Trump hijacks Veterans Day speech to make case for his Iran war — and 250-foot arch

President Donald Trump used the national Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday to defend his war with Iran, telling an audience of veterans and their families that the United States had already won it and that the only open question was “when we want to end it.”Speaking in the cemetery’s Memorial Amphitheater, Trump inserted the partisan remarks towards the tail-end of his remarks after devoting most of them to commemorating the service of American veterans.“America did not start a war with Iran. Iran has been waging war in America since 1979. This should have been taken care of a long time ago,” Trump said. “It was about time somebody fought back. All of us fought back. We fought back, and we seriously fought back, and we won. Just a question of when we want to end it. We want to make sure we have a total victory, not a 93% percent victory.”The speech came eight days after voters handed control of both chambers of Congress to Democrats in an election Trump himself has said was shaped in part by the war. About six in 10 voters told the AP’s Election Day survey that the decision to use military force against Iran was the wrong one.President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a ceremony in honor of Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetery on November 11, 2026 (Getty)Trump, who unlike Vice President JD Vance did not serve in the military, set up the argument by introducing Dale Garner, a Marine veteran who survived the 1983 bombing of the barracks in Beirut by Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants, an attack that killed 241 American service members. Garner, the president said, was “a veteran who reminds us why that mission really matters.” After describing Garner’s collapsed lung, broken back and burns, Trump asked him to stand. “You look good, Dale. He looks good. A handsome guy. What’s going on here?” he said.He then gave his own account of the current conflict. “We began operations against Iran seven months ago, of which only a few weeks were active hard fighting. We lost 18 beautiful souls,” Trump said, referencing the casualties sustained by U.S. forces in the days after American strikes on Iran began on February 28. The president said the war would be over “soon,” as he has said repeatedly since the spring while offering no evidence to support the claim.“It’ll take them 25 years to rebuild back what we have destroyed, and hopefully we won’t have to destroy any more of that country,” he added.Standing a short walk from the graves of Americans killed in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump listed the length and death toll of each of those wars and said the country “got very little from any of these wars.” He said Korea lasted four years; the fighting there ran from 1950 to 1953.He contrasted those wars with the U.S. operation in Venezuela to remove dictator Nicolas Maduro this past January, which he said was won “in 48 minutes” while continuing his effort to recast that action as a “war” that his administration had “won” and boasting of the petrodollars the U.S. has supposedly taken in from getting preferred access to Venezuelan oil. “We’re taking out billions and billions of dollars of oil and all sorts of other things. Be hundreds of billions very soon,” Trump told the crowd. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it, and we paid for the cost of the war many, many times over already.”“To the victor belong the spoils, they used to say,” he added. “But you can say it again with us under this leadership.”Near the end of his remarks, Trump turned to the 250-foot gilded arch his administration plans to build between the Lincoln Memorial and the cemetery where he was speaking. The project is being challenged in court, and critics say it would disrupt historic sightlines in the capital, as The Independent has reported.“Soon we’re going to dedicate a magnificent triumphal arch to our veterans, and that’s in honor of our great veterans and our great militaries,” he said. “They’ve been waiting for it for 200 years.”The president did specifically mention his party’s defeat in last week’s elections except to talk about his administration facing “some minor setbacks” and vowing to “handle them very nicely.”Earlier, he broke off from a tribute to the endurance of American troops for another veiled partisan aside, telling attendees: “We’re not going to allow anyone to hurt or damage our country with bad, foolish, horrible ideology.” “We’re not going to let it happen, and everyone knows what I mean,” he said.