Trump Is Getting His Iran News Through Disturbing Daily Video Montage
Every day for the last 25 days, President Donald Trump has sat comfortably in his office and watched a glorified highlight reel of his destruction in Iran.
The daily video compilation is about two minutes long and shows the largest and most pulverizing strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, NBC reported Wednesday.
Three U.S. officials and one former official told NBC the video update—which one described as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up”—is raising alarms among the president’s allies that he’s not receiving a “full scope” of what’s happening in Iran, distorting his view of the nearly month-long conflict that’s wreaked havoc across the globe.
Though he does receive other verbal updates from officials, the daily sizzle reel of bombs has also made Trump even more furious with the media’s negative coverage of the war, which, in his eyes, has apparently been a success. He’s questioned why the public narrative isn’t reflecting the highly curated, crowning moments of U.S. military power he’s seeing on-screen, the officials and former official told NBC.
That’s because what’s happening in Iran over the last month has been disastrous. More than 1,500 Iranians and 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed, gas prices have skyrocketed, Trump’s goal of reopening the Strait of Hormuz is looking increasingly fantastical, and public opinion of his handling of the war is at an all-time low.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that the president doesn’t have a total picture of the war.
“That’s an absolutely false assertion coming from someone who has not been present in the room,” she said in a statement to NBC. “Anyone who has been present for conversations with President Trump knows he actively seeks and solicits the opinions of everyone in the room and expects full throated honesty from all of his top advisors.”
Full-throated honesty apparently means showing the president an edited montage of bombing another country over and over again.