WASHINGTON — While every military conflict brings difficulty in understanding what is really happening at the front lines, President Donald Trump’s war against Iran features its own unique fog of misinformation: the fabulist commander-in-chief himself.
In the span of just a few hours Monday, Trump claimed the war he started unilaterally was almost over, that Iran was within two weeks of producing a nuclear weapon last summer, that it possessed American Tomahawk missiles and used one against its own schoolchildren, that he had to attack Iran because it was about to attack the United States, that other Gulf states had joined the fight against Iran and that, oh, by the way, his war was not actually almost over.
Not a single factual assertion was supported by evidence, and a couple were demonstrably false.
Doug Lute, a retired Army general and former U.S. ambassador to NATO, said Trump’s open lying about the Iran war continues to degrade America’s relationship with allies. “His lies and ignorance erode confidence in us all,” he said.
“The president said that for the MAGA faithful who believe everything he says no matter how false or fraudulent,” said Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office in Trump’s first term. “Iran has no Tomahawks. The world knows that. He did it to try to hide the shameful fact he murdered 170 or more Iranian schoolgirls in his whimsical, uncoordinated and badly conceived-of war.”
