‘Too many cooks’: Is flooding the zone hurting Trump’s Iran message?

Trump himself personally appeared before the media twice in the immediate aftermath of the raid to capture Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela: first conducting a live interview by phone with Fox News, then holding a press conference in the afternoon. Cabinet officials also sat for interviews with multiple Sunday news programs.

However, Trump waited two days after the bombs started dropping after Operation Epic Fury to publicly field questions from reporters. One senior Republican strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, told the Washington Examiner that the delay suggests Trump was in “wait and see mode.”

“I think that the way the raid went down in Venezuela, everything went so smoothly, that President Trump just wanted to get out and take credit, which he had every right to do,” the strategist suggested. “But Iran wasn’t so simple. We didn’t even know for sure that [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei was dead until Saturday night, so I’d say it was smart, letting the dust settle a bit.”

Since Monday, in addition to Trump’s public appearances, Vice President JD Vance has done a prime-time interview on Iran, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spoken to reporters multiple times on Capitol Hill. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine have held two joint press conferences at the Pentagon, the president’s senior negotiating team gave two background briefings on Saturday and Tuesday, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is slated to brief reporters herself Wednesday afternoon. On top of all that, Trump has taken nearly two dozen brief phone interviews with outlets spanning the political spectrum.

Multiple GOP operatives with close ties to the White House believe that Trump’s team, with their drastically different messaging styles and ideological leanings, may be clouding the public’s understanding of the president’s strategy, timing, and goals for Iran.

Three veteran Republican strategists, two of whom were political appointees during Trump’s first term, told the Washington Examiner that the usually reliable Rubio made a major messaging mistake on Monday.

Speaking at the Capitol, Rubio suggested that Trump’s hand was forced into striking Iran by Israel, as the U.S. ally was committed to carrying out its own attacks with or without U.S. assistance. The comment ignited a firestorm on social media, as U.S. support for Israel has become somewhat of a lightning rod problem within the president’s MAGA coalition. Rubio was forced to clean up his words before briefing a second round of lawmakers on Tuesday, claiming that the United States had determined that any attack on Iran by Israel would have resulted in retaliatory attacks against U.S. military personnel in the region, but not before the president himself was asked about it earlier in the day.

“They were going to attack if we didn’t do it,” the president said. “They were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that. I think they were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen,” Trump said. “So, if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand. But Israel was ready, and we were ready, and we’ve had a very, very powerful impact.”

One former Trump administration official told the Washington Examiner, “We all know that President Trump makes it hard on the comms people. Sometimes he says things that need to be cleaned up, for a variety of reasons, but I’d say it’s generally a not-so-great sign that the president himself is doing cleanup for Marco [Rubio], considering he’s supposed to be the restrained, buttoned-up one.”

“There’s just too many cooks in the kitchen,” a second former Trump administration official said. “Trump is his own best flack. I don’t really see the need to have anyone talking to the media besides him.”

White House officials outright deny that the administration’s messaging isn’t landing with voters or the idea that the number of messengers is muddying the Iran waters in any way.

“President Trump and his administration have been abundantly clear,” White House principal deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement. “Operation Epic Fury has four distinct goals: destroy Iran’s missile capabilities and their capacity to produce new ones, annihilate their Navy, ensure that they can never obtain a nuclear weapon, and stop their ability to arm, fund, and direct terrorist proxies. American Presidents have talked about taking on these threats for 47 years, but only President Trump had the courage to get it done.”

So far, perceptions of Operation Epic Fury are mixed.

Fox News published a poll Tuesday night that found 61% of respondents believed that Iran poses “a real national security threat” to the U.S., but just half approved of Trump’s military campaign. The same poll found 51% of respondents saying that Trump’s handling of Iran made the U.S. less safe, up from 43% last summer.

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CNN’s poll from Monday found 59% of respondents opposed the operation, with 60% saying the president lacked a clear plan for handling the situation. A poll conducted by Reuters and Ipsos prior to Saturday found 55% of Republican respondents in favor of striking Iran, but 42% said they’d drop their support if operations resulted in American casualties or boots on the ground.