Thursday, July 03, 2025

Trump’s Team Is Lying About Iran’s WM

 

The only thing lower than lying about what you accomplished in a war is hiding behind the people who actually accomplished it.

Trump’s Team Is Lying About Iran’s WMD

He savaged Bush for distorting intelligence and overselling the military’s initial success in Iraq. Now Trump and his team are doing the same in Iran.

 

Will Saletan

Jul 02, 2025

 

IN 2016, DONALD TRUMP REBUKED George W. Bush for peddling erroneous intelligence and false assurances about the war in Iraq. He accused Bush of deliberately misrepresenting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, and he mocked Bush’s premature “Mission Accomplished” speech.

Bush and his administration “lied,” Trump charged at a Republican presidential debate in February 2016. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

Two days after that debate, Trump derided the May 2003 speech in which Bush infamously proclaimed that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” and “the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Trump recalled that Bush had stood on an “aircraft carrier saying all sorts of wonderful things, how the war was essentially over. Guess what? Not over.”

Nine years later, Trump is doing what he accused Bush of doing. He has launched a preemptive military strike, this time in Iran. He has defended the strike by misrepresenting intelligence. He has prematurely declared the mission a total victory. And he is impugning the patriotism of anyone who challenges his lies.

ON JUNE 21, AFTER A WEEK of war between Israel and Iran, the United States bombed three Iranian nuclear sites. Three hours later, Trump went on TV and announced that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” The claim was absurd—the damage couldn’t have been assessed that quickly, and the operation hadn’t even targeted most of Iran’s enriched uranium—but Trump repeated it on June 22June 25June 26June 27, and June 29.

Trump’s senior officials joined him in the lie. “Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on June 25. “This was complete and total obliteration,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “There’s no doubt that it was obliterated,” said Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, referring to Iran’s underground nuclear site at Fordo.

“Obliterate” wasn’t just rhetoric. Trump was literally insisting that the three sites and Iran’s whole program had been annihilated. “It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability,” he wrote in a Truth Social post on June 24. At the White House, he said of Fordo: “That place is gone. . . . That place is gone.”

The myth of total destruction was important because it underpinned Trump’s second lie: that no further negotiations or military operations were necessary to curtail the nuclear program. “I don't care if I have an agreement or not” with Iran, the president told reporters at a NATO meeting on June 25. “We destroyed the nuclear,” he explained. “We blew it up. It’s blown up to kingdom come.”

Nor would America have to bomb Iran again. At a June 25 press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, a reporter asked Trump: “If the Iranians do rebuild, would the United States strike again?” Trump dismissed the question. “Sure,” he scoffed, “but I’m not going to have to worry about that. It’s gone for years.”

The basis of these assurances, Trump explained, wasn’t just the totality of the destruction. It was that Iran, according to Trump, was so devastated, exhausted, and demoralized that it no longer wanted to develop nuclear weapons. “They don’t even want to think about nuclear,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One on June 24. At the press conference with Rutte, the president added: “I don’t think they’ll ever do it again. . . . I think they’ve had it. The last thing they want to do is enrich.”

IN ONE VENUE AFTER ANOTHER, reporters pressed Trump about evidence that his assurances were false or baseless. He refused to listen. For example, after the bombing, Iran’s foreign ministry reaffirmed that its nuclear enrichment program would continue. But on June 25, when a reporter asked Trump about those statements, he dismissed them. “The last thing they want to do is enrich anything right now,” he repeated. “No, they won’t do that.”

On June 27, in a Fox News interview, Maria Bartiromo questioned Trump about reports, apparently sourced to Israeli intelligence, that Iran had moved nearly 900 pounds of enriched uranium out of Fordo before the bombing. Trump waved off that possibility. “They didn’t move anything,” he insisted. Two days later, when a reporter asked about Pickaxe Mountain, another of the sites where satellite imagery suggested enriched uranium might be stored, Trump returned to his mantra that Iran had no interest in continuing such work: “The last thing they’re thinking about right now is enriched uranium. They’re not thinking about it.”

