Trump Bitterly Complains CNN ‘Hurt Me’ With Bomb Report — Demands They Call It ‘Unbelievable Success’
President Donald Trump bitterly complained that CNN “hurt” him with bombshell reporting on the Iran airstrikes, and continued to demand they declare the mission an “unbelievable success” on Wednesday.
Trump has been raging for days at CNN and others over coverage of a series of surprise U.S. airstrikes on nuclear sites in Iran. After the strikes, Trump quickly claimed that all of Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated” in the attack, but experts and his own officials were more measured and skeptical.
Then, bombshell reporting from CNN and the NYT emerged that an intelligence assessment shows the strikes may only have set Iran’s nuclear program back by a matter of months.
Trump and his officials held a photo op with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the NATO summit Wednesday, during which Trump lashed out at CNN anew, explaining that “what hurt me” about their reporting and even wrote some news copy for them:
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PETE HEGSETH: Of course, we’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes, battle damage assessments, and CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the President look bad when this was an overwhelming success.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We had a tremendous success, and this is the New York Times, I call it the failing New York Times, it’s going to hell, and CNN, which as you know, very few people are watching.
And you would think they’d do the opposite. You would think that they’d want to say, “This was an unbelievable success!”
And the thing that hurts me is it’s really demeaning to the pilots and the people that put that whole thing together, the generals. That was a perfect operation.
And when you look at the holes, and this was done from 52,000 feet. There was no moon, there was no light, and those three holes are right together.
And also, and nobody talks about this, we shot 30 tomahawks from submarines, in particular one submarine, but that was 400 miles away, and every one of those tomahawk hit within a foot of where they were supposed to hit, took out a lot of buildings that Israel wasn’t able to.
We took them out with tomahawks. We don’t even talk about that. This was a devastating attack, and it knocked them for a loop, and, you know, if it didn’t, they wouldn’t have settled.
If they had won, if we didn’t take it out, they wouldn’t have settled, somebody mentioned that to me last night, if that thing wasn’t devastated, they would have never settled.
Watch above via the White House pool.
