CORINTH, Mississippi — Speaking at a campaign rally at Crossroads Arena in Corinth, Mississippi, on October 26, 2026, President Donald Trump defended the ongoing war with Iran and told the crowd: "We didn't start the war with Iran. Iran started the war with us." The line echoed a remark made earlier at the same rally by Representative Trent Kelly, who argued that Iran had started the war in 1979. Trump also dismissed an earlier ceasefire as a waste of time and said he had expected oil prices to rise much higher.

The claim, as stated

The claim under examination is narrow and specific: that Iran, not the United States, started the war now being fought. It is not a claim about the 1979 hostage crisis, about decades of hostility, or about Iranian-backed attacks over many years. It is a claim about who started this war, and it can be tested against the documented sequence of events in early 2026.

How the 2026 war actually began

The current war, known by the United States as Operation Epic Fury and by Israel as Operation Roaring Lion, began on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched coordinated, large-scale airstrikes and missile barrages against Iran. Those opening strikes targeted nuclear infrastructure, military installations and leadership compounds, and they killed Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, along with several senior officials. Iran's retaliation — waves of missile and drone strikes against Israel, US military installations and regional assets — came after those opening strikes, not before them. That sequence is documented in the running live coverage of the Gulf crisis and in the reporting of the war's opening days.

The 1979 argument does not rescue the claim

The only reading under which the claim works is the one offered at the rally itself: that Iran "started" the conflict in 1979, when revolutionaries seized the US embassy in Tehran. That is a real historical event, and it poisoned US-Iranian relations for decades. But it is not the start of the 2026 war. Between 1979 and February 2026 there were long stretches of diplomacy, sanctions, proxy conflict and negotiated agreements, including the ceasefire Trump himself dismissed at Corinth. Treating a 47-year-old crisis as the starting gun for a war launched in 2026 collapses two different things into one sentence, which is why the claim misleads even though its 1979 reference point is real.

What the intelligence record shows

Accounts of Pentagon briefings to Congress around the launch of the February 2026 operation indicate that intelligence officials had not identified an imminent Iranian strike against American forces that would have required a preemptive offensive. There were also no reported Iranian first strikes on US forces that triggered the February 28 operation. That absence matters: a preemptive war can be debated on its merits, but it cannot honestly be described as a war the other side started. The administration's own framing at the time presented the operation as a long-planned action — Trump said at Corinth that it "should've been done a long time ago" — which sits awkwardly with the claim that Washington was forced into it.

Our finding

The claim is Misleading. It takes a genuine historical grievance from 1979 and uses it to rewrite the start of a war that, by the documented record, began with US-Israeli strikes on February 28, 2026. Readers should also note the shifting timeline offered at the same rally: Trump said in February that the war would take about six weeks, yet eight months later he was still defending it on the campaign trail — a further reason to treat rally rhetoric about this war with caution. For the latest verified developments, see the dispatch on Trump's Sunday-strike reversal and the Iranian warning that followed it, plus more in Politics.