USA

Trump’s frustration on Iran boils over in attacks against media

President Trump’s frustration with media coverage of the war against Iran boiled on thursday When he claimed the New York Times’ reporting was “inflammatory” and called CNN “stupid” and the “enemy.”

Verbal barrages aimed at the media are commonplace for Trump, but Thursday’s unusually intense attack seemed emblematic of his frustration with a conflict that wasn’t going well.

Rapidly rising oil prices have caused pump costs for Americans to soar to new levels. National average gas price on Friday, According to AAAIt rose more than 30 cents to $4.39 last week alone. Before the war, the average price was just under $3.

A poll released Friday by The Washington Post showed that 61 percent of Americans — including nearly 1 in 5 Republicans — view the war in Iran as a “mistake.”

The war has cost American taxpayers at least $25 billion so far, according to the Pentagon, and the short-term economic impact is much greater.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic’s leadership remains defiant, despite being worn down by thousands of military offensives.

The media reported all of this, much to Trump’s obvious displeasure.

“If you see CNN, their [Iran] He complained in the Oval Office on Thursday: “If you read The New York Times, I think it’s actually inflammatory. You read the New York Times, you actually think they’re winning the war. I’ve read some of these columnists, but it all starts at the top. It’s a terrible thing.”

In the more welcoming circles of the media, Trump insists that victory has already been won and that an even greater victory is at hand.

In a phone interview on Newsmax Thursday afternoon, host Greta Van Susteren asked the president: “Didn’t you win already?”

Trump replied, “We already won, but I want to win by a bigger margin.”

This is clearly not seen that way by others.

Trump’s insistence that regime change in Tehran has already been achieved is implausible, considering that former religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war, was replaced by his son Mojtaba Khamenei, a close ally of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran still maintains a stockpile of highly enriched uranium, even as more damage has been done to nuclear sites that Trump previously claimed were “destroyed” in last year’s airstrikes.

Meanwhile, Iran’s strongest trump card in the conflict has been its ability to force the virtual closure of the Strait of Hormuz, normally a transit channel for about one-fifth of the world’s oil. Trump has retaliated by imposing an additional American blockade of ships traveling to and from Iranian ports, but this has so far produced no progress.

Trump has repeatedly attacked the media for things going wrong.

On Air Force One in mid-March, he called an ABC News reporter “a very disgusting person” for pressing him about the war, including why he was sending more troops to the region.

It’s gone even further in the last two weeks.

on April 20 social media post He claimed that the “Anti-American Fake News Media” was “rooting for Iran to win.”

The next day, called the writer The Wall Street Journal had a “FOOL” and a “MORON” article. the opinion letter in question “Iranians think Trump is a sucker” was the headline.

Thursday’s sedition charge took the hostility a notch higher.

But to many observers, the root cause of Trump’s discomfort appears to be events in Iran, exacerbated by the media’s reluctance to cover the conflict in a positive light.

“His frustration with what’s going on in Iran and how people are responding is not the scope of the coverage,” said GOP strategist Susan Del Percio, a frequent critic of Trump.

“He just wants the news he wants to be published, which is not surprising. It’s his frustration that makes him angry, and that’s very much the way things are going,” he added.

Tobe Berkovitz, a professor emeritus at Boston University who specializes in political communication, said part of Trump’s problem lies in the very confident predictions he made in the early days of the war and his failure so far to deliver on those predictions.

“Trump has made very aggressive statements about how long this is going to take, how we’re going to win, what he’s going to do, and most of that hasn’t been delivered at this point,” Berkovitz said.

“What about the goals he’s aggressively communicating? The media looks at them and says, ‘Can we put a check mark next to these?’ he says. And for now the answer is: ‘No, we can’t.’”

But Trump’s position has defenders.

Some of this is within his own administration, such as when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth controversially compared reporters to the Pharisees of Biblical times at a press conference in mid-April.

Hegseth claimed that some members of the media have “politically motivated hostility” towards President Trump [that] “It almost blinds you to the genius of our American warriors.”

The Defense Secretary’s criticism was met with pushback in part because some took it as implying a comparison between Trump and Jesus.

But even in late March, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a column “The war is going better than you think,” ran the headline.

Comparing progress in Iran to other conflicts in the past, Stephens said, “If past generations could see how well this war was going compared to the war they had to fight at a frightening cost, they would be astonished at the comparative good fortune of their own future generations.”

But even Berkovitz, who is sometimes critical of what he sees as liberal tendencies in contemporary media, was skeptical that the war in Iran was being portrayed as harsher than past conflicts.

He specifically touched on coverage of the Vietnam War nearly half a century ago, when the media became very critical as the conflict progressed. This culminated in a 1968 on-air comment by venerable CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, who lamented that the United States was “bogged down” in Vietnam.

However, Barry Bennett, who served as a senior adviser on Trump’s first campaign in 2016, insisted that the president is being denied the benefits he deserves here and now.

“There’s no way to look objectively at what’s going on militarily and economically in Iran and not credit President Trump with disarming the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism — unless you’re seriously left of center and hate Trump enough to cloud your judgment,” Bennett insisted.

But so far most American voters disagree; at least when it comes to the general pros and cons of war.

Unless that changes, Trump’s anger will likely flare up further.

Note is a column written by Niall Stanage.

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