President Donald Trump has praised Gen. Dan Caine for years, long before nominating him to serve as his chief military adviser, and Caine has seemingly won over the president once again.

“I have to say, Gen. ‘Razin’ Caine was incredible,” the president told reporters Wednesday, days after the U.S. military carried out an unprecedented operation targeting three of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

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The White House released photos taken of the Situation Room during the operation, showing him seated between chief of staff Susie Wiles and Vice President JD Vance.

“General Caine is detail-oriented and ruthlessly focused on carrying out President Trump’s military objectives,” Vance said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal. “After about two months on the job, General Caine helped oversee a series of incredibly precise airstrikes that resulted in zero American casualties and the obliteration of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. I think the best way to judge his job performance is by its results, and America is safer and stronger thanks to the successful operation he oversaw last weekend.”

While he has played a primary part in explaining the mission, his role as an apolitical and active-duty military officer has put him in a difficult position as he has stood alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at two somewhat contentious press briefings this week.

During the first of those briefings, last Sunday morning, Hegseth projected an air of certainty over the strikes’ success and the level of damage caused, while Caine was more cautious in his language.

Hegseth called it “an incredible and overwhelming success,” which was in line with the president’s public comments, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman said, “It would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.”

His unwillingness to discuss the level of damage stood out in comparison to Hegseth’s projection of confidence that “Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been obliterated.”

Between then and the second briefing, which occurred on Thursday morning, a preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency was leaked to the media and raised doubts as to whether Hegseth and Trump had accurately described the level of damage done in the attack.

As the defense secretary and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman stood in the Defense Department’s briefing room on Thursday morning, Hegseth used his opening remarks to criticize the media extensively, including claiming it is in the media’s “blood to cheer against Trump.”

Hegseth tore into specific outlets, including his former employer, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, and the Pentagon press corps broadly for its coverage of the DIA report. An investigation is underway to find out who leaked the intelligence.

The secretary claimed that the leaker provided a selective portion of the report to multiple outlets to portray the strikes negatively and hurt the president.

After Hegseth wrapped up his opening comments, Caine provided a detailed explanation of how the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb worked, which the U.S. military used to bomb two of the three Iranian nuclear facilities targeted in the operation.

He did not weigh in on Hegseth’s criticism of the media, sticking solely to the details of the planning of the operation, the attack, and the subsequent attack on the United States’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

At one point, Caine was asked if he would agree with the president and secretary’s use of the word “obliterated” to describe the destruction, to which he said the Pentagon doesn’t “do [battle damage assessments],” before the secretary took another shot at the media.

“So, you bring the chairman here, who’s not involved in politics, he doesn’t do politics, that’s my lane to understand and translate and talk about those types of things. So, I can use the word obliterated. He could use defeat, destroyed, assess, all of those things,” Hegseth said. “But ultimately, we’re here to clarify what these weapons are capable of, which anyone with, you know, two ears — two eyes, some ears and a brain can recognize that kind of firepower with that specificity at that location and others is going to have a devastating effect.”

Caine denied ever feeling pressure from the president or secretary to change his assessment.

“That one’s easy, no. No, I have not. And no, I would not. My job as the chairman is to offer a range of options to the president and the National Command Authority, to deliver the risks associated with each of those and then take the orders of the National Command Authority and — and go execute them,” he said.

After the briefing, Trump declared it was “one of the greatest, most professional, and most ‘confirming’ News Conferences I have ever seen!”

Former White House coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk said Caine’s briefing was “really important and just worth studying because he went through a lot of information that until now would have been classified.”

Democratic political strategist David Axelrod said Caine “deserves our admiration for the professional and credible manner in which he has briefed on the Iran mission, Sunday and today,” while Hegseth, he said, “deserves another cookie from the boss for his unhinged, attack dog antics, berating the media for reporting facts he himself acknowledged.”

DAN CAINE PRAISES OFFICERS WHO STARTED FORDOW OPERATION PLANNING 15 YEARS AGO

Trump nominated Caine to be his senior military adviser to replace Chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., though the president had long touted Caine’s role in the military’s defeat of the Islamic State.

Trump has frequently retold a story, which Caine denied during his confirmation hearing, that the two met in December 2018, when Caine was the deputy commanding general of the Special Operations Joint Task Force in Iraq. Per Trump’s retelling, Caine told him the military could defeat ISIS in a matter of weeks, offering a much shorter time frame than those given by the president’s advisers, and put on a MAGA hat.

“I have never worn any political merchandise,” Caine told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his nomination hearing.