Trump’s patience runs out: Inside the final days before the strike on Iran

In the end, President Donald Trump lost his patience.

For weeks, his administration had pursued a dual-track strategy toward Iran, dispatching envoys Steve Wifkoff and Jared Kushner to negotiate with Iran on its nuclear program while staging the largest military build up in the Middle East since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. But once the USS Gerald R. Ford steamed into the Mediterranean eight days ago, current and former officials say, the balance shifted.

By the end of the week, Trump made the final call to pursue military action after deciding that Iran’s Islamist regime would not commit to his satisfaction to forgo nuclear weapons, according to three senior Trump administration officials.

On Saturday in Iran, U.S. forces launched coordinated strikes alongside Israel, ending a tense standoff that had built for months and bringing Washington into its most expansive military confrontation with Tehran to date.

Waiting for the armada

The USS Ford entered the Mediterranean around Feb. 20, a major factor in the ultimate timing of the strike, according to one former National Security Council official and one Israeli official. The carrier’s arrival gave Trump the full range of military options Trump wanted.

The officials, like others in this report, were granted anonymity to share sensitive details of the operation.

“The arrival of the Ford was significant,” said the former Trump NSC official who’s been involved with Iran policy.

It was also the result of weeks of close U.S.-Israeli intelligence collection and coordination. “Whenever you eliminate people, and not just carry out an attack against targets, there’s an element of surprise and also when you have the intelligence on them,” the Israeli official said.

Trump had made clear to advisers that while he wanted to give diplomacy one last chance, he would not allow talks to drag on indefinitely, according to a high-level administration official involved in Middle East diplomacy.

Since January, when Iranian security forces killed what some reports have called tens of thousands of protesters in a brutal crackdown, Trump had grown increasingly convinced that Tehran needed new leadership, calling for an end to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s 37-year-reign in an interview with POLITICO.Still, he authorized a final diplomatic push.

He sent longtime confidant Steve Witkoff, along with his son-in-law and peace envoy Jared Kushner to Geneva to explore the possibility of a nuclear deal with the Iranians. Kushner and Witkoff met Iranian officials in Geneva twice in February, with Oman serving as a mediator.

The high-level administration official involved in Middle East diplomacy described the effort as genuine, if ultimately futile.

“The read is simple: He very much optimized for a deal,” the official said. “There was no true counterparty in the end. This is the way we have executed this from the start. In [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, for example, there is a willing counterparty, albeit tough, but at the table.”

“Here, when it’s literal religion, it becomes a fool’s errand at a point to keep trying to find a compromise,” the official added.

The American red line

The Iranians made some concessions, such as offering to stop enrichment for a time, but they fell far short of what was needed to satisfy the hard American line: a commitment to not develop a nuclear weapon.

One of the senior Trump administration officials said Iran insisted on keeping their enrichment capabilities even after Washington offered what they felt were creative workarounds, such as free nuclear fuel forever.

“One of the rules of dealmaking is that you have to know very quickly if there’s a deal to do or not,” the official said. “If they wanted to have a civil peaceful nuclear program, we offered them many, many ways to do that. But instead that was met with games, tricks, stall tactics, and that was really the conclusion that we came back with.”

In the talks Iran wanted to talk specifics about sanctions relief and nuclear compromises, but Washington sent only Kushner and Witkoff – not any experts, confusing the Iranian delegation about how to move forward, according to one person familiar with the diplomacy.

The Americans did not see the need for any experts to discuss zero uranium enrichment, a second person said.

The last-ditch effort at diplomacy was also a way to mollify Arab allies, who in recent weeks had urged caution about attacking Iran in conversations with the president’s top aides. But several Arab diplomats came away from their White House meetings with a sense that their concerns weren’t breaking through and that an attack at some point soon seemed likely, according to three people familiar with those conversations.

“Trump has been pressing hard for weeks,” one of those people said. “Once the military was in place, the window of opportunity was there.”

For weeks, two of the people familiar added, U.S. officials were quietly laying the groundwork inside Iran for strikes targeting the country’s military and religious leaders. That effort involved gleaning intelligence about the location of Iran’s leaders for a strike and figuring out who would be willing to work with the U.S. if the regime were to fall.

On Tuesday, congressional leaders in the Gang of Eight were briefed on the possibility of U.S. military action in coordination with Israel. Two days later, Trump received a briefing from U.S. Central Command chief Admiral Brad Cooper on his options. In planning meetings in the lead-up to U.S. military strikes, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine expressed concern about the impacts of an extended U.S. military operation on the Pentagon’s stockpiles and air defenses, according to one of the people familiar with the conversations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was not part of the day-to-day planning, also had reservations. But neither of them forcefully made the case against going to war, the person said.

Beyond Trump and a small handful of hawks, the mood in the administration became one of resignation. In the administration, “these guys are just apoplectic about where things are heading,” the person said.

“There were people uncomfortable with Midnight Hammer and Absolute Resolve,” the person said, referring to the June attack on the Iranian nuclear sites and the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. “But those were well planned and had discrete objectives. This doesn’t have that.” On Friday, Vice President JD Vance met with Oman’s foreign minister Badr Albusaidi, who was mediating the U.S.-Iran talks, in a Hail-Mary diplomatic play. Though Albusaidi left the most recent round of talks in Geneva saying there had been “significant progress,” the American delegation was not satisfied after the most recent round. To Washington’s allies it was clear time was running out.

At the center of the impasse was Trump’s insistence that Iran publicly and unequivocally commit to forgoing nuclear weapons. Iran’s repeated pledges over the years that it would not build such weapons apparently did not meet his bar.

Iran denies it has ever sought to build a nuclear weapon, but the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency has reported years of nuclear weapons-related work. Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium, the fissile material it could potentially use for a bomb, is believed to have been buried under rubble after the U.S. and Israel attacked its three main nuclear sites in June. Tehran says it has a right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes such as medical research.

“They have to say, ‘We’re not gonna have a nuclear weapon,’” Trump said Friday, hours before the strikes began. “They just can’t quite get there.”

“We’ve been playing with them for 47 years”

By Friday afternoon, Trump was in Corpus Christi, Texas, for a rally, stopping at a burger joint after addressing supporters. Trump’s tone, even then, was resolute.

“We’ve been playing with them for 47 years, and that’s a long time,” Trump said. “They’ve been blowing the legs off our people, blowing their face off our people, the arms. They’ve been knocking out ships one by one. And every month, there’s something else, so … you can’t put up with it too long.”That evening, Trump flew to Mar-a-Lago, where he set up operations at his private club as top defense and intelligence officials joined him.

Hours later, the strikes began, as Trump watched from Mar-a-Lago and Vance and other Cabinet secretaries monitored from the Situation Room at the White House.“Now you have a president who is giving you what you want,” Trump said in recorded remarks, appealing directly to Iranian citizens. “So let’s see how you respond.”

Nahal Toosi and Paul McLeary contributed to this report.