CBS asked Karoline Leavitt if Trump invented his reason for going to war with Iran, and her response created a bigger problem than the question did
Image by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0.
This isn’t landing the way she intended.
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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt faced tough questions when CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Nancy Cordes asked her whether President Donald Trump was making up reasons to justify the war in Iran. Leavitt pushed back and defended the president, insisting his decisions were based on real intelligence and facts.
Cordes directly asked Leavitt at the briefing, “There are no U.S. leaders or Israeli leaders who are making those same claims, so is he making this up to justify his decision to go to war now?” Leavitt responded, “The president is not making anything up, Nancy.” She said Trump was basing his decisions on intelligence, facts, and information gathered during a year-long engagement with the Iranian regime.
The exchange followed earlier questions about Trump’s shifting timelines around an alleged Iranian attack. According to The Daily Beast, Trump claimed he decided to strike Iran because he believed they would hit U.S. targets within seven days, and even said he “bumped it down even further.” “Within a week, they were going to attack us 100 percent,” Trump said in Florida.
Leavitt’s defense of Trump raised more questions than it answered
When Cordes asked where Trump was getting this information, Leavitt said it wasn’t the first time the president had stated he launched “Operation Epic Fury” because he believed Iran would strike first. She described it as a “feeling the president had based on facts” provided by his top negotiators.
Trump’s own words from his press conference reflected this, as he said, “I thought that they were going to attack us. I thought they would if we didn’t do this at the time we did it” and “I think they had a mind to attack us.”
What made the situation more complicated was that Leavitt’s claim that Iran planned to attack the U.S. directly contradicted what the Pentagon had told Congress, that there was no intelligence suggesting Iran was planning a first strike. The conflict has also had ripple effects beyond the battlefield, with Iraq’s World Cup hopes now affected by the Iran war as the country pushes FIFA to address the crisis.
Further adding to the controversy, Trump also suggested on Monday that Iran had struck a girls’ school in Iran with a Tomahawk missile, an attack that killed around 175 people, mostly children. However, when he was challenged on this claim moments later and told that his own Pentagon chief was not backing him up, Trump quickly backed down.
Trump acknowledged he had no proof for the assertion. “Because I just don’t know enough about it,” he said, before adding that “tomahawks are used by others.” Meanwhile, Trump’s plans for the Strait of Hormuz are raising fresh alarm as the broader consequences of the war continue to unfold.
The White House maintained that Trump was not fabricating justifications for the war, but the president’s own shifting statements and the gap between White House and Pentagon accounts continued to raise serious questions.
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Published: Mar 11, 2026 04:45 pm