The Pro-MAGA Press Can’t Agree on How to Cover Trump’s War on Iran  – Mother Jones

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth conducted a remarkably peevish press conference on the United States and Israel’s attacks on Iran. At various points, journalists in the breifing room asked—reasonably enough—whether there was “a concern of this spiraling into a longer war.”

“Did you not hear my remarks?” Hegseth responded, sounding indignant. “I mean, we’re ensuring the mission gets accomplished, but we are very clear-eyed, as the president has been, unlike other presidents, about the foolish policies of the past that recklessly pulled us into things that were not tethered to actual clear objectives.” 

The “mission for our warfighters,” Hegseth added a moment later, still sounding moderately ticked off, “is very, very clear. And they’re executing it right now, violently.”

The prickly exchange was notable, considering that the current Pentagon press pool is almost entirely made up of right-wing outlets who typically provide overwhelmingly pro-Trump coverage. The previous Pentagon press corps walked out en masse in October after refusing to sign a restrictive media policy and were largely replaced by a variety of conservative media organizations and influencers.

It was inevitable, then, that one day those reporters and influencers and others in the MAGA-flavored press would be called upon to cover an actual news event that does not always reflect favorably on the president. With the invasion of Iran, that day has now arrived. 

Following that press conference, Hegseth quickly had to bat away suspicion he had again put a thumb on the scale. Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson, who herself has a history of bigoted and xenophobic statements, denied a report from CNN’s Brian Stelter that Hegseth only took questions from handpicked outlets. “He is not Sleepy Joe Biden,” she retorted on X. “Hope that clears up any confusion.” That take-all-comers bravado was undercut on Wednesday when the Washington Post reported the Pentagon had since acted to bar two photographers from further Iran briefings after they published photos of Hegseth his staff deemed “unflattering.”

With the Iran invasion, Hegseth and the rest of the Trump administration are facing unusually heavy criticism from unexpected quarters. Conspiracy theorists who have often been pro-Trump have made it apocalyptically clear that the war has made them sour on the president: Natural News, a floridly weird anti-vaccine and pro-conspiracy outlet, called the Iran attack “the final, convulsive act of a dying American empire,” arguing that it would, in the end, guarantee “a seismic shift in global power, and it hands the ultimate leverage not to Washington, but to Tehran.” But many, more prominent, far-right figures have also come out unequivocally against it, including Steve Bannon, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Infowars kingpin Alex Jones. (Carlson even claimed on his program, which airs on X, that he’d flown to Washington “three times in the last month” to try to dissuade Trump from attacking Iran.)

Those figures seemed clear—unusually clear, in many cases—that the stakes are high. On Monday’s Infowars broadcast, Alex Jones warned that he thought the attacks would “absolutely escalate to World War III 99% of the time.” 

“The full invasion of Iran is going down,” he said, anticipating a ground invasion. “We have days, maybe a week, to stop this… It’s all happening.”

The Federalist, often a home for more genteel pro-Trump puffery, also pumped the brakes, writing that the administration has been asked reasonable questions that “Trump and his top officials can’t answer consistently and coherently.”

The simple questions, according a piece by Federalist senior editor John Daniel Davidson, include “what is our goal in Iran? Why did we launch this war now? What is our theory of victory, and how will we know when we have achieved it? These four questions in particular deserve answers. So far, we haven’t got them.” 

Other pro-Trump media outlets, including several that make up the new Pentagon press corps, seems less sure how to cover the invasion, toggling between a neutral accounting and— sometimes in the same breath—kowtowing to the president and the administration by framing the conflict in their preferred terms. The National Pulse, for instance, an outlet founded by former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam—he’s also an investor in a “MAGA hot spot” restaurant in Washington—ran an item on Tuesday about how the war is, in Trump’s words, “very complete” and praised US and Israeli forces for “effectively decapitating the Islamist regime’s top leadership and crippling” its military capabilities.

In the Pentagon briefing room, reporters asking questions often use the Trump administration’s preferred language, not only by referring to Iran’s forces as “the enemy” and “the adversary,” but by proceeding from the premise that the war is going exceedingly well. In a (calmer) press conference on Tuesday, for instance, in which Hegseth and Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took questions, they often served as opportunities to stress that the mission was under control and wouldn’t expand into a broader war. Alexandra Ingersoll, an anchor with the exceedingly pro-Trump One America News, helpfully asked about the degradation of Iran’s missile capabilities. Another journalist tossed up a softball and asked about Trump’s boast that he had a “really good call” with Russian President Vladimir Putin; Hegseth affirmed that he had. 

In contrast, Eric Schmitt from the New York Times asked about a timeline for the bombings to end, prompting one of the most revealing exchanges of the war so far, when Hegseth responded by declaring that President Trump “controls the throttle,” adding, “It’s not for me to posit whether it’s the beginning, the middle or the end.” 

The new Pentagon press corps members are often careful to follow up any question, no matter how bland, with some manner of praise for the administration. After asking about the government’s “message to Americans” at this time, and whether Israel “might be taking advantage of the U.S.’s backing,” Jordan Conradson, a writer from the far-right and heavily conspiratorial Gateway Pundit, tweeted that he was “proud to be in the Pentagon asking fair questions for our readers” and thanked Hegseth and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for “for having us taking my questions” [sic]. 

The Epoch Times, which has been traditionally been rabidly pro-Trump, has so far mostly stuck to bland and newspaper-like recountings of the bombing campaign. But the paper, which is backed by China’s Falun Gong religious movement, also ran a carefully worded opinion piece by a frequent contributor, praising the “current mission” as a “precise air and naval operation without American boots on the ground.” But, the author added, “Lessons learned from the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam quagmires informed us that nation building rarely is effective and democracy can’t be transplanted.” 

There’s rarely been a more stark divide within the MAGA press as the one visible between the often-cheerleading Pentagon briefing room and the critics on the outside. On Monday night, Alex Jones said Infowars wouldn’t cover the invasion “like it’s an entertainment show or we’re watching a war movie”—a strong claim from someone who’s covered virtually every mass shooting as though it isn’t real, spinning those claims into poisonous and virulent infotainment for his audience. 

“This is real,” Jones declared, for once. “We’re living this.” He needed, he added, to “stop the show” for a few hours and pore over his clips and headlines in order to better communicate what was happening to his audience.

“When you’re eating bug protein,” Jones darkly added, referring to his frequent claims that Americans are destined to be enslaved by elites and forced to eat insects, “you’ll remember this broadcast.”