Former Trump Spokeswoman Turns on Him Over Iran War
President Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran is so unpopular, his own former spokesperson is calling him out.
During an appearance on Fox News Monday night, Caroline Sunshine pointed to a statement from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine, who said that the United States could “expect to take additional losses” as it engaged in ongoing “major combat operations” in Iran.
“I voted for President Trump, and I worked for President Trump because I didn’t want to hear statements like that from my government again regarding American involvement in the Middle East,” Sunshine, who previously served as Trump’s deputy communications director, said.
Sunshine urged the Trump administration to be clear about their objectives for the military campaign, arguing that the president’s supporters did not support intervention in Iran.
“Are any of those objectives in the direct national interest of the United States and of the American people, or is this going to be another regime-change war that the American people rejected and did not vote for?” Sunshine said. “If they wanted that, they would not have voted for Donald Trump as many times as they have and put him in the Oval Office.”
She also called out the administration’s flimsy rationale for launching the strike in the first place.
“Six months ago, the American people were told that we used B2 bunker-buster bombs to completely obliterate and destroy Iran’s nuclear program, and anybody who said otherwise was fake news,” she said. “Now we’ve been told that we’ve—somehow in those six months they were able to restart the program—now we’re told that we’ve completely destroyed it again.”
The White House claimed to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities in June, and as recently as last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that Iran was not currently enriching uranium. Meanwhile, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff claimed last month that Iran’s enrichment level had reached “60 percent.”
Sunshine noted that in addition to assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, the U.S. and Israeli strikes had wiped the chessboard of potential replacements and that Trump had indicated he was ceding power back to the people.
“If all of that has been done, why are we still there?” Sunshine asked. “Because we’ve lost six U.S. service members at our bases in the Middle East, and I don’t think the American people are going to have a very high tolerance for losing more U.S. soldiers unless those objectives are very clear, and those timelines are very clear, and it’s made clear how it is in the direct interest of the American people.”
A total of six U.S. military service members have died in a suspected drone strike on their makeshift operations center at a civilian port in Kuwait. There was no warning or siren to warn the officers of the oncoming attack, CNN reported Monday.
Meanwhile, the number of civilian deaths in Iran has surpassed 700, including dozens of school-age girls.