NBC News: Trump's aides appear to be hiding bad war news from him

From the beginning of seditionist criminal Donald Trump's second term, there have been questions both about his surviving mental acuity and the extent to which his advisers have been taking advantage of his state to pursue their own agendas while he sits around mostly unaware and disinterested.

Those questions are always couched as "critics say," to be paired off with dramatic expressions of outrage from the advisers being accused of Doing That. And while everyone's having that fight, a new White House leak comes out that validates the critics' fears and makes it pretty damn clear that inside the Oval Office, or more commonly inside the draped-off corner of some Mar-a-Lago club room, things are much worse than we thought:

WASHINGTON — 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.”

Uuuuuuuuuuugh.

That's the lede of a new NBC News report describing Trump's management of his new Iran War, or more accurately his aides' management of his management of the war, and there is so much bad news in there that it's hard to know what to pick out.

There is something very on-the-nose about Trump's major exposure to his own war being a two-minute daily "montage" of the prettiest explosions the war has most recently produced. Nothing about what the other side's doing, of course. This is intended as a feel-good, pick-me-up version of the war, the daily jingling of the keys. It's Cortex Stimulation Time, and it's only a fifth of the length of a Teletubbies episode because Dear Leader's far more easily bored than your average child and not even a montage of people getting brutally murdered will keep his attention for longer than 100 seconds or so.

Don't worry, though. That's not his main exposure to his own ongoing war.

The highlight reel of U.S. Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders and news reports, the officials said.

In a moment we're gonna find out why that's worse. As for why we're hearing about this, when it seems pretty obvious that the White House wouldn't want any of us talking about grandpa's Montage Time, it appears to be for the usual reason: the half-assed attempt to make the war into a no-risk, high-stimulus video game for Trump "is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war," multiple NBC sources said.

So it's a leak from administration insiders who are trying to distance themselves from Operation Clusterfuck, or who are laying the groundwork for an upcoming argument that Grandpa Clusterfuck was tricked into the war by his Clusterfuck Advisory Board, or are trying to gently extract the White House from Operation Clusterfuck by exposing the Clusterfuck Advisory Board as Clusterfuckers.

The more we hear about operations inside the White House, the more it becomes clear that they aren't any different from the meme-obsessed, edgelord social media culture the administration has enforced in its public-facing roles. There have been no White House strategy meetings with arrows on a map, or slideshow presentations probing possible responses if Iran retaliated by closing the Persian Gulf to the world's ships, or any of that.

There was no plan, because plans take longer than two minutes to explain. There is only boom-boom time. Grandpa's murder montage is the bulk of it, and the rest of it is just vibes, man.

Much of the rest of the story is, as usual, taken up by rebuttals from a bunch of known administration liars who are in their roles solely to lie extravagantly about everything they're asked. Once you reveal some big-deal news that suggests the commander in chief of the United States military is getting the majority of his war reports through short-format snuff films, you're going to have to publish the theatric outrage of the handful of people in the White House who still know you're supposed to express outrage over such claims.

But NBC buried the most alarming details underneath that, and ... hoo boy.

The current and former U.S. officials said the military can’t brief Trump on every strike — there are hundreds every day — and so the curated video, while it showcases U.S. capabilities, doesn’t reflect the full scope of the conflict.

“We can’t tell him every single thing that happens,” a current U.S. official said. The official noted that Trump’s briefings tend to draw better feedback from his aides when they focus on U.S. victories.

Yeah, we wouldn't want to upset Stephen Miller by bringing up bad news. Like most other rodents, When he's stressed he tends to eat his young. Nobody wants to deal with that.

Overall, the official said, the information Trump gets about the war tends to emphasize U.S. successes, with comparatively little detail about Iranian actions.

YOU DON'T SAY. HEY, I WONDER IF THERE MIGHT BE DOWNSIDES TO THAT.

One example came this month when five U.S. Air Force refueling planes were hit in an Iranian strike at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, according to one of the current U.S. officials. Trump wasn’t briefed about the strikes, and he learned what had happened from media reports, the official said. When Trump inquired, he was told the planes weren’t badly damaged, the official said.

The official said Trump reacted angrily behind the scenes to the news coverage. Publicly he posted on Truth Social calling coverage of the strike misleading and accusing media organizations of wanting the U.S. “to lose the War.”

