Trump says quiet part out loud on why he's bombing Iran: 'It’s more for public relations'

In the wake of the Trump administration’s failure to achieve regime change in its war against Iran, President Donald Trump has fixated on another objective – seizing the country’s supply of enriched uranium. But on Thursday, he made a startling admission that the effort was largely a public relations stunt.

“I’d just feel better if I got it, actually,” Trump said in an interview that aired Thursday on Fox News with Sean Hannity. “But it’s… I think it’s more for public relations than it is for anything else.”

Moments after authorizing the first wave of U.S. attacks on Iran, Trump issued a direct call to the Iranian people to “take over your government.” In the weeks since, Trump repeatedly claimed that the United States had, in fact, enacted regime change in Iran, citing the number of Iranian officials killed by the United States and Israel.

Military and foreign policy experts, however, have refuted the claim.

“It's fair to say that there has been a leadership change in the regime, but the regime is still there because the basic structures, like the constitution, are intact,” said Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, speaking with the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact.

Seizing Iran’s existing supply of enriched uranium has become the new top objective for Trump, an apparent attempt to achieve his administration’s long-stated goal of removing Tehran’s ability to ever acquire a nuclear weapon. However, seizing Iran's existing supply of enriched uranium, argued Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, would not actually achieve that goal.

“You cannot unlearn what you've learned,” Grossi told CBS News.

Furthermore, such an operation “would involve probably thousands of U.S. troops on the ground for weeks in the middle of Iran,” argued military historian Max Boot.