‘Trump Wants Good News’: the Pentagon Is Under Pressure to Sanitize Iran War Data
The president ‘rejects bad news as fake,’ one U.S. official says. ‘He’s getting what he is paying for.’
For months, staffers for Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon have been under tremendous pressure to produce data and internal reports that match President Donald Trump’s constant flow of self-serving propaganda on the Iran war.
Two U.S. officials and another source familiar with the matter tell Zeteo that when staff have produced data and analyses seen as too gloomy to the American side, higher-ranking officials in Trump’s Department of Defense have told them they need to frontload and emphasize the “good news,” before the reports get briefed to the White House and the president.
Materials that sources say have invited Trumpian edits have included internal data and reports on Iranian military capabilities, damage to Iranian targets, remaining munitions and weapons on all sides of the war, and other key metrics used to measure military success or failure.
All three sources say that within the Defense Department and elsewhere in the U.S. government, a common response to this among staff is: What good news?