Fox News host Laura Ingraham questioned whether President Donald Trump was “fully briefed about the risks” of the Iran war, as more of his once-loyal allies are beginning to turn amid the conflict raging in the Middle East.
The 62-year-old Trump backer has secured multiple interviews with the president since he returned to office — and he even appointed her to the Kennedy Center’s board last year. But now, even the Fox News host is wondering what the president has been told about the war.
“With different leaders in place, Iranian negotiators may have little knowledge about what their government is willing to concede, or even whom precisely to ask. So if we cannot come to some type of peace deal with people who can’t be trusted, then what?” she said on Monday’s episode of The Ingraham Angle.
Ingraham explained that it “looks like the U.S. is going to escalate,” and pointed to Trump's recent threats against Iran.
“Now, knowing what little time we have and how quickly this can spiral out of control, we still have a lot of questions,” Ingraham said. “For instance, was the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning?”
She continued: “And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this, how complex it could actually get and further possibilities of casualties or other damage, the difficulty of dealing with these people? Or was he told this would be relatively quick in and out?”
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
Ingraham’s questions come as a report Tuesday detailed how the risks of the war spiraling out of control were “downplayed” to Trump by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “Nobody in the room during that critical meeting emphasized the potential risks,” according to the CNN report.
Earlier Monday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that if Tehran does not agree to a deal and open up the Strait of Hormuz soon, U.S. forces will “conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”
The Fox News host is just the latest MAGA figure who appears to be changing their tune on the president due to the war. Over the weekend, Politico reported mounting discontent among White House staffers who are younger and “more-right wing.”
“They’re very frustrated. They didn’t love the war to start with, and since it began, the constantly contradictory messaging from the president himself, is just brutal, brutal for staff to deal with and making their life really hard,” an unnamed source familiar with the situation told the outlet.
Some Republican lawmakers, such as Representative Nancy Mace, have also expressed concern amid growing speculation a potential ground operation in Iran.
“Just walked out of a House Armed Services briefing on Iran. Let me repeat: I will not support troops on the ground in Iran, even more so after this briefing,” Mace wrote on X last week.
Republican Representative Tim Burchett told NewsNation he doesn’t think there’s a “will for a ground conflict” among congressional lawmakers.
“I know a lot of Republicans don’t support that, and I know all the Democrats don’t support it, so I firmly believe there is room there for it, but I don’t think that now is the time,” he said Sunday.
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