As Donald Trump’s war against Iran stagnated into a stalemate and strategic defeat, hawkish Fox News personalities who urged the president to attack in the first place have repeatedly used a football metaphor to emphasize how close the U.S. was to some nebulous victory.

Trump and his Fox allies began predicting an imminent end to the Iran war just days after the start of the U.S. bombing campaign. But four weeks into the war, the Iranian regime was intact and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatened global trade in energy and fertilizer, rattling even some of the president’s allies.

Fox contributor Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and Fox senior strategic analyst Jack Keane, a retired Army general — both avid Iran hawks whose commentary on the subject reportedly influenced Trump’s thinking — responded by stressing that the U.S. was “on the 20-yard line” and “in a red zone.”

“After three weeks of operations, we’ve got them at the 20-yard line, but you’ve got to get into the end zone to score,” Thiessen said during a March 26 interview on Fox & Friends. “The question is how do we finish those last 20 yards? The last 20 yards are the hardest. What’s left — all the easy targets have been hit. What’s left is the hardened targets, the hidden targets, the deeply buried stuff. We are dismantling that. We have a plan to do that.”

Thiessen repeatedly claimed over the following months that the U.S. remained at the “20-yard line” but could score whenever it mustered the will to do so, before conceding last month that he was “willing to live with” stopping in that position because Trump had gone “80 yards better than any president before him.” His Fox colleagues and their guests, meanwhile, more hopefully claimed that the U.S. was even closer to victory — and abruptly dropped the metaphor over the summer as the war settled into a quagmire.

March 27. “I try to describe it in a football analogy,” Keane explained on Fox & Friends. “You know, we’re in the red zone here, we’re on the 20-yard line, trying to get to the goal line, and the opposition is putting as much impediments in because they can see how close we are to attaining our objectives.”
April 1. The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), discussing a speech in which Trump said the war was “nearing completion,” told Fox’s Sean Hannity: “We’re inside the 10-yard line, and he’s telling Iran how this movie ends.”
April 21. “I still agree with the general though — Gen. Jack Keane — is, we’re on the 5-yard line right now,” Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones said on the show.
April 22. Jones again cited Keane the following day, saying, “We’re on the 5-yard line right now.” His co-host Ainsley Earhardt responded: “We’ve continuously heard that we’re on the 5-yard line. We’ve got to finish, we’ve got to make that touchdown, and we’ve got to bleed them dry, and that’s what President Trump is doing.”
May 11. “There is no doubt in my mind, taking out the ayatollah, a lot of their leadership, has put us in a better position,” said Jones. “Are we on the 5-yard line? Of course, but the president had to take this action.”
June 9. Thiessen, responding on America Reports to Iran downing a U.S. helicopter, said Trump should “finish Operation Epic Fury, which was stopped at about the 20-yard line, take it into the finish line, announce that you've achieved your objectives. Then once they have been disarmed of all that capability, open up the strait by force and over time hand it off to an international coalition, and then arm the Iranian people to take down this regime.”
June 10. On Special Report the following night, Thiessen defended Trump’s frequent claims that a deal with Iran was imminent by saying, “He doesn’t need a deal. … He was at the 5-yard line, we have to hit the targets.”
June 11. The Five co-host Dana Perino commented, “It feels like we’ve been in this doom loop on the 1-yard line for three months, and I hope that that is true.”
July 8. Jones said on Fox & Friends that “from a military standpoint, we’re still on the 5-yard line.”
July 21. Thiessen, asked on Special Report how the war could end, said: “We stopped the fighting and the ceasefire on the 20-yard line, we take it into the end zone. We have about 14 days of combat where we have to take out all the targets that we have available. We took out 85% of their defense industrial base, we take out 95% of it, we set back all their programs, and we further entomb the nuclear dust. Then we stop major combat operations, we impose the blockade, we open up the Strait of Hormuz, and then we go and we help the Iranian people overthrow the regime.”
July 25, July 29, July 30. Thiessen reiterated his July 21 remarks claiming the U.S. campaign was “on the 20-yard line” before the ceasefire on multiple Fox shows.
August 4. On The Story, Thiessen credited Trump with “huge accomplishments” in Iran but added: “We have to acknowledge that when we had the ceasefire in April, we stopped at the 20-yard line. … If it turns out that we are only going to go to the 20-yard line, I'm willing to live with that. You know, it's 80 yards better than any president before him and it's a huge accomplishment, but we have this opportunity here to irreversibly change the course of the Middle East sitting right here for the president to seize.”

The war reached the six-month mark on August 28, having “deteriorated into a quagmire of the president’s own making with no clear goals, no obvious strategy and no end in sight,” while senior U.S. military leaders warn that “prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters