Trump Spends NATO Raging Over Reports His Iran Strikes Did Nothing

Donald Trump furiously pushed back Wednesday against reports that his surprise strike on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities hadn’t “completely and fully obliterated” them as he’s previously claimed.

While attending a NATO summit in The Hague, Trump attacked multiple news outlets that had reported the day before on a damning early assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which found his strike on Iran hadn’t completely destroyed the country’s nuclear capabilities and instead only delayed it a few months. Once the president got going, he couldn’t stop.

“This was an unbelievable hit by genius pilots and genius people in the military, and they’re not being given credit for it because we have scum,” Trump said, referring to some reporters in the room. “CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick. And what they’ve done is they’re trying to make this unbelievable victory into something less.”

Trump, who regularly rails against the press, claimed he was only doing so on behalf of the service members who’d executed the strike.

“Very unfair to the pilots that risk their lives for our country, and then they get fake news New York Times and CNN make up a phony story to get some hits. That’s the only reason I care about it, because those pilots were so brave, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump said. “They flew into the hornets’ nest and then they got hurt so badly by what the fake news wrote, and it was CNN, it was The New York Times, and they’re both disgusting, disgusting, really horrible groups of people.”

Trump then outright denied the findings of his own government’s report, once again opting for intelligence from a foreign government: Israel.

When asked whether he would attack Iran again if they rebuilt their facilities, Trump replied, “I’m not gonna have to worry about that. It’s gone for years.” The president claimed that Israel’s nascent report would find that they had achieved “total obliteration.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has opted to trust Israeli intelligence over U.S. intelligence. He repeatedly ignored the annual threat assessment produced by his own intelligence community, which found that Iran was “not building a nuclear weapon,” opting to trust Israel instead.

Trump also tore into the outlets in a post on Truth Social Tuesday night. “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY. THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC,” he wrote.

But the Trump administration has been reluctant to meet the president’s absolute confidence of a successful strike. While Trump patted himself on the back for a mission accomplished, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said Sunday it was “way too early” to say whether the strike had actually been successful. That same day, Vice President JD Vance declined to confirm that Iran’s nuclear sites had been completely destroyed.

Money can’t buy everything: New York City Democrats elected Zohran Mamdani in the citywide primaries.

Mamdani was ranked first Tuesday in the Democratic mayoral primary by 43.5 percent of the city’s eligible voters with 90 percent of the votes counted, beating out a wide field of rivals in the city’s second mayoral election process to use ranked-choice voting.

The 33-year-old is the first democratic socialist to win the coveted candidacy, marking a seismic shift in the party’s national standing. Mamdani won Democratic voters over on a platform focused on taxing the rich and addressing the rising cost of living. Chief among his ideas were plans to reform New York’s constricting housing crisis, which he said would involve incentives to develop more affordable housing, monitoring bad landlords who repeatedly violate rent laws, and freezing rates on rent stabilized apartments.

Since Mamdani did not win 50 percent of the vote, he initially was going to have to wait a week until all of the ranked votes were counted. But in a shocking turn of events, ex–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo conceded the race.

“Tonight was not our night,” said Cuomo, who had just 36.3 percent of first-rank votes. “Tonight was Assemblyman Mamdani’s night.”

Cuomo congratulated Mamdani on a strong campaign, saying his opponent “inspired [New Yorkers] and moved them and got them to come out and vote. He really ran a highly impactful campaign.

“Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won,” Cuomo added.

Mamdani’s progressive agenda did not come without its detractors. Critics argued that Mamdani’s promises lacked available infrastructure, such as a plan to instate a network of city-owned grocery stores in order to tackle food insecurity, or promises to make bus rides free citywide.

The win shocked the Democratic establishment, which had sided with Cuomo in his bid for Gracie Mansion. Mamdani’s win also flies in the face of some of New York’s biggest corporate interests. Cuomo’s donors included a citywide landlord lobby, pro-MAGA billionaire Bill Ackman, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Doordash, and a $25 million super PAC that “shattered” outside spending records.

But his loss marks a brutal turn for Cuomo’s power in New York politics, as New Yorkers effectively nixed a city-based comeback for a man who was forced to resign from his leadership position in 2021 after he was deemed too corrupt for Albany. After his resignation, the Department of Justice determined Cuomo had sexually harassed 13 women over an eight-year period.

Mamdani, meanwhile, was backed by grassroots support and individual donors who helped him nearly reach the city’s $8 million campaign cap before he asked his supporters to “please stop sending us money.” Instead, the Ugandan-born Queens lawmaker’s team leaned into their ground game, banking that a volunteer army with 29,000 door-knockers would be able to make the difference.

By the final days of the primary race, Mamdani had received more out-of-state donations than his top two rivals combined, signaling a national appetite for his politics.

Mamdani previously served in the New York State Assembly representing the 36th District in Queens since 2021.

He was endorsed by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and also won the support of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a figurehead for the nation’s progressive movement.

Republican Representative Maria Salazar spoke out against President Trump’s indiscriminate deportation of immigrants—many of them in her own district—during a hearing with Treasury Secretary Jerome Powell on Tuesday.

