The United States is bombing Iran because Donald Trump had a “feeling.”

That’s the actual justification White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered Wednesday when pressed on why America launched “Operation Epic Fury” against a country of 90 million people.

“The president had a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States, was going to strike our assets in the region, and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt says Trump's decision to strike Iran was based on his "feeling based on fact that Iran does pose an imminent and direct threat to the US" pic.twitter.com/f3BUG0w8am

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 4, 2026

A feeling. Based on fact. Sure.

Can you imagine the response from the Fox News crowd if a female president said she started a war based on a “feeling”?

When a reporter pointed out that Leavitt had listed grievances against Iran going all the way back to 1979 but still couldn’t identify the “imminent threat” that required bombing the country, she had a predictably empty response.

“I reject the premise of your question,” Leavitt replied.

The briefing got worse from there. Asked repeatedly whether regime change is the goal of this war—now five days old—Leavitt couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. She rattled off military objectives: eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile threat, destroy naval capability, sever their pathway to nuclear weapons.

“Those four objectives that you laid out do not explicitly include regime change,” another reporter followed up. “If those objectives were achieved and the Islamic Republic still existed, would that be an acceptable outcome?”

“That’s a hypothetical question that I’m not going to engage in,” Leavitt said.

The White House has spent days trying to clean up a mess created by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who admitted Monday that Israel pressured the U.S. into attacking Iran. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio said.

By Tuesday, Rubio was pretending he never said it.

Meanwhile, Leavitt was also asked whether the U.S. bombed a girls’ school in southern Iran that killed up to 168 people, mostly children between ages seven and twelve.

“Uh, not that we know of,” she said, before accusing reporters of falling for Iranian propaganda. The bombing was documented by on-the-ground reporters and civilian cell phone video. UNESCO called it a “grave violation” of international law.

Six American soldiers have been killed in the conflict so far. More than 1,000 Iranian civilians are dead, including 176 children. The military is “burning” through missiles. And the president’s justification for all of it is a feeling.