On Tuesday, the press got hold of a preliminary analysis by the Defense Intelligence Agency assessing that Trump’s strikes on Iranian enrichment facilities had only set back the program by a few months. Real damage was obviously done—the United Nations believes that centrifuges at the Fordow site are no longer operational—but no one knows what happened to Iran’s inventory of highly enriched uranium. Maybe it was moved before the U.S. attack; maybe it’s buried under rubble.
But if it’s intact and the Iranians can get to it, even a small enrichment facility could turn it into bomb-grade material quickly.
Trump and Hegseth were rattled enough by the DIA assessment to begin hedging on the “total obliteration” of Iran’s facilities, but the president never sticks with caution for long when he’s placed on the defensive politically. He goes on offense and tries to reshape the narrative in his favor. So he started posting manically on Truth Social about the success of the strikes, treating the DIA leak as a story about the treacherous media lying to impugn our great military and our even greater commander-in-chief.
Hegseth’s presser was designed to carry that spin forward. He whined that the media should focus more on how hard it is to fly a plane for 36 hours, as the crews of the B-2s that attacked Iran had to do, and at one point asked, “How about we talk about how special America is?” Notably, he singled out Jennifer Griffin of Fox News, his old employer, to accuse her of having been especially unfair in covering the fate of the Iranian nuclear program. Griffin is probably the most credible and respected reporter left at the network.
In every particular, the secretary of defense appeared to be what he is: a cringy talk-show blowhard who’s miles out of his depth, forced to retreat to his comfort zone of seething about liberal bias because he has nothing of substance to say in a tense moment. Picking a fight with Fox News, which has been cheerleading Israel’s war with Iran for weeks, seemed designed to underline the idea that no matter how propagandistic a MAGA media outlet is, it can never be propagandistic enough.
Trump loved Hegseth’s performance. Of course he did.
The state of Iran’s nuclear program is an early gut-check for his second presidency, though, and not just for the usual strategic and political reasons.
A test of “strength.”
The Bush administration’s early optimism about the Iraq war became so notorious in hindsight that, more than 20 years later, there are phrases associated with it that still linger in the public consciousness. “Mission accomplished,” of course. “Greeted as liberators.” “A few dead-enders.” Those who were deep in the weeds of the blog discourse at the time will remember the “Friedman Unit,” so named for New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s habit of sporadically reframing “the next six months” as the key to the war’s outcome.
So if it turns out that Trump has been too sanguine in asserting that Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated” by U.S. airstrikes, for once, he wouldn’t be flouting some presidential norm. He’d be following one.
And if it turns out that he knows the program wasn’t obliterated but has chosen to lie about it, he wouldn’t be breaking new ground there either. Deceiving Americans about the true state of a conflict in which the country is embroiled has been a White House tradition dating back more than 50 years.
“Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” “Iran can no longer build weapons of mass destruction.” In matters of war, Trump may turn out to be less different from his predecessors than he seems. It would feel churlish to begrudge him his very own “mission accomplished” moment.
But Trump does differ from George W. Bush in important ways, of course.
His outlook on war is different. Bush and his team were hawks by nature who ended up turbo-charged by 9/11. Trump is dovish, a critic of Bush’s “forever wars,” and seems to take greater pride in his diplomatic achievements than his military ones. Any president can read a battle plan and say “do it,” after all, but only one has gotten Kim Jong Un to make kissy-faces at him.
If Trump’s attack on Iran turns out not to have achieved its objectives, he’s ripe for criticism that he failed to follow his instincts and showed weakness by letting himself be swayed by the hawks around him.
There are members of his own coalition who will make that criticism, too. That’s another difference with Bush: Whereas the right of 2003 was foursquare behind invading Iraq, the right of 2025 has a meaningful isolationist, “America First” faction with which the president himself was allied until six days ago. The Tucker Carlsons and Steve Bannons will tread lightly in criticizing Trump directly, especially now that they’ve seen the polling, but they can and will spin a failure in Iran as a stain on his legacy someday in the future when it’s politically safe to do so.
