On Thursday, 11 November, Donald Trump told Hugh Hewitt’s show that “nobody’s been killed in the last five months” of the war with Iran and that “we haven’t lost a soldier in five months”. The Washington Post and People show the claim is false: American service members died in July, inside that five-month window.

In the same interview he compared it with Russia, “losing 25,000 people a month between Russia and Ukraine, mostly soldiers”. That figure is his, not a toll checked here. He also said the United States controls the Gulf, that “we won Venezuela” and that it controls the Strait of Hormuz. Those are the president’s statements, not findings.

The Washington Post summarises the July deaths this way: three soldiers in an enemy attack on an air base in Jordan, another at an air base in Iraq, and a Navy captain in an emergency landing in the Arabian Sea.

People, citing a Pentagon release, names the four soldiers. On 17 July, in the attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii; Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas; and Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, New York, were killed. On 19 July, Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, died at Erbil Air Base in Iraq during a controlled detonation of a downed drone.

People also reports that on 1 July a Navy officer was killed after his helicopter made an emergency water landing in the Arabian Sea. The Washington Post refers to a Navy captain, in the same sea, and does not give a date or a name in its summary. The two newsrooms do not use the same wording, and this account does not attach a name that those texts do not give.

On 22 July, Trump attended the dignified transfer of the four service members killed in Jordan and Iraq, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, People reports. Before he travelled he called them “great heroes”.

The Washington Post writes that the Pentagon has reported 23 deaths of American service members in the Middle East during the war with Iran. In another Thursday interview, with Stephen A. Smith, Trump said he had to do what he did in Iran and that he hopes it will be seen as a great decision. That line is not the claim of no deaths in five months.

The photograph, from 2011, shows the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery, not the 2026 Veterans Day ceremony and not the radio interview. Image: Arlington National Cemetery, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: Trump falsely claims ‘nobody’s been killed’ in Iran war ‘in the last five months’, The Washington Post.