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U.S. President Donald Trump cast doubt Friday on the prospects of a diplomatic resolution with Iran, saying he is losing faith in Tehran's negotiators after a ballistic missile strike on a U.S. base in Jordan interrupted active talks, while vowing that American forces would continue hitting Iran "very hard."
Speaking at a Cabinet meeting at Camp David, Trump painted a picture of a war he believes the United States is winning decisively, five months in, while simultaneously questioning whether Iran can be trusted at the negotiating table.
Trump said the Iranian missile strike, which he described as five ballistic missiles fired at a U.S. base in Jordan overnight Thursday, came at the worst possible moment, mid-negotiation. All five missiles were intercepted by air defenses.
"I'm losing faith in them, because they do lie and they do misrepresent," Trump said. He described waiting for a call from special envoy Steve Witkoff on how the talks were going, only to hear instead from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran had just struck the Jordan base.
Trump praised Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Vice President JD Vance for their diplomatic efforts, but said Iran "breaks their word so often." He cited what he described as a recurring pattern in which Iran would spend hours in nuclear discussions only to publicly deny they had taken place afterward.
"All they do is make me angry," Trump said. "They just make me angry."
Despite his frustration with the talks, Trump made clear that military pressure would continue and pushed back on any suggestion that the U.S. had held back in its approach to the conflict.
"We'll be hitting them very hard," he said. "And you know at some point, they're going to say, 'We just can't take it anymore.'"
When asked whether he had rejected a proposal to escalate further and "go big" on strikes against Iran, Trump interjected sharply: "We are going big. We have already gone big. What is big?"
In his opening remarks, Trump framed the ongoing conflict in explicitly comparative terms, measuring it against America's longest and most costly wars.
"We've done an amazing job here. We're in there for five months," Trump said, noting that U.S. involvement in Vietnam lasted roughly 20 years and the Afghanistan war ran even longer. "We have obliterated their military capacity. Again, they've got some left, but soon they won't have some left."
The U.S.-Iran conflict, which Trump has characterized as an ongoing military campaign, has drawn sustained public scrutiny. Trump acknowledged that Americans have grown frustrated with the pace of the war but pushed back against what he called "incorrect stories" about Iran's resilience.
"Iran is doing very poorly," he said. "They're having a hard time. They've been very dishonest. They've been very dishonorable to deal with. But that makes no difference. They're doing very, very poorly."
The Friday Cabinet meeting came amid a fragile and increasingly volatile diplomatic situation. Trump said he remained open to negotiations continuing, even as he threatened escalating military action, with Witkoff, Kushner, Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio all cited as active participants in the diplomatic track.
Whether the dual-track approach, pressing militarily while continuing talks, can be sustained remains an open question. Trump, asked whether further Iranian attacks could be expected, offered no reassurances. "I think I'm going to be foolish to say no," he said earlier in the week. "You always have to keep your guard up."
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