Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night, at a CPAC gala after the midterms, on the war with Iran:
“But you can’t really call it a war, because a war is like Russia-Ukraine. They lose 25,000 people a month. We haven’t lost one person in six months.”
The record does not support that claim. Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was killed in action on July 19, 2026, at Erbil Air Base, Iraq, during the controlled detonation of a downed one-way attack drone, according to the Department of War’s casualty release. July 19 is less than four months before the president spoke, and Swinton was one of four U.S. soldiers killed in the region that week. Video: CPAC
President Trump made the remarks on Friday, November 6, 2026, speaking poolside at the CPAC Circle Retreat and Gala at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, with CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp standing beside him. The passage came as he described the U.S. strike campaign against Iran earlier in the year and said Iran wants to make a deal. The claim is checkable against the Defense Department’s own casualty releases, which record the deaths of four American soldiers in Iraq and Jordan in July 2026, inside the six months the president described. The clip is a short excerpt from CPAC’s own recording of its event, published by CPAC on its official accounts.
