The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump says Iran can be "taken out" in one night

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

President Trump held a press conference at the White House Monday. He discussed the latest developments in the war with Iran, as well as other topics. We break down what was said, and why it matters.This episode: senior political correspondent Tamara Keith, national security correspondent Greg Myre, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This podcast was produced and edited by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs.Special thanks to Dana Farrington, Ted Mebane and Natalie Winston.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith, and I have a new title, Senior Political Correspondent. Congratulations, Tam. Thank you. I'm Greg Myrie. I cover national security. And I'm Mara Liason, Senior National Political Correspondent. And today on the show, President Trump held a press conference at the White House to discuss the war with Iran. During it, the president shared the harrowing rescue of the American weapons officer who was shot down over Iran. And I ordered the U.S. armed forces to do whatever was necessary to bring our brave warriors back home, a risky decision. Because we could have ended up with 100 dead as opposed to one or two. It's a hard decision to make. But in the United States military, we leave no American behind. We don't do it.

And he continued to level threats against Iran if it doesn't open up the Strait of Hormuz. The entire country can be taken. out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night. Greg, I want to start with you. We just played a clip there where President Trump continues his threats against Iran. Did we learn anything new about the president's plans? No, not in specific terms. And he said, well, I can't tell you the plan. He said he has a plan, but he can't tell it. But the question of what sort of military action he might take after this extraordinary threat that he's been making, very specifically yesterday, talking about going after bridges and power stations, and a lot of question about, you know,

aren't these civilian targets? And, you know, is that a legitimate way to prosecute this war? So he's put himself in a corner. Tomorrow night would be the fourth deadline he's set for a massive operation that he, at least in general terms, he's describing as a big escalation in the war. But he did not give any details, for example, on the Strait of Hormuz, how that might be dealt with. Is he thinking about a military operation for that? Is he talking about negotiations? And I'll just finish with saying it's a very different tone from his speech last Wednesday night when he talked about two or three more weeks of war. He sounded like he wanted to wind this down. And today he's very much talking about a possible escalation of the war. Yeah, Mara, I want to turn to you. We came into this press conference wondering why the president was holding a press conference, what he was going to announce. In the end, it seems that he really just wanted to talk about this daring rescue mission. Yes, I think the reason for the press conference is that he wanted to bask in the glory of a successful rescue mission. The one part of this war that has gone according to plan and successfully is the military part. The military objective. have for the most part been achieved. It's the political objectives that haven't been. He has talked

about regime change. Yes, some of the people have changed. They actually have the leader has the same name. And he's younger. And he's younger. No nuclear weapons. No nuclear enrichment. Keeping the straight of harm moves open. Unconditional surrender. All of those political objectives have, he's gone back and forth on that. So I think the purpose of today's press conference was to really retell the incredibly dramatic and with a happy ending operation that the U.S. military conducted to get back this airman. And what we don't know, unless we should say, the press conference is continuing to go on as we're speaking, he hasn't told us what he's going to do if Iran does not open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. tomorrow. He says, we're going to take the entire country can be

taken out in one night and it might be tomorrow night. He's made threats like this before. He's walked them back. He might do that, you know, 24 hours from now. He was very, when somebody tells you, I have a plan, but I'm not going to tell you what it is, that's a pretty classic bluff. Greg, I do want to go through this really harrowing tale of the rescue of two airmen who were shot down over Iran and both were ultimately rescued. the first part of this press conference was devoted to a recounting of this rescue in pretty minute detail down to the details about all of the different aircraft and timing. They left some details out. But tell us about it. Yeah, extraordinary tale, Tam. So this F-15 gets shot down before dawn Friday in Iran, first U.S. aircraft to get shot down.

The U.S. is able to locate one of the true crew members, the pilot. And then they conduct an operation with more than 20 planes, or 20 aircraft, according to President Trump, flying seven hours into Iran in daylight to rescue this pilot, bring him out safely. He's injured and is in Germany at a hospital now. But the other one is still missing. And it wasn't until Saturday morning that he was able to use. use his beacon and make contact with the Americans. And it was the CIA who was able to locate him. He had an injury. He climbed a mountain of some sort and hid in a crevice in order to try to evade Iranians who were coming after him. The president said 155 aircraft were sent into Iran to find him. There were all sorts of deception efforts. The CIA was spreading information.

that he'd been picked up on the ground and was being sent out of the country and ground. They had these planes in different areas to confuse the Iranians about where he might be. President Trump said seven different areas. They landed two planes that were going to take people in and out, involving hundreds of forces. They found him. They got him to the planes. The planes were stuck in wet sand, as President Trump described it. Repeatedly. Repeatedly. They had to fly in addition. planes to take everybody out on a seven-hour flight and then blow up the planes that they couldn't get out of the wet sand. The pilot is safe. He's also in Germany. As President Trump kept making

movie references, you know, this could soon be a major motion picture starring Tom Cruise. So one question I have for you is that the president and other members of his administration, Secretary of Defense, Pete Hagseth, referred to this as a difficult decision or, you know, only the president could make this decision. Is, it was this a difficult decision? Certainly it was a daring rescue, but it strikes me that this is a principle of the American military, that you don't leave a man behind. Oh, absolutely. President Trump said that. We'll never leave an American warrior or serviceman behind. the military mindset is very much in that frame. And the U.S. is prepared. It has all sorts of resources.

