatening to eviscerate the nation’s energy infrastructure. “We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages,” the President said, “where they belong.”

In a phone interview the next morning, Trump told TIME that Iran was eager to make a deal to end the fighting. ‘Why wouldn't they call? We just blew up their three big bridges last night,” the President says. “They’re getting decimated. They say Trump is not negotiating with Iran. I mean, it's sort of an easy negotiation.”

President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a cabinet meeting at the White House on March 26. —Will Oliver—EPA/Bloomberg/Getty Images

And yet behind the bluster has been a growing recognition within the West Wing that the situation may be slipping out of its control. Key Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were surprised by the barrage of retaliatory attacks Tehran launched against U.S. and Israeli targets across the region, including in countries long assumed to be off-limits: Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, a state that had both harbored Iran’s terrorist proxies and served as a conduit for backchannel diplomacy between the U.S. and Hamas. The response shattered the assumption that Tehran would confine itself to performative retaliation. In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran's muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war. Hegseth “was caught off guard. There’s no question,” says a person familiar with his thinking.

The Pentagon disputes the account. "The U.S. military is the most advanced, comprehensive, and battle-tested planning organization in the world. Long before Operation Epic Fury launched, we had already anticipated, war-gamed, and fully prepared for every possible Iranian response, from the weakest possible reaction to the most extreme escalation,” Hegseth’s chief spokesman Sean Parnell tells TIME. “Nothing Iran does surprises us. We are ready, we are dominant, and we are winning."

By the Pentagon’s accounting, Operation Epic Fury has been an unambiguous military success, leaving 90% of Iran’s missile capacity degraded or destroyed, roughly 70% of its launchers neutralized, more than 150 naval vessels disabled or destroyed, and Iranian Supreme Ali Khamanei killed, along with many of his top lieutenants. Yet it seems increasingly unlikely Trump will achieve the broader objectives he trumpeted—permanently blocking Tehran’s path to a nuclear weapon, dismantling its ballistic missile program, and replacing the Islamic Republican’s theocratic hardliners with a friendlier regime—on the compressed timeline the White House has embraced.  

In his speech, Trump cast the operation as on the cusp of victory. “We have all the cards. They have none,” he said. “We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly.” But the endgame remains murky: Trump simultaneously pledged  to ramp up the fighting and wind it down. He has vowed to use unprecedented means to unleash devastating force against Iran, but tells TIME that he would never allow artificial intelligence to make lethal decisions, insisting that a human would always control the chain of command. “I wouldn’t allow AI to do it,” Trump says. “I respect AI. It’s a decision that a president has to make—assuming he’s competent.” Beyond that, there are very few options he appears willing to take off the table. 

Steve Witkoff, the President's longtime friend and envoy, frames this as the product of a business career in which maintaining optionality was paramount. “Donald Trump always has multiple exit strategies,” Witkoff has told colleagues at the White House and State Department. “He keeps a lot of options, a lot of off-ramps, and then feels his way through the process.” But wars have a way of outrunning a President’s plans. The risk of Trump’s gamble is that intensifying the military campaign in the coming weeks will do more to close exit routes than to create them. 

As preparations for the war began, the Administration believed it had a winning formula. The U.S. would deliver an opening strike so overwhelming Tehran’s only viable response would be limited retaliation—enough to satisfy domestic audiences without inviting more attacks. It was a theory rooted in precedent. When Trump ordered the killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani during his first term, Iran’s response was a missile strike on a U.S. base that caused no casualties and was telegraphed in advance. After Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 air campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the retaliation was similarly tempered. 

President Trump departs on Marine One on March 18. —Celal Gunes—Anadolu/Getty Images

Trump has long favored what aides call “one-and-done” operations. He has launched them in Yemen, Syria, and Somalia. In January, he pulled off the audacious capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, spiriting the autocrat out of the country to face trial in the U.S., and creating room for the ascension of a more compliant partner, acting president Delcy Rodriguez. He then moved to facilitate U.S. access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, among the largest in the world. Aides say Trump saw Venezuela as a demonstration that a swift, surgical intervention could topple a hostile regime, install a cooperative replacement, and secure American interests without drawing the nation into an open-ended confrontation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a champion of military aggression against Iran, had a different idea of how things might go. Over the last six months, Netanyahu repeatedly told Trump that the past successes against Iran should serve as a prelude for a more sustained, final campaign, an Israeli official tells TIME. On Feb. 11, Netanyahu came to Washington for a private meeting with the President that stretched for hours. “We’ve come this far, Donald,” Netanyahu told Trump, according to a source present. “We have to finish what we started.” Iran was playing for time, Netanyahu told Trump, and would race toward a bomb in secret. “After they got hit the last time, they thought they had nothing to lose,” says another Israeli official, arguing that Tehran would see the development of nuclear weapons as the only way to prevent such an onslaught from happening again.

The plan of attack was set in motion nearly a month before it was executed, according to two senior U.S. officials. It took weeks of meticulous coordination, much of it conducted in close consultation with Israeli counterparts. When the New York Times published details of the planning of the operation on Feb. 17, Trump exploded at aides, unleashing a string of profanities, according to a senior Administration official. The President then told reporters he would decide on strikes within “10, 15 days,” although he knew the U.S. was planning to attack much sooner. “He was intentionally engaged in public misdirection to protect the mission,” a White House official says. 

Trump became wary enough of leaks that some of his own aides were the target of subterfuge. On Feb. 27, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago. Aides assembled in a makeshift Situation Room. Trump bristled at the number of people present. “He thought the group was too big,” one official recalls; it included people Trump didn’t recognize or didn’t feel he knew well enough. At one point, the President snapped that the operation was off. He said he would keep deliberating. This was another head fake: Trump had already made up his mind to attack that very night. Once the room cleared, he called back a smaller, trusted circle—those he wanted beside him as the first bombs fell.

