President Donald Trump lashed out at “scum” who revealed his much-championed strikes against Iran were likely far less effective than he claims.
Speaking at a NATO summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Trump also conceded that the report from his own intelligence community was “correct,” even while continuing to insist that his strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities caused “total obliteration” and having previously dismissed the report as fake news.
“CNN is scum, MSDNC is scum, the New York Times is scum. They’re bad people, they’re sick,” Trump raged Wednesday.
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“What they’ve done is they’ve tried to make this unbelievable victory into something less,” Trump went on. “The generals and all of the people who did a good job, they get demeaned by these idiots at CNN, who can’t get ratings. The place is dying, nobody even wants to waste their time going on any of their shows, so they form what [sic] The New York Times, which is dying also. Without Trump, you wouldn’t have a New York Times.”
It follows after both publications reported leaked findings from a classified military intelligence report that suggested Trump’s weekend strikes against three separate nuclear sites in Iran fell far short of an “obliteration,” as Trump claims, and had likely only set the country’s nuclear program back by a mere matter of months.
The coverage of the leaked documents had already prompted a flurry of typically bellicose Truth Social posts from Trump stretching into the small hours of the 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,” he wrote, adding: “THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!”
During Wednesday’s comments to reporters, however, Trump did at one point appear to soften his tone, conceding that there may have been something to the report’s findings after all.
“The intelligence was very inconclusive, the intelligence says ‘we don’t know, it could have been very severe’,” he told reporters. “That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct.”
Even so, he swiftly rowed back from anything that might have sounded like a reviewed assessment of the damage on his part. “But I think that we can take… we don’t know… it was very severe, it was obliteration,” he said.
Trump also maintained that Iran’s nuclear ambitions had been put back by “decades.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a statement provided by the Pentagon that “our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons.”
“Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target—and worked perfectly,” he went on. “The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran; so anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission.”
Speaking alongside Trump Wednesday, Hegseth also said the leak is being probed and accused whoever was responsible of having a “political motivation.”
“We are doing a leak investigation with the FBI now, because this information is for internal purposes—battle damage investigation—and CNN and others are trying to spin it to try and make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success,” Hegseth said.
Over the weekend, Trump intervened in a conflict between Iran and Israel by launching strikes on three nuclear facilities in Iran—Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan—announcing shortly after that they had been “completely and fully obliterated.”
The operation, dubbed “Midnight Hammer,” involved a U.S. submarine launching Tomahawk missiles and B-2 bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on two of the sites. It marked the first time the weapons—which are the most powerful non-nuclear bombs in the world—were used in combat.
“I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki,” Trump said Wednesday, referring to the atomic bombings of Japan at the end of World War 2. “But that was essentially the same thing that ended that war.”
Iran retaliated by launching a missile attack on the American Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar—no casualties were reported, and Trump thanked Iran for giving “early warning” of the operation.
He later declared a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, only to furiously accuse both parties of violating the deal just hours later. On Wednesday morning, the ceasefire appears to have been restored—with Trump insisting that his bombings were to thank for securing the deal in the first place.
“This was a devastating attack, and it knocked them for a loop,” Trump said of Iran. “And you know, if it didn’t, they wouldn’t have settled,” Trump said.