It took until 2016, egged on by Trump, for Republicans to feel safe admitting their misgivings about the Iraq war. The reckoning on the Iran war could come much sooner now that a dovish wing of the party exists and is quietly spoiling to say, “I told you so.”
Of course, the enemy gets a say, too. Just as the persistence of the Iraqi insurgency forced Bush to eventually cop to reality, there’d be no way for Trump to spin a surprise nuclear test in the Iranian desert a year or two from now. If he got wind that one was in the works, he’d be tempted to bribe the regime into quietly canceling it lest it put the lie to his “total obliteration” claim. (Remember “pallets of cash”? They’re coming back.) Even future Israeli attacks aimed at neutering Iran’s nuclear rebuilding effort would create a political problem for him. If the threat is over, why does Benjamin Netanyahu feel obliged to keep “mowing the lawn”?
More so than even a post-9/11 Bush, Trump is obsessed with perceptions of strength. For Bush, that always seemed more strategic than temperamental: He was a wartime president with a popular mandate to behave hawkishly after a national trauma launched his job approval into orbit. For Trump, the need to show strength comes straight from the amygdala. He’s so averse to “weakness” that, during his first weeks as a candidate in 2015, he told an audience of evangelicals that he had never sought forgiveness from God. When asked later why not, he replied, “Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness, if I am not making mistakes?”
Only weaklings make mistakes. And if facts should come to light that prove he has made a mistake, he’ll press as hard and tirelessly as a human being can to construct a narrative in which the facts are wrong, not him. That’s what’s at stake in the mystery over whether Iran’s nuclear program has been “totally obliterated.” If it hasn’t been, it won’t just be a strategic or political embarrassment. It’ll be the most formidable test yet of Trump’s ability to create his own reality and get his fans to believe it. He and his defense secretary are getting started on that early.
But in the meantime, it’s already become a test of whether he’s built the sort of administration that he hoped to build.
A team of henchmen.
Sean Spicer was a press flack. Rudy Giuliani was … I don’t know what he was. But neither held an important position in the first Trump administration. Those were reserved for serious people, especially at the start of the president’s term.
Pete Hegseth does hold an important position, though, and was tasked on Thursday with addressing the nation during a crisis. Despite the fact that he’s nominally the most powerful military official in the world, occupying a position of elite policymaking influence, he came off as the same sort of hacky lib-punching performance artist as Spicer and Giuliani. That’s another way in which his clownish press conference captured the ethos of Trump’s second administration: He got the job because he’s a henchman, not a talented wonk, and he behaved accordingly on Thursday.
He understood the assignment. And he was obviously disappointed that Jennifer Griffin, who placed her duty to her profession over Fox News’ duty of fealty to Trump, did not.
The whole point of Trump 2.0 is to rid the government of people who won’t be henchmen for the president and replace them with ones who will. In his first term, many of his deputies were asked at some point to choose between behaving ethically and professionally on the one hand and doing what the president wanted on the other. Most, even those as dubious as Bill Barr, chose correctly. Trump was supposed to fix that problem in his current term by staffing up with people who would choose differently.
So, how on earth did we end up with leakers from the Defense Intelligence Agency embarrassing the president at the height of his post-attack military glory?
That’s a storyline straight out of the first Trump administration, when the “deep state” was still rife with left-wing saboteurs determined to foil the president’s noble plans for world peace. That’s who was supposed to have been purged by now via loyalty tests in hiring, mass dismissals at the Pentagon and Justice Department, and polygraphs galore. A government of henchmen is designed for precisely a moment like this one, when the president is at risk of being embarrassed by bad news about the success or failure of a questionable military operation. If the intelligence says “it didn’t work,” a team of henchmen will make sure it doesn’t get out.
Instead, it leaked in three days.
Trump built an elaborate loyalty contraption, and it failed its first big test. No wonder he’s been manic on Truth Social—especially since this isn’t the first time lately that he’s found fewer henchmen around him than he’d like.
Understanding the assignment.
“President Donald Trump has privately complained that the Supreme Court justices he appointed have not sufficiently stood behind his agenda,” CNN reported earlier this month.