“We agree with [what] President Trump is doing, what the administration is doing in deporting illegals, criminal illegals. We do not want Tren de Aragua, we don’t really want people who have committed any type of crime, even more if they are illegals,” Salazar said to Powell. “But we do know that unfortunately what’s happening right now after six months of Mr. President being in office, that we’re losing thousands and thousands of workers [that] the ICE leadership has called ‘collateral damage.’ And most of those people are working in three main sectors: construction, hospitality, and agriculture.… We’re talking about 50 percent of the economy.”

Salazar also asked Powell to elaborate on the impacts of these deportations on the economy. He told her plainly that while he isn’t in charge of fully assessing the impact of immigration policies, Trump’s deportations have “reduced the amount of growth in the labor force,” which in turn would slow the economy.

Salazar is right to point out that the administration is locking up and deporting people with no criminal records who contribute significantly to the economy, but Trump obviously does not care to make the same distinction. This is a sadly ironic and extremely predictable turn of events for someone who endorsed the man who is now terrorizing her constituency.

This isn’t the first time Salazar has issued a plea to Trump. In February, she told CNN that “we have to make a differentiation between the Tren de Aragua and those Venezuelans who came in through [Temporary Protected Status].” The Supreme Court last month let Trump revoke TPS for about 350,000 Venezuelans living and working legally in the country.

An early U.S. intelligence assessment has determined that Donald Trump’s airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear bases failed to destroy core components of the nation’s nuclear program.

The president’s attack, conducted without the express approval of Congress, damaged facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan on Saturday. But a battle damage assessment by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm determined that the missile barrage only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, CNN reported Tuesday.

The White House denied the contents of the leaked report, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt rebuffing the whistleblower as a “low-level loser.” But she still acknowledged that the report had been classified as “top secret.”

In the wake of the attack, Trump celebrated that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated.” He told reporters aboard Air Force One Tuesday that the nation should “get on to being a great trading nation” with regard to its oil supply. He further promised that, based on the severity of the attack, “the last thing on Iran’s mind right now is nuclear weapons.”

But not everyone on Capitol Hill shared Trump’s evaluation. In an interview with Steve Bannon Tuesday, Republican Senator Rand Paul wondered if Iran would respond “with a sprint to creating a nuclear weapon.”

“There are news reports out today saying that 400 kilograms of enriched uranium at 60 percent was spirited out before the attacks,” Paul said.

Israeli officials signaled Sunday there was evidence that Iran had moved equipment and uranium—enriched to 60 percent purity—from one of the bomb sites ahead of the attack. The fuel was reportedly stored inside another nuclear complex near the ancient capital of Isfahan.

International Atomic Energy Agency Director Rafael Grossi texted The New York Times that his inspectors had laid eyes on the uranium a week before Israel attacked, and that Iran has “made no secret that they have protected this material.”

Paul warned he wasn’t “sure you can bomb away the ability to make a nuclear weapon.” He noted that the Iranians had enough uranium to manufacture about 10 weapons. “I hope the war will not continue, but I guess I rest my judgment on the previous incursions of so many presidents—from Obama to Bush—overseas that really didn’t go as planned,” Paul said.

At least 606 people have been killed in Iran since Israel first attacked on June 13, according to Iran’s health ministry. Approximately 107 people died on Monday alone, making it the deadliest single day of the conflict.

Iranian officials have made it clear that they are no longer interested in negotiating with American leadership, citing the nation’s deception ahead of prearranged talks regarding Iran’s nuclear program that were scheduled to take place earlier this month.

Trump preemptively announced a successful ceasefire between Iran and Israel Monday evening, before the two nations had jointly come to an agreement on the terms of ending their conflict. Hours after the ceasefire deadline had passed, the two nations continued lobbing missiles at one another.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that yet another wrongly deported immigrant must be returned to the United States to receive due process.

Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, 31, to El Salvador minutes after the Second Circuit ordered that he remain in the U.S.—and despite the government having assured the court it would hold off on his removal until at least the following day.

The government chalked the wrongful removal up to “a confluence of administrative errors”—though Politico reports that the Department of Homeland Security has said there was “no error” in his deportation, alleging that Melgar-Salmeron is a member of MS-13.

In a Tuesday ruling, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court ruled that the government must facilitate Melgar-Salmeron’s return.

The judges, one of whom was appointed by Trump in his first term, also gave the government a one-week deadline to file a document clarifying Melgar-Salmeron’s “current physical location and custodial status” as well as “what steps the Government will take, and when, to facilitate his return to the United States.”

The Second Circuit judges in their Tuesday decision cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Noem v. Abrego Garcia, in which the high court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador.

Melgar-Salmeron’s is just the latest instance in which courts have had to step in to rein in Trump’s wanton deportation campaign. Politico reports that Melgar-Salmeron’s is the fourth case—Abrego Garcia’s being the most famous—of federal courts ordering the administration to return illegally or improperly deported immigrants to the United States.