Near the end of his speech in San Antonio on Wednesday, which has just concluded, Donald Trump repeated his false claim that the war he started with Iran in February was necessary to prevent Iran from destroying American cities like Los Angeles or San Diego in a nuclear attack.
“I am ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “We had no choice because we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
What the president did not say is that US intelligence agencies wrote in March 2025, in an annual threat assessment provided to Congress, that Iran abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons more than two decades ago.
“We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so,” the intelligence community reported last year. Three months later, in June 2025 , Trump ordered US military strikes on Iran’s main nuclear-enrichment facility, which, he said, had been “obliterated”.
Still, on Wednesday, Trump repeated his claim that the war on Iran he launched in February of this year with Israel had been necessary to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
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