Meanwhile, the president made up stories about various damage assessments. On June 25, at a press conference with Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Trump declared that “the high commission of Iran just said it [Fordo] was totally demolished.” No such commission exists, and statements from Iran’s government have said no such thing.

On Truth Social, Trump announced, “Israel just stated that the Nuclear Sites were OBLITERATED!” But Israel’s actual assessments, quoted in a White House fact sheet, made no such boast. Officially, the Israel Atomic Energy Commission said Israeli and American strikes had “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.” Unofficially, Israeli officials told reporters that the extent of damage at the three targeted sites was unknown.

As Trump spewed his fictions and embellishments, he blithely contradicted himself. In the press conference with Rutte, he said of Fordo: “Iran went down to the site afterwards. They said it’s so devastated. . . . Two Iranians went down to see it, and they called back, and they said, ‘This place is gone.’” But two minutes later, Trump mentioned that “nobody can get in to see” the facility’s underground chambers, because “the tunnels are totally collapsed.”

In his interview with Bartiromo, Trump said Iran wouldn’t have moved enriched uranium out of Fordo before the bombing, because it hadn’t expected the site to be attacked. “Nobody thought we’d go after that site, because everybody said that site is impenetrable,” he explained. But seconds later—apparently forgetting or not caring that he had just brushed off the idea of Iranian preparations—he claimed that vehicles spotted at Fordo in the days before the strike were there “to seal up the entrance” with concrete.

Trump also alluded to unspecified intelligence that supposedly vindicated his boasts. At the NATO meeting, he said of Fordo: “We’ve collected additional intelligence. We’ve also spoken to people [who] have seen the site. And the site is obliterated.” He posted the same statement, again without evidence, on Truth Social. The next day, at a White House event, he asserted that “the target has now been proven to be obliterated, just as we said.”

TRUMP IS LYING. A week and a half after the bombing, he has offered no such proof. Instead, his flunkies have issued empty statements claiming, with zero discernible evidence, that “new intelligence” or “credible intelligence” backs him up. The charlatan who accused Bush of politicizing intelligence and lying about weapons of mass destruction is politicizing intelligence and lying about weapons of mass destruction.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is that Trump, like Bush, is suggesting that anyone who disputes the president’s statements about a war is sabotaging America’s armed forces.

In 2005, as the Iraq war soured and the purported Iraqi nukes failed to turn up, Democrats accused Bush of having manipulated intelligence to justify the war. Bush responded by challenging his opponents’ patriotism. Their accusations of manipulation “send the wrong signal to our troops,” the president warned. “As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them.”

Vice President Dick Cheney joined Bush in this flag-waving counterattack. “American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions,” he fumed, while “back home, a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie.” One could argue, said Cheney—pretending not to endorse this argument himself—that the “untruthful charges against the commander-in-chief have an insidious effect on the war effort.”

Trump, having rebuked Bush and Cheney, is now copying their tactic of hiding behind the troops. At the NATO meeting, he called journalists “scum” for reporting, accurately, that according to a preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment, the damage from the Iran strike was limited. He accused the press of “hurting” the mission’s pilots by “trying to minimize the attack.” And he said CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, one of the first reporters to reveal the assessment, “should be FIRED” for denying the truth—“TOTAL OBLITERATION!”­­—and for “attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making them look bad.”

Hegseth went further. At a Pentagon briefing, he lambasted journalists for challenging Trump’s tale of obliteration. “You, the press corps . . . It’s like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump,” the defense secretary raged. He accused reporters of trying “to cause doubt and manipulate the mind, the public mind, over whether or not our brave pilots were successful. . . . You’re undermining the success of incredible B-2 pilots.”

Spare us the sanctimony. These lectures about undermining America’s warriors aren’t patriotic. They’re cynical and dishonest. The only thing lower than lying about what you accomplished in a war is hiding behind the people who actually accomplished it.

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