And I think one extraordinary thing, the U.S. tried to rescue American diplomats who were held hostage in Iran in 1980. That failed miserably. Helicopters crashed and burned in the desert. At that point, they created all of these completely revamped the system to carry out these rescues. That's when, for example, Seal Team Six. was created to do exactly this kind of thing. And here we are, 46 years later, and one of these rescues is carried out in Iran and went more or less flawlessly. Yeah. Mara, Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth and CIA director John Radcliffe, President Trump also all kept bringing up the fact

that this rescue happened over Easter. Hegset went as far as comparing the pilot's rescue to the resurrection of Jesus. Shot down on a Friday, good Friday, hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday, and rescued on Sunday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday. A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for a nation rejoicing. God is good. This isn't the first time that Secretary Hegseth has used religious imagery to send the message that God is taking care of the United States.

And Donald Trump said earlier in the press conference, God was watching us. And we were in Easter territory. That's a feature, I think, of the Trump administration. The president did get a question about the Strait of Hormuz. He said, I can't talk about a ceasefire, but we have willing to. participants on the other side. He's done this before, saying that he now has a whole new crop of Iranians who are more moderate and less radicalized that he can negotiate with. But he didn't give any clues as to whether he thinks that he'll have to use ground troops. He sent a lot of troops

to the region. Up until now, he has acted as if he thinks air power alone, just bombing them back to the Stone Age, we'll get Iran to comply. There's no evidence that that's ever happened in the past. And I think for a lot of his supporters, that could be a red line. I mean, sending ground troops makes this a whole different kind of concept. Yeah, I mean, I want to talk about another sort of political red line that has been crossed, which is that gasoline is now $4 a gallon. How I think we got a little bit less of it today than in his address to the nation last week. But how is President Trump talking about the sacrifice that Americans are making? Well, he has said that the sacrifice was worth it. It's just a very small blip. He says that oil prices will come down. The

Strait of Hormuz will open naturally. He has said that this is a sacrifice that Americans can make, and it's worth it to get rid of the regime in Iran. But on the other hand, he has political pain points that get reached when the markets tank or when gas gets over $4 a gallon. And we've seen him change course when the political pain is too much. And so the question is, He has said this would only take six weeks. We're now in the sixth week. How much longer can the president do this with the Strait of Hormuz being closed by Iran? And I don't think he can declare victory credibly unless the Strait of Hormuz is open. And a reminder, the Strait of Hormuz was open before this war started. It is now a piece of leverage that Iran has that they weren't

using before the war? A tremendous piece of leverage. In fact, I think if you ignored everything else about the war and just focused on the Strait of Hormuz, you could tell where this is going. And quite miraculously, actually, the strait has been open, despite all the Mideast turmoil in recent decades, it really wasn't back. And you have to go back to the 1980s or the first Gulf War with the U.S. in the early 1991 when there was disruption, any significant disruption of oil coming out of the Gulf. So this has been a point that the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain. They are there to help make sure the straight is safe and secure. The U.S. military has planned this, thought about this literally for decades. So this is by no means of surprise, but it's a huge problem right now. And a military operation, not only to reopen it, but then to keep it open, would take a lot of time, especially when Iran could disrupt traffic by just occasionally hitting one of those tankers that go. through every day. Greg, is that possible without ground troops? Well, I'm not in charge of the Pentagon, so I don't have to make that decision. I think there's two ways to do it. One is to

negotiate a solution. Another is the U.S. Navy has resources in the region, but not perhaps enough to do it. But you're talking about there's like 2,000 ships, many of them oil tankers stuck on either side of the strait, and the U.S. has maybe 20 warships in the region, doing other task. They're not there to escort ships. You do the math. That's 100 tankers or 100 ships for every U.S. Navy ship. And Iran can hit those ships from distance with a missile, with a drone on land. You know, in the past, you had to worry about sea mines or something immediate. Now Iran has much more significant capabilities to strike from distance. And it doesn't have to hit everyone, just once every so often to scare the other ships from trying to go through the strait. Okay, let's take a quick break.

more in a moment. And we're back. Mara, on Sunday, on Easter Sunday, President Trump put out a post on social media that contained expletives. It ended with praise be to Allah. But it started with Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day all wrapped up in one. Iran, there will be nothing like it. Open the straight. Expletive, expletive. Well, there was one expletive. Openly. Openly. The expletive straight, you crazy bastards. I mean, it sounded like a TV show. Yes, okay. Yes, that was the other word I was dancing around.

