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Donald Trump tends not to promote others’ press conferences, but on Wednesday afternoon, the president made an exception, writing to his social media platform, “Secretary of Defense (War!) Pete Hegseth, together with Military Representatives, will be holding a Major News Conference tomorrow morning at 8 A.M. EST at The Pentagon.” He added, “The News Conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable. Enjoy!”
The point, evidently, was to push back against evidence from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, which completed a preliminary intelligence assessment this week and found the airstrikes were less effective than Trump claimed and that the mission set Iran’s nuclear program back by only months, not decades.
Did the beleaguered defense secretary have “irrefutable” evidence to bolster the president’s dubious and premature boasts? Evidently not. The New York Times reported:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered on Thursday the Trump administration’s most detailed descriptions yet of the planning and execution of U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. But Mr. Hegseth and General Caine offered no new assessments of the state of Iran’s nuclear program or the damage to the sites.
One of the points that came into focus over the course of the press conference is that Hegseth wanted to answer questions that have largely gone unasked. The Pentagon chief spoke at some length about how impressive the mission was and how flawlessly it was executed.
He was apparently right about the logistics. It was, by all accounts, a well-executed military operation.
But one of the foundational questions since the public learned of these preemptive airstrikes was whether they served their intended purpose. If the goal was to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, it matters whether the operation actually destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. If the point was to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat for the foreseeable future, it matters whether the military offensive eliminated the Iranian nuclear threat for the foreseeable future.
Trump obviously has an opinion about this, which appears to be at odds with the available intelligence from his own country. Hegseth’s Q&A was ostensibly about proving the president right, but it didn’t: The Cabinet secretary pointed to a suspect CIA report, which didn’t quite echo Trump anyway, while taking a quote from the International Atomic Energy Agency out of context.
“Irrefutable” it was not.
At this point, some readers might wonder why Hegseth even bothered holding a press conference if he didn’t have new information to advance the White House’s preferred political narrative.
The answer, by all appearances, was to satisfy his audience of one. As NBC News noted:
In a post on Truth Social, Trump praised the Pentagon news conference that Hegseth and Caine held on Iran this morning. ‘One of the greatest, most professional, and most ‘confirming’ News Conferences I have ever seen!’ Trump wrote. The president then attacked the press just as Hegseth did during the briefing. ‘The Fake News should fire everyone involved in this Witch Hunt, and apologize to our great warriors, and everyone else!’
The typical point of a press conference is to convey information to journalists. The point of Hegseth’s press conference was to make weird boasts, condemn journalists and whine like a delicate snowflake about coverage from mean news organizations that don’t seem to care about his feelings, all while dodging good questions that he should’ve been able to answer.
Will this shift the public conversation? Probably not. Did it make the secretary’s boss happy? Apparently yes — and given that there have been some reports about Hegseth being sidelined within Team Trump, the Pentagon chief may care about little else.