The White House has spent today disputing several news outlets' reporting that the U.S. strikes against Iran did not decimate the country's nuclear program.
If you missed the reporting: CNN, The New York Times and NBC News all cited an internal preliminary classified report that determined Saturday's bombing only set Iran's nuclear program back by a few months, challenging President Trump's assessment that the strikes set the country back years or destroyed it entirely.
💡 Why this matters: Carrying out the strike against Iran was a sophisticated maneuver in foreign policy. Even if the initial report is correct in that it pushed back Iran's nuclear program by just a few months, that's still a win for the White House. But Trump has set the bar incredibly high by suggesting the U.S. strikes decimated Iran's nuclear materials, setting Tehran back by decades.
Trump closed out the NATO summit this morning with a wide-ranging press conference but spent much of it pushing back on the reporting.
He even equated the Iran strikes to WWII: Trump compared the U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear sites to dropping atomic bombs in Japan near the end of World War II. "It was so devastating. Actually, if you look at Hiroshima or if you look at Nagasaki, you know, that ended a war, too," Trump said. "This ended a war in a different way, but it was so devastating."
^ Keep in mind that roughly 200,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He also dismissed the report's assessment that Iran moved its nuclear materials before the strike: "If you knew about that material, it's very hard and very dangerous to move," Trump said.
Earlier this morning, Trump bashed the news outlets as "scum."
From Trump: "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 that's in this room. And not all of you are … CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They're bad people. They're sick," Trump said. "And what they've done is they're trying to make this unbelievable victory into something less." 📹 Watch Trump vent about the reporting
His team publicly backed him up: The president's national security team strongly disagreed with the reporting on the initial internal assessment.
➤ Vice President Vance posted a scathing critique of American media, arguing it is "full of the least curious, least insightful people in our country." 🔎 Read Vance's criticism
➤ Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued to Politico that Iran is now "much further away from a nuclear weapon."
➤ Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says there is an investigation into how the report was leaked. During Trump's NATO news conference, Hegseth stepped up to the microphone and accused the media of trying "to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country."
^ Oh, by the way. Trump referred to Hegseth as "Secretary of War," noting the position used to be called that. "We feel like warriors," Trump said. 📹
For what it's worth: An Iran Foreign Ministry spokesperson says that Saturday's bombing "badly damaged" its nuclear installations.
Keep in mind: The report's conclusion could easily change — it is an early assessment, after all. Without any inspections on the ground, it's hard to know how successful the strikes were. Here's a helpful Brookings Institution explainer on measuring the strike's success.
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