President Trump speaks to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles as he oversees "Operation Epic Fury" at Mar-a-Lago on Feb. 28. —Daniel Torok—White House/Getty Images

That evening, Trump had dinner on the patio of Mar-a-Lago with a group that included deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Witkoff, and White House counsel David Warrington. Not present was Vice President J.D. Vance, who was in the Situation Room back in Washington. A Trump official says that was a reflection of standard continuity-of-government protocol, which calls for the President and Vice President to be kept apart during sensitive national security operations when both are not at the White House. Of the President’s inner circle, Vance had pushed hardest against the operation, according to two sources familiar with the deliberations. “J.D. really doesn’t like this,” Trump told the group gathered under the Palm Beach stars. “But when the decision is made, it’s a decision, right?”

A White House source says that Vance, in the lead-up to the offensive, laid out what he saw as both the benefits and the risks, adding that “once the President makes the decision, the Vice President stands by him 110%.” (A Vance aide declined to comment.)

Operation Epic Fury began with a sweeping round of strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader. Tehran’s response was expansive: volleys of missiles and drones targeting U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, barrages against Israeli cities, harassment of commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf, and coordinated attacks by proxy militias across the region. Hegseth was among those taken aback, says the person familiar with his thinking: “He was expecting the Iranians to fight back in some form. When they started attacking virtually the entire region, it sort of hit him like, ‘Whoa, we’re really in this now.’” 

The Administration also appeared to be taken by surprise when Iran reached for a source of leverage: control over the Strait of Hormuz, which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through each day. In response to U.S. strikes, Tehran implemented a de facto blockade, declaring the channel effectively closed and restricting passage to non-hostile vessels. The resulting economic shock had domestic reverberations that went beyond the expectations of Trump’s inner circle. As gas prices skyrocketed, Trump sought to recast the higher costs as a necessary trade-off—a short-term burden in service of eliminating the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. 

A view of missiles launched by Iran in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli attacks in the skies over Beersheba in southern Israel, on March 29. —Mostafa Alkharouf—Anadolu/Getty Images

On one hand, Trump saw value in Iran’s aggressive response, believing it would validate his case that the Islamic Republic posed a destabilizing threat. “Now that you’ve seen how they behaved over the last two days against other countries in the region, they would have wiped them all out,” Trump told me during a March 4 phone call. Yet advisers were concerned the war would alienate political supporters drawn to his pledge to avoid new entanglements overseas. Trump returned to power in 2024 by promising affordability, castigating the Biden Administration over inflation, and appealing to what his aides described as nostalgia for the pre-pandemic economy. As fuel prices and consumer costs climbed, the conflict in Iran threatened to erode some of his central campaign promises. 

Trump also faced a Catch-22 of sorts. He wants to end the war, but not without achieving objectives that would definitively prevent Iran from inching closer to a nuclear weapon. In internal discussions, some national-security officials warned a sustained assault might do more to accelerate Tehran’s ambitions than deter them. “The only way they will think they can prevent something like this from happening again is to have a nuclear weapon,” says another White House official.  “There is more of a burden on us now to have a tangible, enforceable agreement that keeps them sufficiently blocked from crossing the nuclear threshold.”

As the fighting drags on, Trump has been struck by Tehran’s resolve. “They are very tough. They're able to withstand tremendous pain,” he tells TIME. “So I respect them for that. The fact is, I think they're better negotiators than they are fighters.” 

The Administration now faces an acrobatic challenge: finding an off-ramp without appearing to have achieved too little. Engineering a successor regime that is more stable and Western-friendly than the one he aims to displace is proving trickier than Trump thought it would. The war has come to resemble a grim game of whack-a-mole, as one Administration official describes it, with strikes eliminating successive leaders as officials search for a viable alternative to emerge from the wreckage.

A portrait of Iran's slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the rubble of a destroyed building at the site of an overnight airstrike in Beirut's southern suburbs on March 28. —AFP/Getty Images

When Trump spoke to TIME early in March, he talked of regime change: “I want to be involved in the selection,” of a new Iranian leader, he said. “They can select, but we have to make sure it's somebody that's reasonable to the United States.” Such an outcome is difficult to envision; in his April 1 speech, he falsely claimed it was never the goal. The hope, aides say, is that the degradation of Iran’s military capacity and decapitation of its leadership infrastructure will foreclose the possibility of a nuclear-armed state, dismantle its ballistic missile program, and create the conditions for internal change. But that, too, is fraught. Ordinary Iranians are largely unarmed, facing an advanced army willing to deploy overwhelming force against its own people 

Independent analysts say reopening the strait would likely require either a sustained military occupation with U.S. boots on the ground or a negotiated end to hostilities. Neither path is simple. Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are inclined to prolong the conflict, viewing it as a rare opportunity to weaken a common adversary. But they also recognize their dependence on Trump’s timeline. With Israeli elections looming, Netanyahu has little room to maneuver without Trump’s backing, an Israeli official says. “They'll do what I tell them,” Trump tells TIME of the Israelis. “They've been a good team player. They'll stop when I stop. They'll stop unless they're provoked, in which case, they'll have no choice, but they'll stop when I stop.”

How the war may shape November's elections—and what those results will mean for the rest of his presidency—is a question that hangs over Trump’s decisions. Some advisers detect a note of resignation in the President’s thinking. In private discussions, he often points out that the party in power tends to lose ground in the midterms. “He’s having trouble getting past the history,” an aide observes. But history also suggests there can be worse outcomes for a President who takes the nation to war than losing an election.  

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