← Videos · Foreign Policy & Defense

Trump Delivers an Address to the Nation, Apr. 1, 2026

April 1, 2026 · The White House · 0:28:30

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump addressed the nation on the evening of April 1, 2026, opening with the day’s other launch: “Let me begin by congratulating the team at NASA and our brave astronauts on the successful launch of Artemis 2… It will be traveling further than any manned rocket has ever flown.” Then to the war, one month in: “As we speak this evening, it’s been just one month since the United States military began Operation Epic Fury.” He restated the casus belli as he states it — a regime that “recently killed 45,000 of their own people who were protesting,” a 47-year confrontation, and a nuclear program “right at the doorstep”: “For years, everyone has said that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. But in the end, those are just words if you’re not willing to take action when the time comes.”

He laid out the objectives — “eliminating Iran’s navy,” dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power — and the domestic footing he credits for them, including, as he stated it, over $18 trillion in investment and 53 stock-market record highs in a year. The close carried both tracks at once: “We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly. Very shortly, we are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks… In the meantime, discussions are ongoing. Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death.”

Why it matters

The April 1 address is the war’s one-month presidential accounting — objectives restated, a two-to-three-week horizon of heavier strikes announced, and negotiations acknowledged in the same breath — recorded on the Foreign Policy & Defense hub as the baseline for the ceasefire that followed within the week.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: the two-to-three-week strike horizon, the on-track-to-complete-objectives claim, and the $18 trillion investment figure, each as stated by the President in the address.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Delivers an Address to the Nation, Apr. 1, 2026,” The White House, April 1, 2026 (official upload, embedded above). All figures and characterizations as stated by the President in the address.