By Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — President Trump is coming under increasing pressure to explain his military campaign in Iran to the American people.
So far, the president has not delivered a prime-time address or held a press conference. He ignored shouted questions from reporters as he flew from Florida to Washington on Sunday. “Pre-recorded social media clips won’t cut it,” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons remarked.
But Trump is communicating on his own terms — in ways that didn’t even exist for past presidents in wartime. He is posting updates to the social media platform he controls; chatting with reporters who call his cell phone; sharing links to supportive op-eds; and even cracking a joke at the Iranian Navy’s expense.
Trump has projected strength but has also sent mixed messages about the objectives of the military strikes. The New York Times, after a brief phone interview with Trump, said he offered “several seemingly contradictory visions” about a transition of power in Iran.
Earlier, when Trump spoke with an Axios reporter on Saturday, he suggested the military campaign might not take long: “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days.”
Then, on Sunday, he told the Daily Mail that “it’s always been a four-week process,” and he told The Times “we intended four to five weeks” for the joint US-Israel attacks in Iran.
In another phone call, this one with reporters from MS NOW, Trump — a cable news obsessive — indicated that he’d been watching news coverage of the combat operations. He said he had seen “celebrations” of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death both inside Iran and on the streets of Los Angeles.
That call, MS NOW said, was less than a minute long. It reflects Trump’s scattershot approach to communicating about the conflict — a Truth Social post here, a phone call there.
“There’s no better communicator than our president,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a press conference Monday morning.
During the first weekend of fighting, Trump’s main messages came via two web videos recorded and published by the White House.
The first video, early Saturday morning, announced the combat operations and called on Iranians to topple their leader. The second, on Sunday afternoon, highlighted Khamenei’s death and said the US and Israel were acting “to ensure security” for the world.
The videos totaled 14 minutes and contained claims that fact-checkers and government sources have challenged.
The taped video format gave Trump an unusual amount of control — the opportunity to record more than once, for instance, and to edit out remarks.
The videos were an end run around the news media and a break from presidential tradition, as CNN’s chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins noted on air.
“Typically,” she said, US presidents deliver speeches “in front of the White House press pool,” with reporters there to bear witness and try to ask questions.
In another break from tradition, Trump did not deliver an Oval Office address announcing the outbreak of war, a format past presidents have utilized to amass the country’s attention and influence public opinion.
“By eschewing an address to the nation, Trump clearly has no plan or intention to explain to the American people why we went to war with Iran, what happens next, and what victory looks like,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for President Barack Obama, told CNN.
“By offering a different spin to every reporter whose call he answers, he comes across as making it up as he goes, which is probably the c