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According to The Guardian, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has harshly criticized President Donald Trump following a massive US-Israeli military operation against Iran.
According
to The Guardian, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has harshly criticized
President Donald Trump following a massive US-Israeli military operation
against Iran.
Key
details of her response and the situation include:
- "Shame!": Greene expressed her deep disappointment on social media, stating, "This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be. Shame!".
- Bait and Switch: She characterized the strikes as a "complete bait and switch," arguing that they betrayed Trump's campaign promises to end foreign wars and avoid regime change.
- Prioritizing Domestic Issues: Greene asserted that the American people want relief from the "affordability crisis" and peace at home rather than new "wars of choice" in the Middle East.
- Operation Epic Fury: The criticism comes in response to "Operation Epic Fury," a joint strike on February 28, 2026, which reportedly killed Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and targeted various military and nuclear facilities.
- MAGA Split: Her stance highlights a growing division within the Republican base between those supporting aggressive military action and "America First" isolationists who feel the administration has been co-opted by "neocons and warmongers".
Trump, the Self-Declared Peace President, Goes to War Seeking Regime Change
News Analysis
Trump,
the Self-Declared Peace President, Goes to War Seeking Regime Change
President
Trump has become increasingly willing to assert American power overseas, a
decade after propelling himself to the highest office by promising to focus on
“America first.”
Peter
Baker
By Peter
Baker
Peter
Baker is the chief White House correspondent. He reported from inside
Afghanistan and Iraq in the days the U.S. wars in those countries started.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/us/politics/trump-peace-president-war.html
Feb. 28,
2026
When he
first ran for president in 2016, Donald J. Trump disavowed the military
adventurism of recent years, declaring that “regime change is a proven,
absolute failure.” He promised to “stop racing to topple foreign regimes.”
When Mr.
Trump ran for president in 2024, he boasted of starting “no new wars,” and
asserted that if Kamala Harris won, “she would get us into a World War III
guaranteed,” and send the “sons and daughters” of Americans “to go fight for a
war in a country that you’ve never heard of.”
Barely a
year later, Mr. Trump is racing to topple foreign regimes, and is sending
American sons and daughters to wage another war in the Middle East. The
self-declared “president of PEACE” has chosen to become the president of war
after all, unleashing the full power of the U.S. military on Iran with the
explicit goal of toppling its government.
What the
Donald Trump of 2016 would think of the Donald Trump of 2026 will never be
known. But they are starkly different figures when it comes to overseas
intervention. A decade after propelling himself to the highest office by
promising to focus on “America first,” Mr. Trump has become increasingly
willing to assert power overseas. The bombardment of Iran on Saturday was the
eighth time he had ordered the military into action in his second term, even as
he has decapitated the government of Venezuela and threatened to overthrow
Cuba’s dictator.
In his
middle-of-the-night social media video announcing the opening of this new war,
Mr. Trump laid out a bill of particulars against Iran going back nearly half a
century, including its pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, its
support for terrorist groups that attacked Americans and allies, the 1979
seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the recent massacre of Iranian
protesters. But he never explained why those aggressions required action now
rather than earlier, or why his thinking evidently changed.
Nor did
he reconcile his conflicting statements on the status of the Iranian threat.
After joining Israel in attacking Iran last summer, he said that he had
“obliterated” the country’s nuclear program. He repeated that claim in last
Tuesday’s State of the Union address, and again in his early Saturday morning
video. But he did not clarify why it was necessary to strike a program that had
already been obliterated.
He did,
however, go further than ever in making regime change the goal, calling on
Iranians to overthrow their leaders. “When we are finished, take over your
government,” Mr. Trump said. “It will be yours to take.” He repeated that in a
social media post Saturday afternoon announcing that the strike had killed
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader — “one of the most evil people in
History,” as he put it.
But how
Iranians should go about taking over was left unclear. Mr. Trump wrote that
police and revolutionary guard forces should “peacefully merge with the Iranian
Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the
Greatness it deserves” — a remarkable notion suggesting that Iranian security
officials would somehow team up with the same people they were gunning down in
the streets just weeks ago.
“His
stated goal here, regime change, is the very thing he ran against in 2016,”
said Brandan P. Buck, a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the
libertarian Cato Institute. “Previously, the president used airstrikes, raids
and covert military power when he believed it could achieve discrete ends with
good optics at little cost. This attack on Iran has broken that formula and
constitutes a leap into the unknown.”
