Anchor Kate Bolduan paused an interview with John Bolton to allow Tapper to call in before asking her colleague about his conversation with the president.
“I just got off the phone with President Trump. It was a nine-minute phone interview, and we talked just about the war in Iran. I’m going to share some of it with you right now. The president said, quote, ‘We’re knocking the crap out of them. I think it’s going very well. It’s very powerful. They’ve got the greatest military in the world, and we’re using it,’” Tapper said.
“I asked the president how long he thought this military operation or war might last. He said, quote, ‘I don’t want to see it go on too long. I always thought it would be four weeks and we’re a little ahead of schedule.” I asked a president if the U.S. was doing more than these military strikes to help the Iranian people regain control of Iran against the regime, to seize the country from the Iranian regime, and he said, yes, the president said, ‘Yes, we are indeed. But right now we want everyone staying inside. It’s not safe out there.’ And then the president said, it’s about to get even less safe. He said, quote, ‘We haven’t even started hitting them hard. The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon.’ We asked him about a bunch of other stuff too that I’m writing up and we’ll share later on The Lead at 5 p.m.,” Tapper added.
“Jake, in your many conversations with him, did you get a sense of mood, tone? I think I saw it described, you know, he’s been doing some interviews, especially over the phone, kind of just how he sounds in this moment as this is playing out?” followed up Bolduan.
“He sounded very pleased with how the operation’s going. He sounded very resolute in terms of the Iranian threat to the region and the world. Very confident about how this was, even though they did try to negotiate with the Iranians, how this ultimately was the right decision and the right approach, given all of the unrest, all of the terrorism, all of the menace that the Iranian regime had had been offering ever since the revolution of 1979,” replied Tapper.
“He didn’t seem to be in doubt at all, thought things were going really really well, and were going to continue. And obviously we’re only on day, what, three of this operation? It started Saturday. And the president is projecting at least possibly that this military operation will last about a month, although obviously that’s not a firm and set time period. So there’s a lot more to come,” Tapper said.
WATCH:
Speaking earlier with CNN’s Jake Tapper, President Donald J. Trump said regarding Operation Epic Fury, the ongoing strike campaign against Iran, “We’re knocking the crap out of them – I think it’s going very well. It’s very powerful. We’ve got the greatest military in the world… pic.twitter.com/zxys25ZBoc
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) March 2, 2026
Given that the U.S. and Israel have already removed Iran’s long-tenured supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, along with several other top officials, the news that “the big one is coming” is shocking.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said early Monday that the U.S. military operation in Iran is “laser-focused.”
“Destroy Iranian missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure and they will never have nuclear weapons,” said Hesgeth, who was joined by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine.
Hegseth declined to give a timeframe for the operation, but he insisted it would not be “endless.”
“This is not Iraq,” Hegseth said. “This is not endless. I was there for both — our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation-building wars dumb and he’s right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission: Destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes.”
Hegseth said there are no U.S. military “boots on the ground” in Iran right now, but said he would not “go into the exercise of what we will or will not do” in the future.
Caine said it will “take some time for us to conduct a battle damage assessment, and the targeting that CENTCOM will run will take those things into effect.”
