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  • Donald Rumsfeld
    • The Unknown
      As we know,
      There are known knowns.
      There are things we know we know.
      We also know
      There are known unknowns.
      That is to say
      We know there are some things
      We do not know.
      But there are also unknown unknowns,
      The ones we don’t know
      We don’t know.

      —Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
  • Donald Trump
    • “The intelligence was very inconclusive. The intelligence says we don’t know. It could have been very severe. That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct. But I think we can take the ‘we don’t know.’ It was very severe. It was obliteration.”

Trump’s response to intelligence assessment on Iran strikes takes an incoherent turn

The intelligence about the U.S. strikes on Iranian targets can’t be conclusive and inconclusive at the same time.

June 25, 2025, 8:57 AM EDT By Steve Benen

As Donald Trump arrived in the Netherlands this week for an annual NATO summit, the American president reportedly hoped to take a victory lap of sorts, celebrating the success of the preemptive military strikes he approved targeting Iranian nuclear sites. As is often the case with the Republican, reality quickly got in the way.

On Tuesday, the world learned of a preliminary intelligence assessment from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, which jolted the public and political debate. As NBC News confirmed, the initial assessment concluded that the U.S. airstrikes “were not as effective” as Trump claimed, and the mission set [Iran]’s nuclear program “back by only three to six months.”

The day after this assessment reached the public, the president responded to the news in a decidedly Trumpian way. NBC News reported:

Trump and his top Cabinet officials are disputing reports that indicate the U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a few months — despite his initial claim that the U.S. ‘obliterated’ the program. Speaking to reporters in the Netherlands today, Trump repeatedly referred to the strikes as causing ‘obliteration.’ He claimed that he thinks the U.S. strikes set Iran back decades.

Predictably, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed the president’s comments. (The New York Times reported that Trump has “closely monitored” which members of his administration have used the specific words he wants to hear.)

There were some key problems with the Republican’s rhetoric at his NATO press conference, starting with the fact that he kept contradicting himself in incoherent ways.

Pressed on the efficacy of the mission and the accuracy of the intelligence, Trump said, “The intelligence was very inconclusive. The intelligence says we don’t know. It could have been very severe. That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct. But I think we can take the ‘we don’t know.’ It was very severe. It was obliteration.”

The first part of his answer was at odds with the second. The intelligence can’t be conclusive and inconclusive at the same time. If Trump wants to say that it’s too early to have a firm understanding of the strikes’ success, fine. But when he simultaneously declares that the U.S. doesn’t know for sure whether Iran’s nuclear sites were obliterated, and that Iran’s nuclear sites were obliterated, his assertions become plainly unbelievable.

Soon after, at the same event, Trump said that U.S. intelligence officials “really don’t know” the full extent of what happened to the [Iranian targets], before adding moments later, “I believe it was total obliteration.”

Or put another way, according to the American president, U.S. intelligence officials don’t know, but he does know. The Republican went on to condemn several American news organizations as “scum,” presumably because they reported that Trump misled the public when he exaggerated the success of the operation — reporting that the president more or less confirmed when he said “we don’t know” whether the mission was a complete success, while simultaneously saying the opposite.

Even by Trump standards, this has become bizarre. Indeed, he can’t have it both ways. On the one hand, the president wants the public to believe the Iranian targets were “completely and totally obliterated” and “completely destroyed,” as part of “one of the most successful military strikes in history.” On the other, he also wants the public to believe the intelligence on the mission was “very inconclusive” and the United States simply doesn’t know, despite the initial assessment that concluded that Trump’s claims were simply at odds with the facts.

In recent months, the Republican has earned a reputation for dishonesty, recklessness and expressing indifference to his own country’s intelligence. The story of the Iranian strikes he approved has quickly reached the point at which Trump is checking all of these boxes at the same time.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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