Mr.
Trump’s critics quickly resurrected his past statements to accuse him of
abandoning his own promises, circulating video clips of his campaign rallies
and social media quotes assailing Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Kamala
Harris as warmongers.
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Mr.
Trump, 2012: “Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to
launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.”
Mr.
Trump, 2013: “Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama
will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly — not skilled!”
Mr.
Trump, 2016: “We’re going to stop the reckless and costly policy of regime
change.”
Mr.
Trump, election night 2024: “I’m not going to start wars. I’m going to stop
wars.”
And there
were plenty of quotes from advisers like Stephen Miller, now the deputy White
House chief of staff (“Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace,” Nov. 1, 2024), and
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (“The War Department will not be distracted by
democracy-building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change,” Dec. 6,
2025).
Among
those lashing out at Mr. Trump on Saturday were not just liberals but also
prominent leaders of the Make America Great movement who complained that he had
been captured by the neoconservatives he once spurned, criticism led by the
right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson and former Representative Marjorie
Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia.
“It’s
always a lie and it’s always America Last,” Ms. Greene, who resigned her seat
last month after breaking with Mr. Trump, wrote on social media. “But it feels
like the worst betrayal this time because it comes from the very man and the
admin who we all believed was different and said no more.”
Representative
Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana, argued that Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran
would head off a worse threat down the road and pave the way for a new Middle
East that would be friendlier to the United States. “To those who say, ‘Well,
President Trump said he wasn’t going to take us into any wars,’ he’s keeping us
out of wars in the long run,” he said on CNN.
Advocates
of action against Iran said Mr. Trump still had not fully committed to changing
the government in Tehran, but instead had left it to the Iranian people.
“Trump’s speech wasn’t a regime change speech — and I wish it had been,” said
Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a
group that has long pressed for tougher policy on Iran.
The only
“durable solution,” he added, is not a military strike that sets the Iranian
nuclear weapons program back by months or years, but the end of the regime.
“But that’s not exactly what Trump prioritized tonight,” Mr. Dubowitz said,
“and we need to be honest about what he did, and didn’t, say.”
Mr.
Trump’s increasing willingness to deploy military force underscores the broader
change between his first term and second term. He is far more comfortable using
the instruments of power than he was the last time around, at home as well as
abroad. What he sometimes threatened or considered doing in his first stint in
the White House, he more readily acts on now, whether it be sending federal
forces into American streets, prosecuting his perceived enemies, purging the
government of those deemed disloyal or imposing tariffs on countries around the
world.
The team
he assembled in the first four years included conventional Republicans or
career military officers who often restrained his most radical impulses. But
there is no John F. Kelly, Jim Mattis, Mark T. Esper or Mark A. Milley this
time around. Instead, he has surrounded himself with more aggressive
break-the-china advisers pushing for more ambitious action and with figures
like Mr. Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Susie Wiles, the White
House chief of staff, who view their jobs as facilitating the president’s
desires rather than talking him out of them.
Mr.
Trump’s journey as commander in chief has been a fitful one. He had no
experience in either the military or public office when he first arrived in the
Oval Office in January 2017. He promoted a more aggressive war against the
Islamic State, but sometimes hesitated to use force, at one point calling off a
retaliatory military strike on Iran with just minutes to go, deeming it not
worth the casualties.
He was
intent on pulling back from much of the world, seeking to bring U.S. troops
home from places like South Korea, Germany and Syria. He negotiated a peace
agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan, a
deal then executed by his successor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in a
disastrous operation.
But he
was also emboldened when a U.S. strike in 2020 targeted and killed Iran’s Maj.
Gen. Qassim Suleimani without instigating the devastating reprisals or
prolonged regional war that some critics had predicted. Likewise, in this
second term, the successful commando raid that captured President Nicolás
Maduro of Venezuela also energized Mr. Trump.
His
public posture, however, has veered wildly over the past year. One moment, he
is presenting himself as a historic peacemaker, forming a so-called Board of
Peace and griping that he has not won the Nobel Peace Prize while boasting,
inaccurately, that he has ended eight wars — including one with Iran. The next
moment, he is threatening to seize Greenland, take back the Panama Canal,
strangle Cuba and even go after Colombia’s president as he did Venezuela’s.
