Officials currently serving in the Trump administration — which struck Iran on Saturday — previously criticized people who supported military action in the Middle East in op-eds and social media posts.
President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. military launched Operation Epic Fury Saturday in an eight-minute video statement posted on Truth Social. The strike quickly drew criticism from current and former Trump supporters who highlighted the president’s past promises that the U.S. would avoid war under his presidency.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller had criticized former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and then-Vice President Kamala Harris over foreign policy in a Nov. 1, 2024 post on X. Cheney, the daughter of late former Vice President Dick Cheney, lost her 2022 GOP primary to a Trump-backed challenger and went on to endorse Harris two years later.
“To anyone still gullible enough to fall for scummy media hoaxes: Trump said warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves,” Miller posted. “Liz Cheney is Kamala’s top advisor. Liz wants to invade the whole Middle East. Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
Left-wing commentator Judd Legum posted a screenshot of a January 31, 2023 op-ed by Vice President JD Vance in which he touted the fact Trump had “started no wars” during his first term in office.
“In Mr. Trump’s four years in office, he started no wars despite enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his own administration,” Vance wrote in the opinion piece. “Not starting wars is perhaps a low bar, but that’s a reflection of the hawkishness of Mr. Trump’s predecessors and the foreign-policy establishment they slavishly followed.”
A 2020 post to X (then known as Twitter) by now-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard featured a T-shirt with “No War With Iran” on it. Gabbard was at the time a Democratic member of Congress running for her party’s presidential nomination.
“No War With Iran. Get our troops out of Iraq and Syria now,” Gabbard, a combat veteran who has since joined the Republican Party, said in the post.
Trump speculated in a 2013 Twitter post that then-President Barack Obama would attack Iran after failing at diplomacy.
“Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly-not skilled!” Trump posted.
During Trump’s first term in office the U.S. military killed General Qasem Soleimani, a notorious commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in a January 2020 strike. Trump also carried out multiple strikes during his first term against the regime of Bashir al-Assad in Syria after it repeatedly used chemical weapons.
In a June 2025 strike, the United States Air Force bombed multiple facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan related to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, dropping as many as 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators. The operation, which involved a 37-hour flight by seven B-2A Spirit bombers, inflicted significant damage to Iran’s nuclear program with no American losses.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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