President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio continue to appear at odds with each other’s messaging on Iran, as Secretary Rubio declared four “clear objectives” for the war — objectives Trump has said have already been met, with Rubio describing Iran’s new current leadership as possibly impermanent, while the president praises them.

On ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” Secretary Rubio on Monday said it is unclear if the current Iran regime will “end up being in charge,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s Alex Ward.

“We have to see [if] these people end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they’re the ones who have the power to deliver,” he said.

Also on Monday, President Trump announced that the U.S. “is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we 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.'”

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“Here are the clear objectives of the operation,” Rubio said, as the State Department posted. “You should write them down: 1. The destruction of Iran’s air force 2. The destruction of their navy 3. The severe diminishing of their missile launching capability 4. The destruction of their factories.”

Opening the Strait of Hormuz — which Trump demanded and critics note was open before Trump began his war thirty-one days ago, is not listed among the four objectives Rubio declared on Monday. Trump has stated previously that the first three have already been met — and he is reportedly preparing to send thousands more troops to the Middle East, possibly for a ground invasion.

Rubio’s stated objectives drew strong backlash.

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“Perhaps the reason Secretary Rubio is having trouble convincing people that these are the only objectives is that none of these goals require thousands of ground troops, which makes it curious why they are flowing into the region right now as I type this tweet,” noted associate professor of political science Christopher Clary.

“No mention of nuclear capabilities, vague language that leaves room for interpretation. Preparing the media space to declare victory and leave?” asked Institute for Military Operations Professor Olivier Schmitt.

“Always good to have clear objectives laid out one month after you start a war,” noted Eli Clifton of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

“Moving the goal posts isn’t the solution Mr. Secretary. What happened to nuclear weapons? Uranium enrichment? Support to proxies? Civilian rising up to challenge the regime? Reopening the Strait of Hormuz?” posited retired U.S. Army military intelligence officer Jon Sweet.

SECRETARY RUBIO: Here are the clear objectives of the operation. You should write them down:

1. The destruction of Iran’s air force
2. The destruction of their navy
3. The severe diminishing of their missile launching capability
4. The destruction of their factories
🎯 pic.twitter.com/SrqCtPLlZB

— Department of State (@StateDept) March 30, 2026

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President Donald Trump is promoting a chilling Alan Dershowitz opinion piece that argues the war in Iran is necessary to stop Iran from obtaining and detonating a nuclear bomb — and to avert the possible deaths of millions of people around the world.

Calling Trump’s war a “preventive military action,” Dershowitz writes at The Hill that had a similar effort “been taken against the Nazi regime in the 1930s, it might have saved as many as 50 million lives.”

“If the military attack against Iran succeeds in preventing it from developing a nuclear arsenal, it too may prevent millions of deaths — we will never know how many,” says Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus.

He warns that if the war is successful the world will never know how many lives it has saved — but if it fails, we will learn the costs “the hard way.”

Dershowitz offers a comparison, saying that had Great Britain and France been more proactive in the period before World War II, and destroyed Hitler’s Nazi regime, thousands of people would still have died. The nations who engaged in such a preventive war “would have been condemned,” rather than “praised for preventing the millions of deaths that ultimately followed, however, since we would never know about them.”

He also blames them for not taking such action, saying they could have prevented World War II.

Dershowitz makes the same argument in favor of Trump’s and Israel’s war against Iran, and asks, aren’t the U.S. and Israel “entitled,” or “obligated” to “eliminate or at least reduce that risk by preventive military action?”

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An election expert told a federal judge that the witnesses the FBI relied on during its investigation that led to the seizure of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, misunderstood elections.

Former U.S. Election Assistance Commission official Ryan Macias, “testified that the list of irregularities the FBI identified didn’t represent a crime and that the witnesses the government based their investigation on appeared misinformed,” NBC News reported.

The witnesses the FBI cited “use contradictory terminology and it represents a misunderstanding of how elections work,” Macias said.

Macias also told a judge that the evidence the Bureau used to justify the controversial seizure of the ballots “doesn’t make sense.”

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Fulton County officials submitted a sworn declaration from Macias, who had advised the county during the 2020 election, the Associated Press reported. He said the Justice Department’s affidavit contains “a multitude of false or misleading statements and omissions” and offered explanations for the alleged “deficiencies.”

Fulton County is suing to force the return of its election materials. Its attorney, Abbe Lowell “criticized the government’s witnesses and information, which were laid out in a since-unsealed sworn affidavit that is ‘full of inaccuracies,'” NBC reported.

Lowell also argued that the government’s witness list couldn’t be trusted because it included “someone who was sanctioned twice by the courts for lying about elections.”

The person Lowell referred to, NBC reported, was Kurt Olsen, “a Republican who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Olsen was appointed by President Donald Trump to investigate the 2020 election from within his administration.”

Lowell also told the judge that there was no crime because there was no proof of intentional wrongdoing.

“The only element that turns normal election irregularities into crime is intent,” he said.

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