Oh, we're definitely screwed, then. The U.S. president's top military and civilian aides straight-up hid one of the more consequential Iranian counterattacks, so he had to hear about it on his television set—and thought his television was lying to him, not his advisers.

That's how empires fall. I'm not even joking, and you and I both know it. Since the beginning of Trump's term there have been constant accusations that Trump's aides have been hiding real-world news from him in order to steer him instead towards their own preferred decisions, and now we've got a concrete example of them doing exactly that.

When Trump's military briefing contains news of Iranian counterattacks, his aides get pissed off. When it just shows boom-boom successes, his aides give "better feedback." Are we going to pretend Trump isn't being manipulated into extending the war by aides trying to downplay the damage it's causing?

Among their concerns is that Trump may not be equipped to make critical decisions about options he’s presented with for possible next steps in the war if he’s not receiving a full scope of information about the status of the conflict, the former official and a person familiar with the concerns said.

Some of Trump’s allies have sought to provide him with additional context, including possible scenarios for how the conflict could evolve and options for winding it down, to broaden the range of perspectives reaching him, according to the former official and the person familiar with the concerns. Recently, some of them tried to bring new polling to Trump’s attention, showing his approval rating sinking several points since the war began, according to the person familiar with the concerns.

There's going to be a tell-all book in which the "person familiar with the concerns" explains to America that They Were Against This All Along, and they will do interviews and try very hard to not be seen as the nation-endangering enabler they signed up to be and continued to be the whole damn time. And we aren't going to buy that book, because screw that person and their too-late ass covering.

But here is the part where we learn that we are all going to die, and I have no idea why it's buried near the tail end of the story because it's the most important damn bit in here.

Last week Trump said that he called a top military general after he saw video of the USS Abraham Lincoln in flames and that the general told him Iran fabricated the video using artificial intelligence.

“I called the general. I said, ‘General, what’s with the Abraham Lincoln, it looks like it’s burning down?’” Trump said at a lunch for Kennedy Center board members. He said the general told him: “‘No, it’s not burning down. Not a bullet was ever fired at it, sir. They know better.’”

One of the U.S. officials said that the USS Abraham Lincoln has been targeted multiple times since the war began but that the strikes have either failed to reach the ship or have been intercepted.

We're so boned. We're going to be lucky if we get out of this without Iran capturing most of the Eastern Seaboard.

To re-emphasize that last bit of reporting: Donald Trump, who spends uncountably many hours each day scrolling through social media looking for flattering images of himself, stumbled on a fake image of the supposed sinking of the Nimitz-class supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln. He thought it was real and called up a general. Which is a thing sitting presidents do now, apparently.

Trump thought it was at least possible that Iran had sunk a U.S. carrier and nobody around him had bothered to mention it. And when queried, the general he contacted told him Iran "knew better" than to fire on it, hiding from Trump the detail that Iran has repeatedly fired on it during the war.

Now, perhaps Trump is lying about what the general said. We can only hope, right? Surely, our nation's top generals are not lying to him that much. But it doesn't appear Trump knows that the carrier has indeed been attacked multiple times.

Every once in a while a story comes by that doesn't get a great deal of airtime or follow-up, only in hindsight being recognized as the prescient first hint of an upcoming catastrophe. I think this one is one of those. We've got multiple anonymous current and former U.S. officials warning that the president's information diet is being so carefully curated that his version of the war doesn't look anything like the real-world version of the war.

Perhaps they're trying to cover their own asses, now that it looks like there's no possible way Trump's stupid war will not end up a disaster for the United States. Or maybe, charitably, they're watching the same Trump build-up to a boots-on-the-ground invasion of the Iranian coast and are trying desperately to ward off the attack with this public attack on the aides who appear to be steering Trump in that direction.

We know Trump's major exposure to the war is through a snuff film montage. We know his relationship with his aides is so bad that he honestly thinks Iran could have sunk a U.S. carrier and his inner circle wouldn't bother to mention it. We know everyone around him lies like they breathe and are stewing in steroidal memelord culture. We know Trump and his top aides are so indifferent to operational security that they're monitoring U.S. military strikes from, sigh, a curtained-off portion of his Mar-a-Lago club.

I don't dare even contemplate what we don't yet know. We only know, with absolute certainty, it's gonna get worse.