He’s felt particular pique at Amy Coney Barrett, supposedly, whom his cronies have told him is “weak” because of several rulings she’s issued against him. (They’re singing a different tune this evening, presumably.) That jibes with the tantrum he threw last month about all of the bad advice he got on judges from the Federalist Society. He wanted henchmen; they gave him conservatives. Never again.
To illustrate the point, Trump is moving forward with his nomination of Emil Bove for a seat on a federal appellate court. Bove was accused this week of having told his deputies at the Justice Department a few months ago to say “f— you” to any federal judge who ordered a halt to deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. He’s also the guy who leaned on the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to drop criminal charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams in order to secure Adams’ cooperation with the president’s immigration agenda. Multiple lawyers in the office resigned afterward to protest such a grossly unethical request.
Like Hegseth and unlike Barrett, Bove understands the assignment. He’s a henchman, and he’s being rewarded for it.
Some Trump appointees who didn’t understand the assignment initially are catching up. When Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, released that weird meditation on Hiroshima a few weeks ago, she seemed to believe Trump would be fine with it. And in a way, that’s understandable: She was chosen as DNI because the president shared her isolationist sympathies and her conspiratorial suspicions about “the deep state.” Why wouldn’t she assume that he’d indulge her in a cri de coeur about elite warmongers? She sounded like him!
But agitating against war isn’t her job as a member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet. Her job is to do his bidding even when it clashes violently with her moral convictions about joining another conflict in the Middle East. When he called her onto the carpet recently for undermining his Iran plans with her Hiroshima video, she reportedly replied meekly, “Yes, sir.” Forced to choose between resigning over her deepest beliefs and meeting his expectations, Gabbard has evidently made peace with being a henchman.
It will be the darkest of ironies if Trump ends up enlisting her in a cover-up of intelligence showing that Iran’s nuclear program wasn’t “totally obliterated” after all. Given the degree to which she’s already compromised herself ethically to suit him, I have every confidence that she’ll play along. Meet the new “deep state,” same as the old “deep state.”
Low trust.
Most Republican voters won’t care if she does either. They love henchmen!
John Cornyn has made no trouble for Trump as a senator, yet he’s getting blitzed in poll after poll of his upcoming primary against Ken Paxton, a loud-and-proud toady of unusual zeal even by MAGA standards. The president deserves a henchman in the Senate, it seems, not just a rubber stamp. And needless to say, if Trump succeeds in ousting libertarian Thomas Massie in his next House primary, whoever the local GOP electorate chooses to replace him will sound a lot more like Paxton than Cornyn.
I have no doubt that the populist base, supposed skeptics of “forever wars” and the intelligence community, will back Trump to the hilt if it’s shown later that he suppressed information proving that Iran’s uranium survived America’s military strike. They’re henchmen too. They understand the assignment.
The assignment is to treat information as a weapon of political warfare, not as data that illuminates reality. Its value lies not in whether it’s true but whether it’s useful to the cause. If you’re an average American, you want to know the current state of Iran’s nuclear program because you’re trying to draw informed conclusions about what bombing can and can’t achieve and what our next steps with Iran might plausibly look like. If you’re a henchman, you want to know the current state of Iran’s nuclear program if and only if it reflects well on Donald Trump’s wisdom in choosing to attack.
Because the government hides the truth in the best of times and a government run by henchmen is that much more likely to do so, any rosy final U.S. assessment of the damage done to Iranian enrichment sites will be hard to believe. Not impossible: The Israelis and the U.N. might back it up, lending it credence. But the internal dynamics of a second Trump administration are such that it’s difficult to imagine any federal agency embarrassing its very vindictive boss by admitting that the airstrikes failed. Their duty of loyalty isn’t to the truth or to the American public, it’s to him. There’s no way to carry out that duty by telling the world “it didn’t work,” even if true.
So maybe it wasn’t left-wing saboteurs in the DIA looking to own the president who leaked the intelligence that Iran’s nuclear capabilities survived. Maybe it was someone who feared that information would be ruthlessly covered up if it wasn’t given to the press. Whatever the solution is to America’s “trust problem,” a government of henchmen ain’t it.
