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Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was forced to apologize after falsely saying that zero U.S. servicemembers have died in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, in the latest instance of the Trump administration demonstrating a careless attitude toward the 18 soldiers killed in the war.
In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Lutnick bragged that no troops have died because of how deftly the U.S. has been fighting in Iran.
“I think the way the president is playing Iran, there haven’t been American deaths. It’s really just an economic chokeout which the administration is now executing more broadly,” said Lutnick, calling in from the G20 AI ministerial held in North Carolina this week.
Eighteen U.S. troops have been killed in the war and 756 have been wounded, according to the Pentagon — which has already faced scrutiny for obfuscating the U.S.’s casualties in relation to the war. The U.S. and Israel have killed roughly 3,500 Iranians since February, including thousands of civilians like those killed by a U.S. bombing of a wedding this week.
“While speaking yesterday at the G20 innovation summit about AI, I answered a question about the military actions in Iran, I misspoke,” Lutnick wrote in an apology posted on X. “18 members of our military have died, and to those families my heart breaks and I am so very sorry for their loss.”
Lutnick claims he was thinking of the U.S.’s Venezuela operation, in which the U.S. killed dozens of people and abducted the country’s president but did not suffer troop deaths. President Donald Trump also gave this excuse in a short post on Truth Social Thursday morning.
The commerce secretary then invoked the 9/11 attack. “As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I am deeply thankful for our military and the sacrifices the men and women who serve our great country make, so such an attack, where I lost my brother Gary (36), my best friend Doug (39) and 656 other close friends and colleagues in the attacks on the World Trade Center, never happens again,” he said.
He is referring to the employees of his Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, who died in the attack. At the time, he was CEO of the company.
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Lutnick, who has spent the past decades speaking at length about the human toll of the attack, has faced scrutiny for several of the decisions in its aftermath — first, when the firm froze payroll to families of deceased employees shortly after the attack. The company later pledged to give the victims’ families a portion of their profits for the next five years.
Years later, when Cantor received a $135 million settlement from American Airlines over the attack, Lutnick again faced criticism when the settlement was not paid out to families of the victims, but to himself, the firm, and other executives. He took the largest share of as much as $25 million from the settlement, reports said.
The remarks are the latest instance of Trump’s cabinet sweeping aside war-related troop casualties as the war continues to weigh on the administration’s approval ratings.
Recently, a wife of one of the servicemembers killed when their aircraft crashed during a refueling mission related to the war on March 12 said that her family has been denied benefits because Congress has not authorized the war. After her post on Instagram about her husband’s death went viral, the Air Force said that it will examine her case.
“So not only was my husband killed in a war he never wanted to participate in,” she said, “but now the benefits we’re left with are being dictated by semantics and public perception.”
Critics have said that the war is unconstitutional as only Congress has the power to declare war. Trump admitted as such in March, saying that he didn’t want to use the word “war” to describe it “because you’re supposed to get approval” from Congress.
Trump has spent the last months downplaying troop casualties, bragging that fewer troops have died than in previous wars. After U.S. troops were killed in the first days of the war, Trump faced criticism after he said: “That’s the way it is. Likely be more.”
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