President Donald Trump is posting through the pain after a preliminary assessment by his own intelligence community cut short his victory lap over the U.S. strikes on Iran.
A classified report leaked to CNN and The New York Times on Tuesday revealed that Trump’s much-touted attacks on three Iranian nuclear enrichment sites over the weekend did not kill the country’s nuclear program. At worst, they likely set the program back by a few months, which counters the president’s repeated claims of “complete and total obliteration.”
Trump was livid at the two news outlets and let them know that in a late-night Truth Social post.
“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.
“THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!”
Trump also posted a bizarre video of stealth bombers taking off as a “bomb Iran” song played in the background; just a number of posts made by Trump throughout the night pushing his “obliterated” narrative.
The president announced on Saturday night that American warplanes dropped bunker buster bombs at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan, marking the U.S.’s entry into the Israel-Iran conflict.
“I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success,” Trump said in a weekend address. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
Administration officials have repeatedly parroted Trump’s claims of “obliteration,” but an early report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, an arm of the Pentagon, found that Iran’s uranium stockpile was not destroyed and its centrifuges were largely intact after the attack.
“So the assessment is that the U.S. set them back maybe a few months, tops,” a source familiar with the assessment told CNN.
The assessment also found that U.S. strikes sealed off entrances to two of the nuclear facilities but failed to damage their underground buildings, according to the Times.
Iran rubbed salt in Trump’s wound by declaring that its nuclear program will “resume without interruption” after the attacks.
“When I see CNN, all night long, they’re trying to say, ‘Well, maybe it wasn’t really as demolished as we thought.’ It was demolished,” Trump told reporters earlier on Tuesday, calling on CNN and MSNBC to apologize to the pilots who dropped the bombs.
“These cable networks are real losers,” he said. “You’re gutless losers. I say that to CNN because I watch it—I have no choice. I got to watch it. It’s all garbage. It’s all fake news.”
Trump officials were quick to shut down the leaked assessment.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell cited an unnamed DIA official who said: “This is a preliminary, low confidence report and will continue to be refined as additional intelligence becomes available. We are working with the appropriate authorities to investigate the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt similarly fumed at CNN, branding their bombshell reporting as “fake news” even as she confirmed the existence of the assessment.
“This alleged ‘assessment’ is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community,” she wrote in an X rant.
“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” she added. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
