LEAKERS: "IT WASN'T ME"

Yesterday I told you about an NBC report that President Trump's primary source of information about the war in Iran is a daily good-news-only highlight reel that's prepared for him by CENTCOM.

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

... the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.

Emily Horne, a former National Security Council and State Department official told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that she has a theory about this leak:

I’m going to tell you my little conspiracy theory about this story. I think this story is a White House plant....

You’ve got multiple sources, both current and former, who are all singing from the same sheet of music—which says to me, again, this is coordinated. This is a plan. So what does that tell us? That tells us that even though this is a story that on a casual read looks kind of embarrassing for the president—and is, I think, being treated as such on social media, like the president of the United States needs a greatest-hits compilation of CENTCOM strikes in order to understand how the war is going—I understand that reaction.

But to be clear, there’s a deeper message that I think they want planted in people’s minds, which is that this White House is now creating excuses for why the war is not going well and why the American people do not approve of this war. And one of the excuses that they are creating is, well, the president of the United States is not being fed good information by his military.

That is what they are trying to plant with this story, if—as I suspect—this is a planted story. They’re trying to create a paper trail and a narrative that says this is going badly not because Donald Trump made terrible decisions, but because his military leadership is not being honest with him about what is happening.

I think it's an attempt to shift blame, but I don't think it's necessarily President Trump and his inner circle trying to shift blame to the Pentagon. The leakers are likely to understand that while this might make the Pentagon look bad, it absolutely makes Trump look bad. Anyone who's paid attention to Trump's presidencies knows that he likes to be fed good news and he likes briefings that don't require him to read a lot of words. Here's an Atlantic story from January 2018:

Before [his first] inauguration, Trump told Axios, “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.” In February, The New York Times reported that National Security Council members had been instructed to keep policy papers to a single page and include lots of graphics and maps....

In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention.

I think the leakers are people who expect this story to make Trump and the Pentagon -- or at least the current Pentagon leadership -- look bad. Their purpose is to say, Don't blame us. Who might want to send that message? I'm not sure. Maybe Vice President Vance, who formerly positioned himself as an opponent of miltary adventurism? Maybe Marco Rubio, who's frustrated that the Iran war has postponed the overthrow of the Cuban government he longs for? Maybe Pentagon careerists who don't like Pete Hegseth's Department of Defense?

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I don't think Trump himself is setting Hegseth up as the fall guy. Zeteo's Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez write:

Trump has seemed eager to shift some credit (or blame, depending on who you ask) for his disastrous war in Iran to Hegseth. Earlier this week, the president said, “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Trump blames Hegseth for the war: "Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, 'Let's do it.'" pic.twitter.com/QBGeFuhM1M

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

But Trump's remark, in a Memphis speech on Monday, doesn't seem like blame to me. In fact, he portrays himself as the person who wanted to do something about Iran:

You know, our economy was fantastic. We had a Dow at 50,000. They say it couldn't happen in four years, it wouldn't happen during my term, but if I got anywhere close, it would be a great success. Well, in my first year, we hit 50,000. And with the S&P, they said -- even more difficult. They said it would be impossible to hit 7,000 on the S&P, and we hit that in our first term.

And then, unfortunately, I came -- I called Pete, I called General Caine, I called a lot of our great people. We have great people. And I said, let's talk. We got a problem in the Middle East. We have a country known as Iran that for 47 years has been just a purveyor of terror, and they're very close to having a nuclear weapon.

We can keep going and get that 50,000 up to 55,000 and 60,000. There's no end. Or we can take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem. And, uh, Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up and you said, let's do it, because you can't let them have a nuclear weapon.

To me that's Trump saying, I, in my infinite wisdom, astutely recognized the threat from Iran, and Pete agreed that we needed to act.

Then I look at that Zeteo story, and I see this:

Donald Trump’s so-called “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has earned himself a new nickname, current and former US officials tell us. Among various staffers and officials working within the august confines of the Pentagon and Department of Defense, the former ‘Fox & Friends’ co-host and “death and destruction”-obsessed Trump acolyte is known as “Dumb McNamara.”

This is, of course, a reference to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, an architect of American military escalation in Vietnam who, despite his disastrous record, maintained a reputation as a brilliant, shrewd thinker. It is exceedingly hard to find anyone in the corridors of Washington power – or anywhere on the planet – who would label Hegseth a brilliant mind.

However, the nickname “Dumb McNamara” has spread within the US government due to Hegseth’s cheerleading of the war and bombing blitzes – overzealous bloodlust and enthusiasm for military fiasco that reminds American officials of, well, a very stupid version of Robert McNamara.

I suspect that there might be overlap between the "current and former US officials" who are leaking the words of "various staffers and officials" in the Pentagon and Defense Department to Zeteo and the "three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official" who are leaking to NBC. I think Defense careerists and/or disgruntled civilians in the White House are doing the leaking, not Trump loyalists.