Trump forced to clean up Howard Lutnick’s latest mess after secretary makes outlandish claim

President Donald Trump on Thursday was forced to use his Truth Social megaphone to play cleanup after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s televised claim that no Americans had died in the administration’s six-month-old war against Iran sparked outrage and ridicule.

Writing on Truth Social, Trump wrote that Lutnick “had Venezuela on his mind when he said nobody was killed” in the unprovoked war that has led to 18 American service members returning in flag-draped transfer cases to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

The Commerce Secretary had previously told CNBC on Wednesday that “there haven’t been American deaths” in the war while touting the administration’s push to isolate Tehran economically after the half-year airstrikes has both failed to topple the Islamic Republic and supercharged cost-of-living issues by raising gasoline prices across the country.

“The way the president is playing Iran, right, there haven’t been American deaths. It’s really just an economic chokeout which the administration is now executing more broadly, and I think it’ll be very effective,” he said at the time.

He subsequently apologized for his gaffe in a post on X, writing that he’d “misspoke.”

“[Eighteen members of our military have died, and to those families my heart breaks and I am so very sorry for their loss. I was thinking about the Venezuelan military operation where no service members died,” he said.

Lutnick also touched another third rail in the same CNBC interview when he claimed that the massive data centers used by AI giants and opposed by a majority of American voters “don’t use water” and called allegations that the huge computer facilities are water-intensive “propaganda by our adversaries to try to slow us down.”

His claim directly contradicted a statement he made in an interview last year in which he said they “suck water” and “need water.”

The Commerce Department head, a longtime friend of the president who served as the chair of his transition effort after he won the 2024 election, is widely disliked by many administration officials who have bristled at his seat-of-the-pants approach that has led him to clash with other administration principals involved in trade and economic policymaking.

Although he remains in good stead with Trump thanks to their decades-long relationship, Lutnick has been under fire for months due to his ties to deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the conflicting statements he has given about the extent of his relationship with the disgraced sex offender.

He has long been known to have had ties to Epstein, who was his next-door neighbor in New York at one point, years before he pleaded guilty to prostitution charges in Florida as part of a sweetheart deal with a George W Bush-era prosecutor who later became Trump’s first Secretary of Labor during his first term.

In October, he told the New York Post that he’d cut off contact with Epstein — who died in a New York jail cell while awaiting sex trafficking charges in 2019 — after a 2005 encounter that he claimed had left him so unsettled that he’d vowed to “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”

But documents released by the Justice Department this year that were reviewed by The Independent show that Lutnick not only maintained ties with Epstein as late as 2018 — the year before he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges and long after he’d spent time in jail for state-level offenses related to his preying on young girls — but even arranged a visit to Epstein’s island in 2012.

Lutnick grudgingly admitted to visiting the infamous landmass, which is part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, under questioning from Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen during a February hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee.

“I did have lunch with him, as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation. My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies,” he said.

“We had lunch on the island, that is true, for an hour, and we left with all of my children with my nannies and my wife … I don’t recall why we did it.”

Lutnick also claimed in his testimony that he “did not have any relationship with” Epstein and “barely had anything to do with that person.”