White House Says Trump Will Decide When Iran Has Really Surrendered

President Donald Trump on Friday demanded Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” but what does that look like? According to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, that’s up to Trump himself and not Iran.

“What the president means is that when he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized, than Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender, whether they say it themselves or not,” Leavitt said Friday, in response to a reporter asking whether Trump means that “the regime has to fully relinquish control.”

“Frankly, they don’t have a lot of people to say that for them because the United States and the State of Israel have completely wiped out more than 50 leaders of the former terrorist regime, including the supreme leader himself,” Leavitt added.

It’s absurd to demand a surrender and then claim that “no, we will decide when you’ve surrendered,” but that appears to be the stance of the Trump administration at this time. Trump himself told Axios Friday that “unconditional surrender could be that [the Iranians] announce it. But it could also be when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.”

Reading between the lines, it seems that Trump wants to unilaterally decide when hostilities with Iran are over, and would prefer to inflict heavy damage on the country’s defenses first. But considering that the U.S. was apparently spurred to attack Iran by Israel, surrender may be moot as long as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still sees advantages in bombing Iran. Whether Iran “surrenders” or not, the bombings will continue until Trump and Netanyahu decide otherwise.

American forces are no longer capable of supplying missiles to U.S. allies amid its war with Iran.

Andrius Kubilius, the European Union’s defense and space commissioner, said Friday that the continent is facing a “huge challenge” in stepping up its defense production to adequately fill the gap left by the U.S. with regards to Ukraine.

“It’s very clear that after the Iranian crisis ... it became more urgent for us in Europe to ramp up production of air defense and anti-ballistic missiles,” Kubilius said in Warsaw. “Americans really will not be able to provide enough of those missiles, both for the Gulf countries, for [the] American army itself, and also for Ukrainian needs.”

For the winter season alone, Kubilius estimated that Ukraine needs 700 Patriot, PAC-2, and PAC-3 missiles, which he noted is “more or less equal to the number of missiles that American manufacturers are capable of producing in a year.”

Polish defense minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz was in lockstep with Kubilius’s assessment, informing reporters Friday that the situation in Europe “is really critical.”

“It is clear that we are going to have to develop our missile production very quickly and very urgently,” he said.

Kosiniak-Kamysz noted that the U.S. will prioritize replenishing its stockpiles in the Middle East, adding to delivery delays to Europe, especially if the war drags on.

Military officials have stressed since Sunday that fighting Iran has already drastically depleted America’s missile defense systems.

In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted.

One source told CNN that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles.

It’s not clear exactly how long the conflict is expected to go on. Per Trump’s own estimates, the war could rage for a few days, or several weeks, or “forever.”

So far, six U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Eighteen American soldiers have also been seriously injured. More than 1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, including 176 children, dozens of whom were at a girls’ school in the country’s south.

On Friday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that reports of Russia giving Iran intelligence to target U.S. assets didn’t matter—a baffling answer given that Iran has already killed multiple U.S. service members in retaliation.

“We have confirmed reports from U.S. officials that Russia is providing intelligence to Iran to help it target U.S. assets in the region,” Fox News’s John Roberts asked Leavitt. “I’m sure this is something that does not please the president whatsoever. Has he spoken to Putin about it?”

“Well, look, I’ll leave that to the president to answer himself, but what I will tell you, John, is we don’t comment on intelligence reports that are leaked to the press,” Leavitt responded. “Whether or not this happened, frankly, it does not really matter, because President Trump and the United States military are absolutely decimating the rogue Iranian terrorist regime.”

Leavitt was quickly rebuked for the tone-deaf statement.

“Dear @PressSec: You need to apologize for your ludicrous statement. Why won’t you condemn Russia for helping Iran?” Representative Ted Lieu wrote on X. “Did the Russian intelligence info help Iran: Kill 6 U.S. soldiers? Hit 11 U.S. bases? Hit U.S. embassies and consulates? Hit U.S. allies?”

“It doesn’t matter if Russia is helping Iran kill US service members??” liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote. “What is this moron talking about?”

Leavitt, perhaps hearing some of the criticism, attempted to clarify her position later that day, with support from the White House Rapid Response X account, which called the situation a hoax—but all Leavitt did was repeat herself.

“Why doesn’t it matter if the U.S. military is being put in danger by Russia? Is that what the president believes, as well?” a reporter asked Leavitt later that day.

“What I meant … is that it clearly is not making a difference with respect to the military operations in Iran because we are completely decimating them. As I said earlier, we’ve taken out nearly 30 of their ships, their navy has been deemed combat ineffective. Ninety percent reduction in ballistic missile retaliatory strikes against the United States and our Gulf Arab partners in the region.… The United States military is the best and most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Leavitt again did not directly address the report that Russia is collaborating with Iran.

The U.S. Army spontaneously canceled a training exercise for an elite team this week, raising concerns that the soldiers may soon be expected to deploy to Iran.

The headquarters element of the 82nd Airborne Division, stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, pulled out of a major training exercise earlier this week. The brigade is a rapid-reaction paratrooper division, comprising up to 5,000 soldiers that are capable of deploying anywhere in the world within 18 hours. They are specialized in missions that include parachute assault, reinforcing U.S. embassies, and enabling emergency evacuations.

The rest of the 82nd Division continued training at Fort Polk in Louisiana.

Deployment orders had not been issued as of Friday, military officials told The Washington Post. The unidentified Army men noted to the Post that the division is expected to deploy a helicopter unit to the Middle East, a plan set before the war began, though that won’t happen until later in the spring.

Nonetheless, military officials are steeling themselves for the worst.

“We’re all preparing for something—just in case,” one official familiar with the issue told the Post.

A spokesperson for the Army referred the Post to a statement that read: “Due to operations security we do not discuss future or hypothetical movements.”

Talk of escalating the conflict with Iran has ramped up in recent days among chief White House officials, at times in a remarkably disaffected way. The president declared on Friday that he wants “unconditional surrender” from Iran, and would not negotiate a peace deal without it.

Republicans are discussing the potentially unavoidable reality of a U.S. ground invasion in Iran; meanwhile, Iranian officials have already said they are “confident” the country could counter a U.S. ground invasion.

When asked by Time if Americans should be worried about Iran attacking them on U.S. soil, Donald Trump responded: “I guess.”

“But I think they’re worried about that all the time,” he continued. “We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

The self-titled “peace president” has so far used his second term to sweep foreign cities, massacre foreign leadership, and indiscriminately bomb civilian targets, such as elementary schools in Tehran.

So far, six U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Eighteen American soldiers have also been seriously injured. More than 1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, including 176 children, dozens of whom were bombed at a girls’ school in south Iran.

The conflict entered its seventh day on Friday. Trump has still not directly addressed the American people on the issue.

Trump administration officials scrambled Friday to explain away the latest horrendous jobs numbers, but couldn’t conjure up more than blaming the weather or fake numbers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier in the day that the U.S. job market had shed 92,000 jobs in February, meaning that the U.S. economy has lost 19,000 jobs since April 2025.

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett struggled on CNBC to summon an explanation for the “surprisingly negative” report that did not include Donald Trump’s disastrous economic policies.

Hassett blamed a spate of severe winter weather, a massive strike at a major health care provider in California and Hawaii, and a recent update to the BLS’s birth-death model that tracks the opening and closing of businesses.

He urged people to look at the average growth: “If you take the average over a few months we had a surprisingly positive one last month, and a surprisingly negative one this one, but on average it’s about what we expect to be seeing because immigration has gone down so much the break-even employment is probably in the 30 or 40,000 jobs a month range.”

The Trump administration has been pushing Americans to lower their expectations for job growth to reflect a labor market that doesn’t rely on undocumented immigrants. Trump officials have argued that a job market that used to produce 200,000 jobs a month should now be expected to churn out closer to 50,000.

In reality, the average labor market growth in 2025 was only half of what Hassett is selling—closer to an average of 15,000 new jobs per month. Meanwhile, five of the last nine months have seen job losses, indicating a policy-driven downward trend, not one caused by snow or strike.

But Hassett indicated that he was focused on pushing something else entirely: Trump’s violent and illegal efforts to steal oil from foreign nations as a sign that stability was on the horizon.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also tried to blame the “bad report” on weather and the strike, before just blatantly lying about the publicly available numbers.

“That has been resolved, so we’re hoping to see those numbers tick back up next month,” Chavez-DeRemer said on Fox Business. “But overall, we’ve gained 60,000 new jobs over the last two months.”

In reality, the latest report saw 126,000 jobs added in January, and 92,000 taken away in February. That’s just 31,000 new jobs. Either Chavez-DeRemer is too stupid to do the math, or she thinks you are. She’s currently under investigation for misconduct.