Donald Trump furiously pushed back Wednesday against reports that his surprise strike on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities hadn’t “completely and fully obliterated them” as he’s previously claimed.
While attending a NATO summit in The Hague, Trump attacked multiple news outlets that had reported the day before on a damning early assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which found his strike on Iran hadn’t completely destroyed the country’s nuclear capabilities and instead only delayed it a few months. Once the president got going, he couldn’t stop.
“This was an unbelievable hit by genius pilots and genius people in the military, and they’re not being given credit for it because we have scum,” Trump said, referring to some reporters in the room. “CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick. And what they’ve done is they’re trying to make this unbelievable victory into something less.”
Trump, who regularly rails against the press, claimed he was only doing so on behalf of the service members who’d executed the strike.
“Very unfair to the pilots that risk their lives for our country, and then they get fake news New York Times and CNN make up a phony story to get some hits. That’s the only reason I care about it, because those pilots were so brave, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump said. “They flew into the hornets’ nest and then they got hurt so badly by what the fake news wrote, and it was CNN, it was The New York Times, and they’re both disgusting, disgusting, really horrible groups of people.”
Trump then outright denied the findings of his own government’s report, once again opting for intelligence from a foreign government: Israel.
When asked whether he would attack Iran again if they rebuilt their facilities, Trump replied, “I’m not gonna have to worry about that. It’s gone for years.” The president claimed that Israel’s nascent report would find that they had achieved “total obliteration.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has opted to trust Israeli intelligence over U.S. intelligence. He repeatedly ignored the annual threat assessment produced by his own IC, which found that Iran was “not building a nuclear weapon,” opting to trust Israel instead.
Trump also tore into the outlets in a post on Truth Social Tuesday night. “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY. THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC,” he wrote.
But the Trump administration has been reluctant to meet the president’s absolute confidence of a successful strike. While Trump patted himself on the back for a mission accomplished, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said Sunday it was “way too early” to say whether the strike had actually been successful. That same day, Vice President JD Vance declined to confirm that Iran’s nuclear sites had been completely destroyed.
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