White House chaos intensifies after Iran downs two US warplanes

The race to find the missing airman from a downed US fighter jet has underscored the growing jeopardy for Donald Trump as the Iran war increasingly slips beyond his control.

Images of an empty ejection seat in the Iranian desert – and round-the-clock coverage of the frantic search for an American soldier lost behind enemy lines – confirmed the worst fears of many in Washington.

Days after he claimed that Tehran was “begging” for a deal to end the war, Trump was taunted by senior Iranian officials as the regime tightens its stranglehold on Gulf oil exports and the global economy.

The crisis capped another chaotic week in Washington. Trump’s sledgehammer diplomacy has pushed US alliances with Europe and Gulf states to the brink. At home, he faces a growing revolt from within his own Maga movement, while the war drives his approval rating to historic lows. “We’re speaking to allies on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon, even inside the administration,” one European diplomat said. “They all say the same thing: ‘We don’t know how to get through to him.’”

In a primetime address to the nation and a flurry of media interviews last week, Trump repeated his insistence that Tehran was desperate for a deal to end the fighting. “Why wouldn't they call? They’re getting decimated,” he told Time magazine.

Iran’s response – downing two US warplanes on Friday – has punctured that complacency. An American soldier paraded on Iranian TV would be a strategic and public relations “nightmare”, security sources in Washington admit, sparking inevitable comparisons with the 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis and the uproar surrounding US captives during the Vietnam war. Even if the missing airman is recovered safely, the crisis only raises further questions about the wisdom of placing US personnel in harm’s way to fight a war that the American people do not support or understand.

“You can spin it as proof that this is a vicious regime in Tehran but, inevitably, it gives the Iranians even more leverage,” one security source said. “And another hostage crisis will only harden public opinion against a war that was not popular from the start.”

The Iranian authorities were quick to hail the downing of the F-15E jet fighter as a victory, while videos spread across social media showing US Black Hawk helicopters rushing to the crash site in a mountainous and remote part of southern Iran.

Iran’s media urged the Iranian people to “capture the pilot alive”, with reports offering bounties of about £50,000 – sums far beyond the means of most Iranians, particularly among the rural farming communities near the crash site.

For Tehran, it was also a chance to display US weakness. A channel that has found internet fame for its AI-generated Lego-style videos supporting the Iranian regime and mocking Trump wasted no time in generating an animation of a Lego-style pilot running from a crowd of angry armed villagers.

The downing of two US warplanes was also a reminder that Iran retains the military capability to inflict serious damage on American forces despite the massive aerial bombardment by the US and Israeli airstrikes now entering their sixth week. Iran also struck two Black Hawks and another jet assisting in the search-and-rescue operation, with Brig Gen Alireza Elhami, commander of Iran’s joint air defence force and base, declaring his forces are “hunting” American aircraft.

Trump was mocked too by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker, identified by the White House as a potential leader for a new, “more reasonable” regime in Tehran. “This brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’” Ghalibaf posted on X. “Wow. What incredible progress. Absolute geniuses.”

The Trump administration had hoped to announce that a deal with Tehran was close when it scheduled the president’s televised address on Wednesday. In the event, Trump veered between support for peace talks and threats to bomb Iran “back to the stone age”.

One former US intelligence official said: “It was clear they wanted the speech to be a rollout of something new and, at the last minute, they didn’t have it. The speech was a big nothing.” They added: “That implies there isn’t a strategy. They are dependent on Iran making massive concessions, and since Iran’s not willing to do that, there’s no plan B.”

Frustrated by the stalemate, Trump has again turned his ire on European allies, telling them to “Go get your own oil” and threatening to abandon the Strait of Hormuz. In interviews last week, the president also threatened to withdraw the US from Nato and mocked Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron in video footage at an Easter lunch event that was posted and then deleted from the White House website.

At the same event, guests compared Trump to Jesus Christ, while his approval rating hit a new low of 33% in a poll last week. Late on Thursday evening, he broke away from strategising over the war to wonder on social media: “Is Bruce Springsteen going to sue his plastic surgeon?”

Underscoring the growing sense of disconnect between the White House and voters, Trump confirmed on Friday that he will ask Congress for a $1.5tn defence budget in 2027, the highest in modern history. The move will be funded by sweeping cuts to domestic spending, including housing and education programmes.

“For the love of all that is holy, we need to get out of Iran,” said conservative podcast host Megyn Kelly, a former Maga loyalist who is an outspoken critic of the war.

Diplomats from Nato allies and Gulf states complain the president is isolated in a tightly guarded echo chamber, speaking only to a handful of close aides. There is widespread dismay that the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who sponsored legislation to require approval from Congress to withdraw from Nato when he was a senator, has joined Trump in trashing the alliance.

“Trump doesn’t need to formally withdraw from Nato to wreck the alliance,” one European diplomat said. “The language alone, coming on top of the threats to invade Greenland [earlier this year] is doing terrible damage.”

Nato secretary general Mark Rutte will visit Washington this ‌week in an effort to defuse tensions. But it was a measure of how frayed the alliance has become that European diplomats were relieved when Trump did not go further in his attacks during the address on Wednesday. Leaks before the speech suggested the president would voice his “disgust” with US allies for refusing to join the war.

Hopes of salvaging the transatlantic alliance could fall on the unwilling shoulders of King Charles, who arrives in Washington on a state visit to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence later this month. The king and queen will be hosted by Trump at the White House before Charles delivers an address to Congress.

There have been calls in Westminster to postpone the trip after Trump’s latest attacks on Starmer and the UK, dismissing British aircraft carriers as unwanted “toys”. But the president is an admirer of the king and there are cautious hopes that Charles’s soft diplomacy could ease the rift. One former US state department official observed that the only European leaders capable of getting through to Trump were the king and Vladimir Putin. In a carefully worded statement, Buckingham Palace confirmed last week that the trip would go ahead “on advice of His Majesty’s government, and at the invitation of the president of the United States”.