Trump is rejecting his own aides' data as 'fake news': report

President Donald Trump’s seeming obliviousness to the impending disaster of his war in Iran is already making voters angry, but Zeteo reports some of Trump’s perceived cluelessness may be because his people genuinely are keeping him clueless.

“Trump wants good news, and he rejects bad news as fake,” said one anonymous source speaking with Zeteo. “He’s getting what he is paying for.”

Zeteo reports that staffers for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon “have been under tremendous pressure” to deliver data and internal reports that “match President Donald Trump’s constant flow of self-serving propaganda on the Iran war.” And the resulting reports are filled with nonsense.

“Two U.S. officials and another source familiar with the matter tell Zeteo that when staff have produced data and analyses seen as too gloomy to the American side, higher-ranking officials in Trump’s Department of Defense have told them they need to frontload and emphasize the ‘good news,’ before the reports get briefed to the White House and the president.

Materials that sources tell Zeteo “invited Trumpian edits” have included “internal data and reports on Iranian military capabilities, damage to Iranian targets, remaining munitions and weapons on all sides of the war, and other key metrics used to measure military success or failure.”

According to all three sources, digging for precious kernels of happy-news fluff is getting exceedingly harder to do.

“Within the Defense Department and elsewhere in the U.S. government, a common response to this among staff is: What good news?” Zeteo reports, adding that one U.S. official compared the pig-lipsticking to “someone wanting to hear about a car they were buying, knowing that the car had a ton of documented problems, but then only wishing to receive descriptions of how great and top-of-the-line the new tires are.”

“The three people say that when analysts and others have tried to soften their reports and intel while still retaining a portrait of how disastrously the war is going for the Trump-Vance administration, there have been multiple times where their work has been edited by Pentagon officials above them, before making its way to Secretary of Defense Hegseth and President Trump,” report Zeteo writers Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez. “… Our sources’ accounts further underscore the degree to which the Trump White House has sought to downplay, or even cover up, how horribly their war has gone for them, as the conflict drives up prices for Americans during an election year – and as every reputable poll shows Trump’s war in Iran remains phenomenally unpopular with the U.S. electorate.”