Charles
Kupperman, who was a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump in the
president’s first term, said he did not think Mr. Trump had evolved in his
thinking about foreign threats. But in the case of Iran, Mr. Kupperman said,
the president set himself up by investing in a diplomatic effort that was
always doomed to fail, leaving little alternative but to take military action.
“It is
difficult to determine Trump’s decision-making process given the serious
downgrade of the N.S.C. and its policymaking role,” he said of the National
Security Council. “What options were developed and presented to Trump and the
process for generating them are key questions.” But he added that “the
diplomatic effort to engage Iran was never going to yield the results that
Trump sought. Pure Kabuki theater.”
The
outcome of Mr. Trump’s geopolitical gamble will depend not just on how the
military operation proceeds, but what comes next. Success has a way of making
voters forget about broken promises. There is little love lost for the Tehran
regime, and video showed Iranians in the streets cheering reports of Ayatollah
Khamenei’s death. If Mr. Trump manages to push the remaining government from
power, he will have something to boast about that none of his predecessors
dared try.
Unlike
the so-called forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that helped fuel his
political rise, Mr. Trump has not made any major commitment of ground troops in
Iran, and seems determined to stick to air power, avoiding the sort of grinding
guerrilla warfare that turned Americans against past wars.
Still, as
Mr. Trump himself warned in his overnight video, there could be American
casualties. And if the Tehran government does fall, it could result in a
replacement that is still hostile to the United States, or in fratricidal
chaos, as happened in Libya after Muammar el-Qaddafi was deposed and killed in
2011.
One way
or the other, his allies were already talking about it being a legacy moment
for Mr. Trump. What kind of legacy is not yet clear. But it will not be the one
that he originally promised.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.
On February 28, 2026, the C.I.A. provided critical, "high-fidelity" intelligence that enabled Israel and the United States to carry out a massive daylight strike in Tehran, reportedly killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of top Iranian officials.
The
C.I.A. Helped Pinpoint a Gathering of Iranian Leaders. Then Israel Struck.
On
February 28, 2026, the C.I.A. provided critical, "high-fidelity"
intelligence that enabled Israel and the United States to carry out a massive
daylight strike in Tehran, reportedly killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei and dozens of top Iranian officials.
The key
details of the operation include:
The
Intelligence: The C.I.A. had tracked Khamenei for months, establishing his
patterns. They identified a rare "target of opportunity"—a Saturday
morning meeting at a government compound in central Tehran where Khamenei would
be present alongside senior political and military leaders.
Tactical
Surprise: The U.S. and Israel originally planned to strike under the cover of
darkness. However, based on the C.I.A.'s real-time intelligence, they adjusted
the timing to Saturday morning, achieving "tactical surprise".
The
Strike: Israeli jets dropped 30 bombs on the compound at approximately 9:40
a.m. Tehran time. The operation, part of a broader campaign codenamed
"Roaring Lion" (Israel) and "Operation Epic Fury" (U.S.),
involved nearly 900 strikes across 17 Iranian provinces.
Casualties:
Along with Khamenei, several high-ranking officials were reportedly killed,
including:
Ali
Shamkhani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.
Aziz
Nasirzadeh, Defense Minister.
Mohammad
Pakpour, Commander of the IRGC Ground Forces.
Mohammad
Shirazi, Chief of the Supreme Leader’s Military Office.
President
Donald Trump announced the success of the strikes on Truth Social, describing
the operation as an effort to destroy Iran's nuclear and missile programs and
encourage the Iranian people to "take over your government".
The C.I.A. Helped Pinpoint a Gathering of Iranian Leaders. Then Israel Struck.
The
C.I.A. Helped Pinpoint a Gathering of Iranian Leaders. Then Israel Struck.
The
killing of Iran’s supreme leader and other top Iranian officials came after
close intelligence sharing between the United States and Israel, according to
people familiar with the operation.
By Julian
E. BarnesRonen BergmanEric Schmitt and Tyler Pager
March 1,
2026
Updated
12:22 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/us/politics/cia-israel-ayatollah-compound.html
Shortly
before the United States and Israel were poised to launch an attack on Iran,
the C.I.A. zeroed in on the location of perhaps the most important target:
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.
