President Donald Trump may have averted a wider war with Iran, but he is now taking the fight to a more familiar foe: the media.
The White House and Pentagon have pushed back strongly against reporting calling into question the efficacy of U.S. strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend, with Trump himself accusing reporters of denigrating the pilots who flew the dangerous mission to tarnish him politically.
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“Those pilots hit their targets,” Trump said. “Those targets were obliterated, and the pilots should be given credit. They‘re not after the pilots; they’re after me. They want to try and demean me.”
Trump took the unusual step of announcing a Thursday morning press briefing by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth himself as part of the administration’s effort to combat the reporting.
“Before I pass it to the chairman, because you, and I mean specifically you, the press, specifically you the press corps, because you cheer against Trump so hard, it’s like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad, you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes,” Hegseth said during the sometimes tense press conference. “You have to hope maybe they weren’t effective. Maybe the way the Trump administration’s represented them isn’t true.”
The Pentagon chief came to the job from television, giving him a more extensive media background than the typical defense secretary.
“There are so many aspects of what our brave men and women did that, because of the hatred of this press corps, are undermined because your people are trying to leak and spin that it wasn’t successful,” Hegseth continued. “It’s irresponsible. And folks in this room are privy to that information because of the proximity here in the Pentagon. It’s an important responsibility.”
Trump took a similar line in a press availability at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting, thanking the pilots and lambasting the press.
“You know, [the pilots] were maligned and treated very badly. Demeaned by fake news, CNN, which is back there, believe it or not, wasting time and wasting– and nobody’s watching them, so they’re just wasting a lot of time. Wasting my time,” he said. “And the New York Times, they put out a story that, well, maybe they were hit, but it wasn’t bad.”
Trump added, “What bothered me about these reports with fake reports put out by the New York Times failing– I call it the failing New York Times because it’s doing terribly. Without me, it would be doing no business at all, but– and by fake news, CNN and MSDNC [his nickname for MSNBC], all of these terrible people, you know, they have no credibility.”
Trump spoke at length about the pilots’ skill and courage, circling back to that topic when asked about a leaked early report, issued with low confidence, that suggested the Iranian nuclear program had not been disrupted as much as the administration originally hoped.
“You know, you should be proud, you– especially you should be proud of those pilots and you shouldn’t be trying to demean them,” Trump told a reporter.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt specifically called out CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, who had previously covered the Trump-Russia story and attempted to debunk the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop. “This reporter wrote a lie from the intelligence community to seek a narrative she wanted to prove,” Leavitt said of Bertrand during a press briefing. Trump had previously called for Bertrand’s firing and alleged she was “attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making them look bad.”
At a White House event on Thursday highlighting workers the administration says would benefit from Congress passing Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill, Trump took a moment to rip “fake news CNN” for its characterization of the Iran strikes.
Hegseth clashed with his former Fox News colleague Jennifer Griffin in similarly personal terms. “Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst — the one who misrepresents the most intentionally,” he said on Thursday.
Trump’s relationship with the legacy media has never been good. Hegseth has been nearly as combative with the Pentagon press corps since taking office after a grueling confirmation process.
The president has started to have some success with his lawsuits against media outlets, worrying press freedom advocates. But being a target of Trump’s criticism, however unpleasant, is still a career booster for many political reporters.
Republican complaints about liberal media bias date back at least to the 1960s. Spiro Agnew, vice president under President Richard Nixon, called the Washington press corps “nattering nabobs of negativism,” a phrase later attributed to speechwriter and eventual longtime conservative columnist William Safire.
This has only intensified in the decade since Trump has been at the helm of the Republican Party. The press is only now coming to terms with its largely kid-gloves treatment of former President Joe Biden’s age-related decline, which grew severe enough that Democrats pushed him off the top of the 2024 ticket following a disastrous debate performance.
The press has regularly been criticized for its coverage of wars since Vietnam. In the past quarter-century, however, many have argued the media has been too trusting of the intelligence community on issues ranging from weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War and the Trump-Russia stories from the president’s first term. Foreign war zones and uncertain international events are notoriously difficult to cover.
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A Gallup poll last year found a continuing trend of low trust in the mass media, with only 12% of Republicans saying they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the press.
While a war between Trump and the media may last as long as any in the Middle East, this one comes with much greater political upside for the White House.