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President Donald Trump insisted Friday that the US conflict with Iran is not a war -doubling down on his assertion that the deadly, more than six-month military campaign in Iran is ‘small potatoes.’
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump was asked about the war in Iran, and to respond to Vice President JD Vance‘s claim, one day earlier, that the ongoing conflict is ‘not a war.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Trump said. ‘A lot of people call it a war. I call it a military conflict, because it’s small potatoes,’ Trump said.
‘It’s not a big thing,’ Trump continued. ‘We did Venezuela, and we did this, and Venezuela [we] lost nobody,’ Trump said, referring to the US capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, ‘and [in] this, we lost 18 people.’
At least 18 US service members have been killed in the war with Iran since it began in February 2026, according to data from the Department of Defense, though a much higher number – at least 767 US service members – have been injured.
President Donald Trump speaks at an event in the Oval Office
‘It’s intermittent. We do intermittent conflicts,’ Trump said of the war with Iran. ‘It’s very intermittent.’
‘We’ve been in there for five months,’ Trump said of the war, which stretched past the six-month mark one week earlier.
‘And in five months, what did we do? We stopped them from having an Israeli war,’ Trump said of Iran and the US strikes earlier this year. ‘If we didn’t go in there, you wouldn’t have Israel right now,’ he told reporters. ‘You wouldn’t have the Middle East/ And they probably would go [at] European cities, and our cities next,’ Trump said. ‘But we stopped them in five months.’