So what do you make of that? And did we learn anything more today about what he meant? No, except for the only thing he said today to add to the threat was how the whole country can be taken out in one night and the night might be tomorrow night. So he's kept to this threat. It's hard to see how these threats get him to where he wants to go. The Iranians have become pretty good at trolling the president. And the Speaker of the Parliament, who happens to be one of the people that the U.S. is negotiating with, said, if the U.S. gets three more victories like this, meaning three more planes downed, they'll be utterly ruined. So I don't see where he thinks these threats are going to go unless he truly wants to carry this out and make Iran look like Gaza or Chechnya.

There seem to be some new peace efforts going. The ones that we've heard about in the last week or two seem to have stalled. There's apparently a new proposal that's floating around out there. It seems to be coming from Pakistan and some other countries that are acting as intermediaries, not directly from the U.S. or Iran. One of the components. seems to be a 45-day ceasefire, although the Iranian media has already taken that down and said that Iran is not interested in that. President Trump has sort of said very vaguely that there are talks that are going well. Steve Whitkoff was there in the room with him. But I can't imagine that that would work for the United States either. Iran doesn't want a temporary ceasefire. They don't want to keep getting hit again and again like they are now and last summer and before that by Israel. The U.S. doesn't want a ceasefire either. You're forced to keep those troops in place. And still, a lot of the difficulty of maintaining a war operation, even if you're not fighting.

So I think both sides are looking for a solution, not a 45-day ceasefire that doesn't end the war. Well, at this point, we have to think what would that off-ramp look like for Trump? That's what a lot of people thought the Wednesday night's speech was going to be about. Declare victory and leave. Although, as I've said before, I think it's hard for him to declare victory if the straight of Hormuz is controlled by Iran. But he has dangled some of the criteria for an off-ramp that people were dealing with are so reasonable. They want to make a deal. Does he just announce that the deal is in the works?

But then he also says, if they can make a deal, and it's not clear who they're talking to and whether they have a thing. authority. Greg, I do want to ask because President Trump has talked about hitting civilian targets in Iran. He's talked about hitting power plants, desalination plants. Aren't civilian targets supposed to be off limits under the Geneva Convention? Absolutely. It's as if you intentionally target civilian infrastructure, that is a war crime. Now, there's a gray area. If a military is using fuel, from a fuel depot. Is that a military target or a civilian target if they're both using it? But some of the things he seems to be talking about certainly seem to fall more heavily on the civilian side, a desalination plant of drinking water, which while in use in Iran is hugely critical to the Gulf Arab countries

where they get 80, 90 percent of their drinking water from desalination plants, which could be in at least one or two cases have been hit by Iran. So not only is, Is there the legal question, even if those war crime cases are not prosecuted with any regularity? But just if it goes both ways, and Iran has certainly been firing at many civilian targets, but if Iran hit a desalination plant, you would need a mass exodus, perhaps, in one of these Gulf countries. So you have to consider, do you want to go down that road if the military advantage would be relatively minimal, since Iran doesn't heavily depend on desalination. Another question I have is the president had previously said that Iran's air defenses were completely wiped out,

that Iran basically has no military. And yet a U.S. aircraft was shot out of the sky. And it took an incredible mission to rescue the airmen. Is there a mismatch between the way the president has described Iran's military and the reality? I think yes somewhat. I guess I would point to what we've heard from the military. And they've been more precise saying that, yes, Iran still has missiles and drones that they can fire. And the U.S. and its allies have shot those down in overwhelming numbers. But the U.S. has flown thousands of missions, as has Israel. And this was the first plane to get shot down on Friday. And then a second one got shot down as part of the rescue.

helicopters got hit so it can spiral very quickly. The U.S. and Israel can still bomb at will. The risk is low, but it's not zero. Right. And I guess that's what we saw. Since we're here in the studio and not there in the room, I'm wondering if there are any questions that you would like to ask the president right now. What is an acceptable outcome in the Strait of Hormuz? You know, does it need to be fully reopened? Does it need to be partially reopened? Can it be negotiated open? Or would you have to carry out a military operation? And I don't think you'd get a straight answer, but that would be my question. And mine would simply be, do you think you can do this with air power alone? Or will you have to put U.S. troops on the ground? Okay, let's leave it there for today. You can always find more coverage of the day's news at npr.org and on your local member station. And don't forget to hit the follow button wherever you get your podcast. So you always get our latest episodes in your feed. I'm Tamara Keith, senior political correspondent. I'm Greg Myrie, and I cover national security. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.