President Donald Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that U.S. military strikes on Iran will intensify night after night, and that power plants and bridges will be targeted next week unless Tehran agrees to negotiate. The warning, delivered in an exclusive interview with chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst on "Special Report," marked the most explicit escalation timeline Trump has laid out since Operation Epic Fury began more than four months ago.
Trump left no ambiguity about what comes next if Iran stays away from the table:
"We're going to hit them very hard tonight. We're going to hit them hard tomorrow night. We're gonna hit them really hard the night after."
And then, he said, the campaign gets worse for Tehran. "Next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges. We're gonna knock out all their power plants. We're going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate."
The president's threat did not come in a vacuum. U.S. Central Command has conducted consecutive strikes near the Strait of Hormuz over the past several days, and the tempo appears to be the heaviest since the conflict began. The Washington Examiner reported that the U.S. and Iran have traded airstrikes for five straight days, with Trump confirming that Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried Iranian nuclear site under construction, is on his target list.
"We're going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready," Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt in a separate interview earlier this week.
When Yingst asked about new activity at a nuclear site outside Tehran that had been previously hit by U.S. strikes, Trump was dismissive. He said U.S. forces could inflict "major damage" on the site "in a matter of minutes," adding, "When they know it's coming, they disappear."
The president also confirmed that he has not ruled out a ground campaign. Asked about options that included seizing Kharg Island, Iran's primary oil export terminal, with U.S. troops, Trump said, "Sometimes you need a ground campaign." He added: "As far as taking it is concerned, if we degrade them far enough and deep enough back, I would do that."
The current escalation follows the collapse of an interim ceasefire agreed to last month. That deal was supposed to pause hostilities, but it fell apart, a pattern Trump referenced bluntly in the Fox interview.
"They want to make a deal. But every time they make a deal, they break it."
Trump called off strikes in mid-June after announcing a broad deal had been approved "at the highest levels." Within two weeks, the administration declared Iran had violated the ceasefire in the Strait of Hormuz, and strikes resumed.
The consequences for global shipping have been severe. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most critical oil chokepoint, was down roughly 90% from normal levels on Monday. AP News reported that weekly cargo shipments through the strait have dropped by nearly a quarter, with Brent crude trading above $85 a barrel, more than 15% higher than pre-war prices.
The U.S. has reimposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports in the strait, and Trump stated that keeping the waterway open remains a core military objective.
Tehran has not absorbed the strikes quietly. Iranian officials told AP that U.S. strikes have killed more than 35 people and wounded over 300 others. Iran has retaliated with missile and drone attacks on U.S. allies, and its military has framed the strait as an inviolable boundary.
Col. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, an Iranian military spokesperson, declared: "Under no circumstances and in no way will we allow America, as a foreign and extraregional country, to interfere in the Strait of Hormuz. This is Iran's invincible red line."
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also successfully launched its first-ever military satellite, a development the Washington Free Beacon reported advances Tehran's ballistic missile program. The Trump administration responded by pursuing expanded sanctions and working to extend a UN arms embargo on Iran before it expires, a move that, if it fails, would allow Iran to legally purchase advanced military equipment from Russia and China.
A senior Trump administration official told the Free Beacon: "The president has been clear that the United States will enforce and expand maximum pressure to impose costs on Iran's malign behavior so the regime will enter comprehensive negotiations."
One notable shift in Tuesday's interview: Trump walked back his earlier plan to charge a 20% toll on all vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz. He said unnamed Middle Eastern nations had agreed instead to make "massive" investment and trade deals with the United States.
"I was going to charge a fee, but instead they'd rather spend a lot of money in the United States, which frankly is better because I don't like the idea of a fee."
No specific dollar figures or country names were disclosed. But the pivot suggests the administration is using the military campaign as leverage not only against Iran but also to extract economic commitments from Gulf states that depend on the strait for their own commerce.
Trump claimed in the interview that Iran's military capabilities have been reduced to a point where rebuilding would take two decades. "I think they're completed now, honestly," he said. "If we left right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild what they have."
But he also acknowledged that Iran retains some capacity to fight back, reaching for a boxing analogy: "They've been degraded to a very low level. And they have fight. You know? It's like a great boxer. You think you have him beat, and then, all of a sudden, he comes back, and he gives you a shot. They have some fight left, but they don't have much."
That assessment tracks with the broader pattern. Even as CENTCOM videos show strikes on submarine and ship maintenance facilities in Bandar Abbas, Iran continues to launch retaliatory attacks. The initial massive U.S. strikes came after Tehran attacked commercial ships in the strait, and the cycle of provocation and response has not broken.
Trump's rhetoric has escalated steadily since his February State of the Union address. As National Review noted, Trump referenced the Iranian regime's 47-year history in that speech, framing it as spreading "terrorism" through its proxies, language analysts described as "portentous" and potentially laying the groundwork for a sustained air campaign.
That campaign is now well underway. The president has moved from warning that Iran "will no longer exist" if the U.S. is forced to finish the fight, to declaring 1,000 missiles aimed at Iran, to now publicly naming the next categories of targets on a week-by-week schedule.
Trump framed the logic plainly in the Fox interview: "The only way you can negotiate with these people is through strength, and the only strength is military strength, and that's what we've done."
He also issued a direct warning to Tehran's leadership: "You better make a deal. You're not going to have anybody left. We're being very careful with the civilian population, as you know, but I said, 'You better make a deal, you're going to not have anything left.'"
Several questions hang over the campaign. Iran has not publicly responded to Trump's latest escalation timeline. The identity of the Iranian negotiators who reportedly spoke with U.S. representatives remains undisclosed. No independent damage assessments have been released to verify Trump's claim that Iran's military is functionally finished. And the specific terms of the "massive" trade deals with Middle Eastern nations remain unspecified.
The ceasefire violation that restarted strikes in late June also raises a harder question: whether any deal Tehran agrees to will hold, or whether the cycle of agreement and collapse will simply repeat.
Trump himself seems aware of that risk. He told Yingst that Iran's pattern is to make deals and then break them. His answer is to keep hitting until the cost of breaking the next one is too high to bear.
Whether that calculus works depends on whether Tehran concludes it has more to lose by fighting than by talking. So far, the regime has chosen defiance. The president has made clear what comes next if that doesn't change.