Trump’s Narrative on Iran Strikes Faces Internal Skepticism

Watan-Politico magazine published a report by John Sakellarides questioning why the U.S. administration is struggling to support President Donald Trump’s sweeping claims about airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

According to the article, officials are trying to prove that the strikes were as successful and flawless as Trump initially declared. However, Washington is facing difficulty portraying the strikes as a decisive victory, especially given the lack of clear evidence supporting that outcome.

The challenge began after a leaked preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment undermined Trump’s assertion that the strikes had “wiped out” Iran’s nuclear program entirely.

Within 36 hours, Trump and his aides launched an aggressive media campaign, holding press briefings and releasing statements from intelligence heads attempting to discredit the leak. They emphasized that the strike had been in planning for years. Still, they were unable to present compelling public evidence that Iran’s extensive nuclear infrastructure had been fully destroyed—an assessment that may take weeks or even months to verify.

The evaluations shared by officials so far have lacked detail and relied on ambiguous language, oscillating between claims that Iran’s program was either “crippled” or “set back significantly”—neither of which confirms complete destruction. Yet, Trump’s team continues to insist it’s too early to draw conclusions while trying to shape those very conclusions.

Politico points out that the administration has fallen into its own trap by saying it’s “too soon” to assess results, while attempting to spin the narrative simultaneously. In an effort to refute the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, which estimated that the strikes may have only set Iran’s program back by a few months, U.S. officials stressed the difficulty of rapidly obtaining reliable intelligence.

At a Pentagon press briefing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed the DIA report as “preliminary and low confidence,” stating it was based on intelligence gathered just a day and a half after the strikes. He even quoted directly from the report, which admitted that meaningful evaluation would require weeks.

Nuclear weapons experts and intelligence analysts agreed that such timelines are realistic, even though aerial imagery is available. They emphasized that ground-level intelligence, possibly from sources on-site, is necessary to understand the full scope of the damage—a challenge complicated by Iran’s refusal to disclose the extent of damage.

On Wednesday, Iran’s parliament voted to suspend cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), making verification even harder.

While U.S. officials focus on successfully targeting uranium enrichment facilities, analysts suspect Iran still retains stockpiles of enriched uranium and undeployed centrifuges that could be used to restart its nuclear program.

Satellite imagery from before the strikes showed rows of trucks at two sites—Fordow and Isfahan—raising the possibility that Iran moved critical materials ahead of the U.S. attack. Pressed on this, Hegseth responded, “I’m not aware of any intelligence confirming whether things were moved or not.”

Later Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted there’s “no indication” Iran relocated enriched uranium, but failed to convince skeptics that it hadn’t.

Top national security officials gave a classified briefing to the Senate, where Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, said it was “obvious” not all enriched uranium had been destroyed.“It’s been clear for some time that some of it couldn’t be destroyed by bunker-busting bombs,” he said.

IAEA Director Rafael Grossi said Wednesday that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium likely still exists. Even Republican Senator Tom Cotton acknowledged that the material may not have been eliminated:“Destroying or confiscating all of their enriched uranium wasn’t the mission. This isn’t Mission: Impossible,” he said.

Trump, however, claimed that the Iranian nuclear program had been derailed and even suggested at the NATO summit that a new nuclear deal with Tehran might not be necessary. Yet, many believe Iran’s covert capabilities remain intact. Despite Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, Tehran still possesses the knowledge to restart its program.

On Thursday, the U.S. administration provided limited details about damage inside nuclear sites, focusing more on the scale of the military operation than the actual success against Iran’s nuclear capability.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe both claimed that major nuclear facilities had been “destroyed,” and that it would take Iran years to rebuild. But Ratcliffe didn’t claim the program was fully dismantled, instead saying it had been “significantly degraded.” Even Republican hawk Senator Lindsey Graham expressed doubts about whether the strikes had actually stopped Iran’s ambitions.

Still, the White House doubled down on Trump’s extreme narrative. As reported by The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont, Trump has essentially forced his intelligence agencies to repeat his claims like parrots—echoing the Bush administration’s PR campaign in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.

The report draws parallels with how George W. Bush and Tony Blair cherry-picked intelligence to justify war, turning the search for weapons of mass destruction into a political branding exercise that backfired on military and intelligence officials alike.

Trump’s sweeping claims have now become a litmus test of loyalty for his administration. His top aides, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President J.D. Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, rushed to align with him. Even Tulsi Gabbard, who had previously voiced skepticism about Iran’s nuclear weapon intentions, reversed her stance after Trump mocked her. She claimed her earlier statements had been “taken out of context” by “biased media” and now insists Iran may have been weeks away from developing a bomb.

As Rolling Stone memorably put it last week, Trump’s attack on Iran was based on “feelings, not intelligence.”