Alex Ritson

since those wars were over.

But particularly among Trump's MAGA base, there is a significant chunk of that base that is very weary of long, messy foreign entanglements or regime change exercises in the Middle East, having seen what happened in Iraq and then in Afghanistan over 20 years of war.

And the more casualties, the more politically difficult it is for the administration to make the case for war to those who really care

don't want to see this turn into a long-running stream of US casualties as we saw in the 2000 and 2010s.

And yet President Trump seems to think the campaign is going well.

He certainly does.

We spoke to him on Air Force One on the flight from Dover to Miami where he's spending the weekend.

And he seems to think that from a military standpoint, this is going extremely well, that Iran is being decimated, that their capacity to...

manufacture and then launch drones and missiles has been very, very much diminished.

And he certainly thinks that this is going extremely well.

What he didn't answer was what he thinks necessarily comes after.

He did say that the U.S.

would, in his mind, have to choose another Iranian leader that

is perhaps more cooperative than the Islamic regime in the hopes that the U.S.

doesn't have to return militarily to the region again in five years or 10 years.

But he's certainly, at least in the short term, very optimistic about how this is going and the impact that these strikes from the U.S.

and Israel are having on Iran's military capacity.

President Trump thinks the bombing campaign is going well, but the Iranian government remains defiant.

Ali Larijani is the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, as well as a close confidant of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed last week.

The strikes carried out by the Islamic Republic will continue.