President Donald Trump was forced into damage-control mode Thursday after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made a stunning claim about the war in Iran: No Americans had died.
That would be quite a claim consideringv18 U.S. service members have been killedvduring the six-month-old conflict, with their remains returned to Dover Air Force Base in flag-draped transfer cases.
Lutnick made the remark during a CNBC interview Wednesday while praising Trump’s strategy of squeezing Iran economically.
“The way the president is playing Iran, right, there haven’t been American deaths,” Lutnick said. “It’s really just an economic chokeout which the administration is now executing more broadly, and I think it’ll be very effective.”
It wasn’t. At least not when it came to remembering the Americans who have died.
Trump stepped in Thursday morning to try to explain away his Cabinet secretary’s remarkable statement.
Posting on Truth Social, Trump claimed Lutnick “had Venezuela on his mind when he said nobody was killed,” apparently referring to a separate Venezuelan military operation in which no U.S. service members were killed.
Lutnick then followed Trump’s lead.
“I misspoke,” he wrote on X, explaining that he had been thinking about the Venezuelan operation when he made the comment.
“Eighteen members of our military have died, and to those families my heart breaks and I am so very sorry for their loss,” Lutnick added.
That’s one mess cleaned up.
But it wasn’t the only eyebrow-raising moment from Lutnick’s CNBC appearance.
During the same interview, he claimed that the enormous data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom “don’t use water.”
He dismissed claims that the facilities consume significant amounts of water as “propaganda by our adversaries to try to slow us down.”
There’s just one problem.
Lutnick has previously said the exact opposite.
In an interview last year, he acknowledged that data centers “suck water” and “need water.”
So, within the span of two interviews, Lutnick managed to offer two very different descriptions of how much water these facilities use.
And this isn’t the first time the Commerce secretary has found himself in the middle of a credibility problem.
Lutnick, a longtime friend and ally of Trump who chaired Trump’s transition effort after his 2024 election victory, has faced criticism inside and outside the administration for his sometimes freewheeling approach to economic and trade policy.
He’s also spent months under scrutiny over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and his changing accounts of how much contact he maintained with the disgraced financier.
Lutnick has long acknowledged knowing Epstein, who at one point lived next door to him in New York.
But Lutnick previously claimed that he cut ties with Epstein after a 2005 encounter that left him disturbed enough to vow he would “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
Documents released by the Justice Department this year, however, indicate that Lutnick’s contact with Epstein continued much later.
The documents show that Lutnick arranged a visit to Epstein’s private island in 2012.
Lutnick eventually acknowledged the visit during a February Senate Commerce Committee hearing after Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen questioned him about it.
“I did have lunch with him, as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation,” Lutnick said. He said his wife, four children and nannies were also present.
“We had lunch on the island, that is true, for an hour, and we left with all of my children with my nannies and my wife,” he said. “I don’t recall why we did it.”
Yet Lutnick also told senators that he “did not have any relationship with” Epstein and “barely had anything to do with that person.”
That history makes Thursday’s Iran gaffe especially awkward for an administration that has repeatedly demanded trust in its version of events.