The
C.I.A. had been tracking Ayatollah Khamenei for months, gaining more confidence
about his locations and his patterns, according to people familiar with the
operation. Then the agency learned that a meeting of top Iranian officials
would take place on Saturday morning at a leadership compound in the heart of
Tehran. Most critically, the C.I.A. learned that the supreme leader would be at
the site.
The
United States and Israel decided to adjust the timing of their attack, in part
to take advantage of the new intelligence, according to officials with
knowledge of the decisions.
The
information provided a window of opportunity for the two countries to achieve a
critical and early victory: the elimination of top Iranian officials and the
killing of Ayatollah Khamenei.
The
remarkably swift removal of Iran’s supreme leader reflected the close
coordination and intelligence sharing between the United States and Israel in
the run-up to the attack, and the deep intelligence the countries had developed
on Iranian leadership, especially in the wake of last year’s 12-day war. The
operation also showed the failure of Iran’s leaders to take adequate
precautions to avoid exposing themselves at a time where both Israel and the
U.S. sent clear signals that they were preparing for war.
The
C.I.A. passed its intelligence, which offered “high fidelity” on Ayatollah
Khamenei’s position, to Israel, according to people briefed on the
intelligence.
They and
others who shared details about the operation spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence and military planning.
Israel,
using U.S. intelligence and its own, would execute an operation it had been
planning for months: the targeted killing of Iran’s senior leaders.
The
United States and Israeli governments, which had originally planned to launch a
strike at night under the cover of darkness, made the decision to adjust the
timing to take advantage of the information about the gathering at the
government compound in Tehran on Saturday morning.
The
leaders were set to meet where the offices of the Iranian presidency, the
supreme leader and Iran’s National Security Council are located.
Israel
had determined that the gathering would include top Iranian defense officials,
including Mohammad Pakpour, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps; Aziz Nasirzadeh, the minister of defense; Admiral Ali Shamkhani,
the head of the Military Council; Seyyed Majid Mousavi, the commander of the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force; Mohammad Shirazi, the deputy
intelligence minister; and others.
The
operation began around 6 a.m. in Israel, as fighter jets took off from their
bases. The strike required relatively few aircraft, but they were armed with
long-range and highly accurate munitions.
Two hours
and five minutes after the jets took off, at around 9:40 a.m. in Tehran, the
long-range missiles struck the compound. At the time of the strike, senior
Iranian national security officials were in one building at the compound. Mr.
Khamenei was in another nearby building.
“This
morning’s strike was carried out simultaneously at several locations in Tehran,
in one of which senior figures of Iran’s political-security echelon had
gathered,” an Israeli defense official wrote in a message reviewed by The New
York Times.
The
official said that despite Iranian preparations for war, Israel managed to
achieve “tactical surprise” with its attack on the compound.
The White
House and the C.I.A. declined to comment.
On
Sunday, Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, confirmed the deaths of two high-level
military leaders Israel said it had killed on Saturday: Rear Adm. Shamkhani and
Maj. Gen. Pakpour.
People
briefed on the operation described it as a product of good intelligence and
months of preparations.
Last
June, with planning underway to strike Iran’s nuclear targets, President Trump
asserted that the United States knew where Ayatollah Khamenei was hiding and
could have killed him.
That
intelligence, a former U.S. official said, was based on the same network that
the United States relied on Saturday.
But since
then, the information the United States has been able to gather has only
improved, according to the former official and others briefed on the
intelligence. During that 12-day war, the United States learned even more about
how the supreme leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps communicated
and moved while under pressure, the former official said. The United States
used that knowledge to hone its ability to track Ayatollah Khamenei and predict
his movements.
The
United States and Israel had also gathered specifics about the locations of key
Iranian intelligence officers. In follow-on strikes after the attack on the
leadership compound Saturday, locations where intelligence leaders were staying
were hit, according to people familiar with the operation.
Iran’s
top intelligence officer escaped, but the senior ranks of Iran’s intelligence
agencies were decimated, according to people briefed on the operation.
Farnaz
Fassihi and Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.
Julian E.
Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters
for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Ronen
Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv.
Eric
Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on
U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
Tyler
Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump
and his administration.
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