For nearly five months, Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran. When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. He has devoted a full address to the topic only once—a rambling prime-time speech nearly four months ago that contained little substance. At this point, after more than 20 weeks of hostilities and at least 18 Americans dead and hundreds wounded, the people of the United States do not—cannot—entirely know what is happening, what progress U.S. forces are making, or what the president’s goals are.
This opacity seems to be by design: The president and his lieutenants appear unwilling to admit that they started, and are now losing, a war with one of America’s most dedicated enemies, and obfuscating probably seems less damaging than admitting this painful truth. Of course, some of their statements are merely mistakes. Some are spin. Others are exaggerations. But many of them are flat lies that Trump and his appointees dump into the public square seemingly without hesitation.
Consider the number of times Trump has said that the war is over or almost over, such as his April 17 declaration to USA Today that the fight to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “over, it’s a great victory.” (He has made other claims of imminent victory at least 30 times, by one count.) He has insisted for months that the Iranian military is finished and that it has nothing left, as he did in the first week of the war when hesaid: “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” (He made similar claims at least half a dozen times in the first month of the war alone.) He has said that Iranian nuclear materials must be handed over, then said that the same materials are worthless and can stay where they are, and now has gone back to arguing that ending the Iranian nuclear program is the most important goal of the war.
All of these claims are dominoes that were set up to fall, one after another, by the single most egregious mistake that Trump made when choosing to go to war: He bet on quick regime change in a terrorist dictatorship and had no other plan should his long shot fall short. Perhaps Trump, after talking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believed the optimistic scenarios of a rapid regime collapse that Netanyahu and others floated. Trump’s own secretary of state reportedly warned the president that he was being sold “bullshit.” Nonetheless, despite Trump’s statement on the first night of the war offering a jumble of rationalizations, he at least made clear that he intended to topple the regime.
But within days, it became apparent that regime change was not happening. Unable to face failure, Trump resorted to prevarication. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks, perhaps a month or a little more. When that timeline fell apart, Trump and his advisers began to dial through various reasons for staying in the war, but regime change—so prominent a goal in the first hours of the conflict—was now no longer one of them. Trump eventually claimed, dishonestly, that he’d never had any such intentions. (He has also said that U.S. actions changed the regime anyway by killing top Iranian leaders—“We’ve had regime change,” he said in late March—implying that he either doesn’t know what regime change means, or he knows and was trying to save face.)
He then piled up more falsehoods. The war was going great, the president and the self-appointed “secretary of war” told the world. “Total and complete victory. 100 percent,” Trump told the French AFP news service on April 8. “No question about it.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the same day, called Operation Epic Fury “a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V military victory” and said that Iran had been rendered “combat ineffective for years to come.” These statements were obvious nonsense. (During early briefings at the Pentagon, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, who must live in the world of real facts and figures, was more circumspect in his pronouncements, mostly limiting himself to a recitation of events and numbers regarding U.S. actions.)
Among the president’s favorite words is obliterated—a term he has repeatedly applied to Iran’s nuclear program and its military forces. Such assertions are clearly false and were almost certainly knowably false from the start. Iran’s military capability has been degraded, not obliterated, which is why this wording has come back to haunt Trump. Over the past few days, a clip of the Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo has gone viral; in it, Bartiromo points out what any sensible person who has listened to Trump talk about the war might question: “I don’t understand how it’s possible that Iran has the capabilities to fight this way and continue to try to lash out,” she said. She was puzzled, she added, “because the U.S. has obliterated Iran’s military, and the president continues to reiterate that.”
Bartiromo’s observation has only three possible responses. One is that the president genuinely has no idea what he’s saying, which would be beyond alarming in any circumstances, but especially during a time of war. Another option is that Hegseth and other advisers are keeping the truth from him, which would be a civil-military crisis of unprecedented gravity. The third option is that Trump is lying.
Now that a poorly negotiated cease-fire has finally fallen apart, Trump has returned to one of his most cringe-inducing howlers: The Iranians, he has said repeatedly, really want a deal. (CNN estimated last month that he has claimed to be close to a deal almost 40 times.) No, they don’t just want a deal: They are pleading for a deal. They are desperate for a deal. Tehran appears to enjoy outing Trump on this one; sometimes the Iranians seem to launch attacks in the region just to make the point that Trump is wrong. (Yesterday, Iran claimed to have struck a data center in Bahrain belonging to Amazon.)
The Pentagon, the institution that should be explaining the details of the war to the public, has fallen mostly silent: Hegseth is happy to offer clips of himself doing comically sloppy pull-ups, but neither he nor Caine has held a briefing on the war since May 5. Americans, after months of war, cannot even be sure how many men and women in uniform have been wounded or how severely.
This information void at America’s military headquarters is a dramatic departure from previous conflicts, when reporters were embedded with American military units; when the Pentagon offered regular, in many cases daily, briefings on operations; and when civilian and military leaders in DOD answered real questions from real journalists. Now those journalists have been banished from the Pentagon, and White House minions lash out at reporters, call them names, and accuse them of bad-faith attacks on America and the U.S. military.
The Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe, for example, recently pressed DOD about a story from The New York Times showing that the Pentagon has been slow to update an online database of those killed and wounded in the Iran war. A Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said on X that “partisan hacks” at the Times were “desperate to smear America’s military,” and another spokesperson, Joel Valdez, blasted Lamothe in an X post as a “disgruntled WaPo hack.” Lamothe’s offense, apparently, had been confirming that the Times’ story was, in fact, accurate.
[Read: Trump owes Americans a better explanation about Iran]
As the CNN reporter Brian Stelter notes, “Hegseth hasn’t explained the military strategy behind the renewed air strikes. His department hasn’t revealed the circumstances that led to the recent deaths of US service members. It’s all indicative of a larger effort to control information, limit access and avoid difficult questions about the war.” This is more than a lack of transparency; the Pentagon is taking away the ability to query actual human beings, instead redirecting journalists to an online source that is itself an obstacle to getting timely and accurate facts.
And the deceptions continue. When Hegseth and Caine appeared yesterday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Jon Ossoff read chapter and verse from Hegseth’s own statements about victory and the certainty of an Iranian surrender, and asked Hegseth whether he stood by them. In effect, Ossoff was asking Hegseth whether he had been lying then or whether he’s lying now. Hegseth became defensive, trying to talk over Ossoff and responding only with boilerplate deflections about the greatness of the American military and how Iran would never get a nuclear weapon. Hegseth refused to give any other answer; he finished his afternoon of testimony by blowing his stack when Senator Gary Peters called him a failure.
Trump and Hegseth are putting on a brave face, warning Iran that it will pay for killing more Americans. “Every time Iran kills an American Soldier,” Trump posted Monday on Truth Social, “they will pay for that killing many times over!” This morning, Trump posted that for every ship attacked in the strait, “the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran.” Leaving aside the issue of this threat to commit potential war crimes, the United States seems to be running out of munitions: On Monday, The Washington Post reported that a “U.S. official familiar with internal administration discussions,” speaking on the condition of anonymity, warned: “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.”
But others—including people in the Pentagon and the intelligence community—must know the truth, and if the White House wasn’t aware of these concerns yesterday, it is now. Trump, Hegseth, and others in the administration know many other truths as well. They should start sharing those truths with the American people.
The post The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War appeared first on The Atlantic.
