On Easter Sunday, former U.S. President Donald Trump made a series of stunning, unplanned disclosures about U.S. operations targeting Iran, confirming that Washington secretly armed anti-government protesters inside the country just weeks before launching military strikes—even as American diplomatic envoys held face-to-face negotiations with senior Iranian leaders on European soil.
In a phone interview with Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst, Trump laid out details of the covert operation: the U.S. arranged weapons shipments to Iranian demonstrators who flooded city streets in late 2024, sparked by crippling economic hardship brought on by sweeping U.S. sanctions on Tehran. However, the secret mission ultimately went completely off plan.
The weapons, which were routed to intended recipients through Kurdish intermediaries based in the region, never ended up in the hands of the protesters the U.S. intended to arm. Paraphrasing Trump’s account during the on-air segment, Yingst relayed the former president’s blunt assessment: “We sent them a lot of guns. We sent them through the Kurds, and the president says he thinks the Kurds kept them.”
This on-the-record confirmation aligns with earlier unconfirmed intelligence reports that the Central Intelligence Agency had been working for months to arm Iranian Kurdish opposition groups. Trump’s remarks also line up with public comments he made in early March, when he stated it would be “wonderful” if Iranian Kurdish forces based in Iraq crossed the border to launch attacks on the Iranian government. Just days after that provocative comment, however, Trump walked back his position, adopting a far more cautious tone. “We’re very friendly with the Kurds, as you know, but we don’t want to make the war any more complex than it already is. I have ruled that out. I don’t want the Kurds going in,” he said at the time.
Experts say the newly revealed admission makes clear that the U.S. was far more deeply involved in efforts to destabilize the sitting Iranian government than previously acknowledged—at the exact same time that U.S. diplomats were holding unofficial back-channel negotiations with Iranian representatives. The mass protests that the U.S. sought to support were ultimately crushed by Iranian security forces, with conflicting reports over casualties. Trump claimed in the interview that Iranian authorities killed more than “40,000 civilians” during the government crackdown, but no independent verification or credible evidence has emerged to back up that staggering death toll claim.
In separate comments to Axios, Trump shared additional details about another high-stakes recent event: the successful rescue of an American F-15 aircrew member whose plane was shot down over Iranian territory the previous Friday. The downed pilot was safely recovered in the late hours of Saturday, capping off a multi-day search and extraction operation that put U.S. forces on high alert. During the mission, U.S. intelligence officials had raised concerns that the pilot’s emergency locator beacon was being used by Iranian forces as bait to lure American rescue teams into a trap.
Trump’s inflammatory language describing Iranians during his discussion of the pilot rescue drew swift backlash from political observers and advocacy groups across the globe. Referring to ordinary Iranian citizens in his remarks to Axios, Trump claimed: “Thousands of these savages were hunting him down. Even the population was looking for him. They offered people a bonus if they captured him.” The dehumanizing language was immediately condemned as bigoted and inflammatory by critics.