President Donald Trump said Sunday that Iran, the country whose nuclear capabilities he said had been “totally obliterated” by U.S. airstrikes in June, was somehow “two weeks” from developing a nuclear weapon when the U.S. and Israel attacked the country Saturday. While some U.S. officials have earnestly responded to Trump’s claim — Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., told MS NOW he hasn’t “seen any evidence to suggest that” — Trump’s use of “two weeks” is enough by itself to warrant our skepticism.
Major developments are always two weeks away, in Trump’s telling.
Major developments — a health care plan, a deadline for Ukraine and Russia to come to terms, evidence that President Barack Obama illegally wiretapped him — are always two weeks away, in Trump’s telling. But few of his promised developments materialize within that timeframe — if they materialize at all. We’d be foolish, then, not to question Trump’s claim that Iran was two weeks away from possessing such a destructive weapon. And we have every right to be angry at Trump using his “two weeks” jibber-jabber to talk about something as gravely serious as war.
In June 2018, Trump told a North Dakota audience that then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar had taken the lead on an Affordable Care Act replacement. He said, “We are coming out with that plan in two weeks” and added that it would be “so much better than anything you’ve ever seen before.” More than two years later, while campaigning for re-election in July 2020, Trump told Fox News that plan was coming “within two weeks.” That same month, he told Fox Business Network, “I will have a statement over the next two weeks on minimum wage.”
You can find examples of Trump using “two weeks” even earlier in his first term and examples of journalists calling his administration out on it. “The president said two weeks ago that he would have a press conference in two weeks on ISIS,” a reporter said to then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer in June 2017. Spicer answered, “As soon as I have an update on that, I’ll let you know.”
MS NOW’s Jen Psaki said in June 2025 that declaring something is going to happen in two weeks is “one of Donald Trump’s absolute favorite tactics.” Writing for The New York Times, Shawn McCreesh wrote, “As almost everyone in Washington is by now aware, ‘two weeks’ is one of Mr. Trump’s favorite units of time.”
Another way to put that is “two weeks” is one of Trump’s favorite lies — which gives us good reason to doubt Trump’s rationale for striking Iran.
“That’s simply not true,” Joseph Cirincione, a national security analyst, told MS NOW’s Alex Witt on Sunday when she asked for Cirincione’s reaction to Trump’s claim Iran was two weeks away from a nuclear weapon. Cirincione, author of, “Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late,” said even if Iran could have developed the material used in a nuclear weapon, that would have been the first of multiple steps that would take much longer, at minimum “several more months of work.”
“Two weeks?” Cirincione said. “No way.”
Two weeks? No way. There’s an old saying that “truth is the first casualty of war,” but truth was a casualty of this president and administration long before Saturday’s attack on Iran, and its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was launched. And though cynics would be justified in saying that the U.S. has often (if not routinely) lied to justify attacking other countries and leaders , there’s something particularly insulting and disrespectful in Trump dusting off his old “two weeks” routine to justify this attack. At least six U.S. service members have been killed and Trump, with a shrug, says the U.S. will likely suffer more casualties. At least 165 people at a girls’ elementary school in Iran are dead, according to that country’s state-run media . The attacks the U.S. and Israel have unleashed have the potential to destabilize the country and the region and cause large-scale death and immeasurable suffering. Trump’s got to know we’ve heard him claim “two weeks” many times. He’s got to know we don’t believe him. That he gave us his “two weeks” jive anyway is evidence that he doesn’t care about the truth. But more than that, it’s evidence that he doesn’t believe he has to credibly justify to the American people his actions that have already brought death to many — American service members, included.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
