U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted Friday that the US conflict with Iran is not a war even as wounded U.S. troop numbers reach 767 and gas prices stay above $4 a gallon.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump doubled down on his assertion that the deadly, more than six-month military campaign in Iran is ‘small potatoes.’
‘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.
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, and a much higher number of 767 military injured.
But Trump pressed on, repeatedly characterizing the military conflict as a small-scale operation compared to previous conflicts, such as the Vietnam War, which he invoked several times.
‘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.’
‘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 US war with Iran, which stretched past the six-month mark roughly seven days ago.
‘And in five months, what did we do? We stopped them from having an Israeli war,’ Trump said of the US strikes in Iran.
The U.S. and Israel launched large-scale joint strikes against military and infrastructure sites in Iran on February 28, 2026.
