President Donald Trump told reporters Monday that the war with Iran began because the Islamic Republic was starting work on a new site for developing material for nuclear weapons — specifically designed to replace the facilities bombed last year by the United States in Operation Midnight Hammer. The disclosure represents the most specific public justification Trump has offered for launching Operation Epic Fury on February 28.

Trump added that Iran wanted to use the “exponentially growing ballistic missile threat to make it virtually impossible to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” claiming that Iran would have otherwise been able to “take over the Middle East.” Asked directly about the pre-emptive nature of the strikes, Trump told reporters: “If I didn’t hit them first, they were going to hit our allies first. I believe upon information and belief. They were going to take over the Middle East.”

The phrase “upon information and belief” — which Trump used apparently unconsciously — is a legal term of art typically used in affidavits and legal filings to denote that a statement is based on secondhand information but is believed to be true by the speaker. It is an unusual formulation for a presidential statement about war justification, and it came under immediate scrutiny from reporters. Trump, who has extensive experience with legal proceedings from his four criminal indictments and civil fraud case, is familiar with the phrase’s context.

President Trump was pressed at Monday’s press conference about his own contradictory statements — having told a reporter earlier in the day that the war was “very complete,” while the Pentagon posted on social media that the U.S. had “Only Just Begun to Fight.” Asked whether it was the end or the beginning, Trump gave an answer that signaled something considerably larger than a tactical air campaign: “It’s the beginning of building a new country.”

Trump expanded on his vision for Iran’s leadership. He said he was “disappointed” by the Assembly of Experts’ selection of Mojtaba Khamenei, predicting it would lead to “more of the same” — and said he liked “the idea” of a leader drawn from an “internal” group of candidates. Trump described his ideal Iranian successor as someone who was “internal and eternal” — a phrase suggesting both domestic legitimacy and enduring stability — and said this process “works well” with Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodriguez, following the capture of Nicolas Maduro by U.S. forces to face drug trafficking charges.

Trump’s remarks about being open to lethal action against Mojtaba Khamenei were carefully hedged. He said it would be “inappropriate” to say whether Iran’s new leader would be targeted as was his father — but the Wall Street Journal had already reported, citing current and former U.S. officials, that Trump has told aides he would back the killing of Mojtaba Khamenei if the regime refuses to negotiate. Trump’s public framing of his Iran endgame as “building a new country” with an “internal and eternal” leader drawn from within — explicitly modeled on the Venezuela template — suggests a post-war political architecture that has not been publicly debated in Congress or with American allies.

President Trump volunteered publicly on Monday that Vice President JD Vance was “maybe less enthusiastic about going” to war with Iran than he was, and that Vance is “philosophically a little bit different than me” on the matter. Trump insisted the two “get along very well” on Iran-related issues — but the acknowledgment of a philosophical gap between the president and his second-in-command on the war’s launch is a remarkable public admission, particularly given that the war has already killed seven American service members and is reshaping the Middle East on a generational scale.

The disclosure is notable given Vance’s track record. While still in the U.S. Senate and before Trump selected him as his running mate, Vance cited Trump’s lack of foreign military entanglement as part of why he backed him for president in the 2024 campaign. Vance has largely and consistently opposed U.S. foreign military interventions throughout his political career — a position that made his elevation to the vice presidency under an “America First” president seem philosophically consistent. The Iran campaign, which Trump has framed partly as being “for other parts of the world, including countries like China,” represents a significant departure from the strict non-interventionist posture Vance publicly championed.

Asked whether the United States would accept responsibility for the strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran on February 28 — the opening day of the war — that killed more than 165 people, most of them children, Trump argued that the Tomahawk cruise missile, made by the American defense contractor Raytheon, is “sold and used by other countries,” and that Iran “also has some Tomahawks.”

The Monday press conference took place against a backdrop of rising concern about oil and gasoline prices — the most immediately tangible domestic economic consequence of the Iran conflict for ordinary Americans. Oil prices have surged above $100 per barrel, commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted, and production has been reduced across Gulf states including Iraq, Kuwait, and Qatar as a result of the regional fighting.

Trump’s statement that the war is being fought for “other parts of the world, including countries like China” — offered to explain why the U.S. would bear the cost of keeping Hormuz open for global oil trade — is geopolitically significant. It positions the United States as the guarantor of global energy security even for its primary strategic rival, and implicitly argues that a closed Hormuz is a threat to global economic stability that falls disproportionately on oil-importing nations in Asia. It also reframes the war’s justification in explicitly global rather than purely American terms — a notable shift from the “America First” framing that has characterized Trump’s previous foreign policy posture.