WASHINGTON – Each day since the war in Iran began, U.S. military officials have conducted a video review of President Donald Trump showing video of the largest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets in the past 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.
The daily montage usually takes two minutes, sometimes longer, officials said. Another described each daily video as a series of clips of “explosive stuff.”
The US Central Command’s highlight reel of bombing Iranian installations and military sites is not the only briefing Trump is getting about the war. He is also updated on interviews with senior military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders and news reports, officials said.
But the video conference fueled concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be getting — or grasping — the full picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two current officials and a former official said.
They said the videos also fueled Trump’s growing frustration with war coverage. Trump has pointed to the success shown in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the media isn’t highlighting what he’s seeing, one of the US officials and a former US official said.
White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt dismissed the idea that Trump is not getting information about the full range of military developments, both successes and setbacks.
“That’s a completely false assertion from someone who wasn’t in the room,” Leavitt said in a statement. “Anyone who has been in a conversation with President Trump knows that he wants and solicits the opinions of everyone in the room and expects full honesty from all of his top advisers.”
Senior Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement: “Operation Epic Fury was a huge success, as our forces executed the mission with unparalleled precision and achieved every objective set from the very beginning. Decisions.”
One of the US officials said that although the discussions about the sensitive military operations are limited to a small group, Trump continues to ask for broad ideas and encourages everyone involved to be smart. The official added that Trump regularly takes calls from a wide range of foreign advisers, always hearing how they feel and getting their views on public opinion.
Public opinion on the war remains sharply divided along party lines, according to an NBC News poll this month, though a majority of voters oppose Trump’s handling of it.
Amid Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, however, support is surprising: MAGA self-identifiers gave Trump a 100% approval rating, with 90% supporting his military action in Iran.
The question of how the president uses information, especially negative developments, and what information is shared by aides can be especially thorny in wartime. For any president, aides have historically had to balance giving a full picture of events and emphasizing achievement of key goals.
In past wars – from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan – administrations have been accused of indulging in “groupthink” when they briefed the president, with officers and military commanders downplaying or omitting inconvenient facts and refusing to see signs that their strategy was failing. President Lyndon Johnson complained that American television news coverage of the Vietnam conflict was misleading and overly negative, and the George W. Bush administration accused reporters of focusing on car bombs instead of continuing to rebuild Iraq.
Current and former US officials have said the military cannot inform Trump of all the strikes – there are hundreds every day – so the selected video, while showing US capabilities, does not show the entire conflict.
“We can’t tell him everything that’s going on,” the current US official said. The official noted that Trump’s briefings tend to get a better response from his aides when they focus on US victories.
Overall, the official said, the information Trump receives about the war tends to emphasize US success, with little detail compared to Iran’s actions.
One example came this month when five US Air Force refueling planes were shot down in an Iranian strike at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, according to one current US official. Trump was not informed of the strikes, and found out what happened through media reports, the official said. When Trump asked, he was told that the planes were not seriously damaged, the official said.
The official said Trump reacted angrily after the news broke. He publicly wrote Truth Social calling for a misleading strike and accusing media organizations of wanting the US to “lose the War.”
Leavitt defended Trump’s criticism of the media.
“Trust in the media is at an all-time low and their inaccurate and biased coverage of Operation Fury, which was a huge success, proves why the president is rightfully frustrated,” Leavitt said in a statement. “The media spends more time using anonymous secret sources to sow chaos than focusing on the success and victory of our great United States military against the Iranian regime.”
Some of Trump’s allies see his frustration as a sign of limited access to information, two current US officials and a former US official said.
Among their concerns is that Trump may not be equipped to make critical decisions about the options presented to him to take next steps in the war if he does not receive full information about the state of the conflict, a former official and a familiar figure of concern.
Some of Trump’s allies want to give him more context, including possible scenarios for how the conflict could unfold and options for ending it, to broaden his reach, according to a former official and a person familiar with the concerns. Recently, some of them have tried to bring new attention to Trump, which shows his approval rating has sunk several points since the start of the war, according to a person familiar with the concern.
Since the war began on February 28, Trump has been shaping and consuming continuous media coverage of it. He has taken dozens of calls from reporters, explaining his positions and hinting at next steps. He is in regular contact with foreign leaders, including having near-daily talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has frequent talks with leaders of the Persian Gulf states, officials said.
And he has publicly admitted that he is seeking information independently.
Last week, Trump said he called a top military general after seeing a video of the USS Abraham Lincoln going up in flames and that the general told him Iran created the video using artificial intelligence.
“I called the general. I said, ‘General, what about Abraham Lincoln, it looks like it’s on fire?'” Trump said at a luncheon for Kennedy Center board members. He said the general said to him: “No, there is no fire, no shot has been fired, sir.”
One of the American officials said that the USS Abraham Lincoln has been targeted several times since the start of the war but the strikes failed to reach the ship or were blocked.
Trump also said he saw a fake video of “buildings in Tel Aviv burning to the ground,” as well as in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. “And they didn’t burn,” he said. “They didn’t get hit. It was all AI.”
Asked to comment on briefings Trump is receiving about the war, the office of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard pointed to her testimony to Congress last week, when she told lawmakers that she and other intelligence officials “continue to provide the president with the best intelligence objective available to inform his decisions.”
The director of public affairs at the CIA, Liz Lyons, summarized in a statement the congressional testimony from CIA Director John Ratcliffe last week, and said that he told the lawmakers, “President Trump is constantly briefed by his national security advisers and given the best intelligence available to give a significant opportunity in making policy decisions.”
Ratcliffe said at a congressional hearing last week that he briefs Trump 10 to 15 times a week on important national security issues.
Gabbard and Ratcliffe also testified that the White House received an intelligence assessment before the war that, if not struck, Iran could retaliate with attacks on energy facilities in the Middle East and threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, possibly causing a collapse in oil prices and the world economy. But Trump suggested last week that Iran’s reaction was a surprise and that “no expert” predicted such a response.
Concerns about the war among some Trump supporters came to light last week when Joe Kent, until recently the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, said that internal gatekeeping has limited Trump’s access to a broad range of opposing views during the war. “Most of the key decision makers were not allowed to come and express their opinion to the president,” Kent told Tucker Carlson in an interview after he left the administration. “There was no serious debate.”
Leavitt wrote on social media at the time that Trump had “hard and solid evidence” that led to his decision to strike Iran.
A few days ago, Trump was asked about the comments of his former AI boss, David Sacks, who said in a podcast that the US “should try to find a way to relax” and that “this is a good time to declare victory and get out.” Trump told reporters that Sacks did not share his views with him.
