Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took a blowtorch to legacy media outlets on Wednesday, slamming CNN and The New York Times for their attempt to downplay the overwhelming success of President Donald J. Trump’s recent military operation targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

Speaking alongside President Trump at a press conference following a NATO summit at The Hague, Hegseth responded forcefully to media reports claiming the strikes were only marginally effective.

“There’s a reason the president calls out fake news for what it is,” Hegseth said after President Trump yielded the podium for him to address the question.

CNN, citing unnamed sources, had reported that the U.S. airstrikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend may have only “set it back by months,” relying on a preliminary intelligence assessment said to be compiled by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. The assessment, they claimed, showed Iran’s uranium stockpile remained intact and that its centrifuges had largely survived.

The New York Times followed suit, claiming the B-2 stealth bomber strikes merely “sealed off the entrances” to underground sites but failed to collapse the facilities themselves.

Hegseth dismissed the reporting as political spin designed to damage President Trump’s leadership and undercut America’s strategic success. “The instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country,” he said.

“They don’t care what the troops think. They don’t care what the world thinks. They want to spin it to try to make him look bad, based on a leak,” Hegseth continued, before pointing out what many Americans already suspect: that anonymous leakers often cherry-pick information to suit an anti-Trump narrative.

Addressing the so-called “low-confidence” nature of the preliminary assessment, Hegseth offered a brutal reality check.

“Why is there low confidence? Because all of the evidence of what was just bombed by twelve 30,000-pound bombs is buried under a mountain, devastated and obliterated,” he said. “So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordow, you better get a big shovel and go really deep, because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated.”

He then pointed to Iran’s own response as the most compelling evidence of the mission’s success.

“You know who else knows? Iran, and that’s why they came to the table right away,” Hegseth said. “Because their nuclear capabilities have been set back beyond what they thought was possible because of the courage of a commander-in-chief who led our troops despite what the fake news wants to say.”

President Trump reinforced the point by referencing intelligence gathered by Israel, America’s closest Middle East ally. “Total obliteration,” Trump said bluntly, citing Israeli agents on the ground.

He read directly from the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission’s assessment: “The devastating U.S. strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility totally inoperable. We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons for many years to come.”

Even Iran’s own officials admitted the obvious. “Our nuclear installations have been badly damaged, that’s for sure,” said Esmail Baghaei, spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry on Wednesday.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe also weighed in, issuing a rare public statement to counter the media narrative. Ratcliffe confirmed that based on “a body of credible evidence,” the strikes had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program.

“This includes new intelligence from an historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years,” Ratcliffe said.

Despite the best efforts of anti-Trump media to undermine the administration’s success, both U.S. and foreign intelligence, as well as Iran itself, appear to agree on one point: Iran’s nuclear ambitions have taken a historic blow.