US strikes on Iran have dominated headlines this week, in a fast-moving news story that grew stranger by the minute. Trump even shouted: ‘They don’t know what the f*** they’re doing’.
Today, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth gave a speech at the Pentagon that came across as more of a condescending lecture, slamming the press for their coverage of the attacks on nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan.
Through gritted teeth, Hegseth told reporters: ‘The assessment is that we significantly damaged the nuclear program, setting it back by years, I repeat, years. What the United States did was historic.’
Furrowing his brow, the defence chief added: ‘But because you – and I mean specifically you, the press – because you cheer against Trump so hard… You want him not to be successful so badly that you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes.
‘You hope maybe they weren’t effective, the way the Trump administration has represented them isn’t true, so you make half-truths, spin leaked information into every way you can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the public mind.’
Hegseth’s remarks were one of the most brutal attacks on the press from a senior official in Trump’s second term so far.
But the most interesting part isn’t the words, an expert has said — it’s the focus of their wrath.
Ian Garner, historian and propaganda analyst at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw, told Metro it’s telling to see Trump and Hegseth go on the attack, not against Iran, but against the media.
‘This has been coming back since his first presidential run. To me, it’s extremely authoritarian,’ he said.
‘The authoritarian approach is to say that the real enemy, the much more frightening enemy, is the enemy within.’
For Hegseth and Trump, that ‘enemy’ is the press, which they claim has undermined a military mission simply by reporting on evidence coming out of the Pentagon.
Media outlets that reported on new intelligence from the US suggesting the attacks in Iran did not destroy the nuclear facilities were publicly humiliated by Trump.
For the President and his Defence Secretary, who hailed them as ‘one of the most successful military strikes in history’, this was a betrayal.
But Mr Garner points out: ‘To suggest the media is somehow undermining a military mission by reporting on evidence, can’t possibly affect the reality of that mission.
‘The way Trump and Hegseth have interacted with the public and media tells us is something much more important: that this conflict is much more about spectacle and performance and giving domestic audiences a show of strength from the White House and the Pentagon than achieving any particular strategic target.’
The heart of this performance? Trump himself. A growing number of Americans are seeing him as the true commander-in-chief, Mr Garner argues.
‘The idea here is that power seems to emanate from this one political figure, from Donald Trump himself, which is eerily reminiscent of cults of personality we’ve seen elsewhere.
‘And yet, the spectacle and the performance are delivered in such an obvious way that it is really clear to any intelligent observer that this is truly a cult of personality.’
The media spectable unfolded after the US unleashed more than a dozen bombs on two Iranian nuclear facilities, the Fordow Fuel Enrichment plant and the Natanz Enrichment Complex.
But the revelation that the US may not have fully eliminated the centrifuges of the sites and highly enriched uranium is quickly becoming an issue for Trump and his ‘cult of personality’ – as well as the media reporting on it.
But it’s not Trump’s first fight with the media. He became famous in his first campaign for slamming what he called the ‘fake news media’ for spreading lies.
In 2017, it was found that one in four of Trump’s tweets at the time contained fake news.
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