If You're Explaining, You're Losing: Pete Hegseth Edition

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened. There is not a liberal America, any conservative America, there is the- And good luck. Hey, folks. This week's Elephant in the Room is an old political rule. And the rule is, if you're explaining, you're losing. Sunday, Saturday night, Sunday morning American time, earlier this week, a number of B-2 bombers flew from Whiteland Air Force Base in Missouri all the way across our great globe to the Fordow plant in Iran. They dropped six GBU-57 Bunker Buster bombs. They're called the Massive Organs Penetrator. They're meant to drill way down into the earth and explode to take out very hard targets. And Fordow was, by all accounts, a very hard target. Since that day, we've had this fantasy version, this fabulous version of what happened that night, that Donald Trump immediately said, everything in Iran has been totally obliterated. It's all gone. Their nuclear program is wiped off the face of the earth. The strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. I wish I could buy it. I wish it was actually true. I wish, by some miracle, the entirety of the Iranian nuclear program had been wiped from the face of the earth. We'd be a better world for it. Then came the leaks out of the intelligence community, because they were going to tell the truth. And the assessments in the early going have been that Fordow is not entirely obliterated. It is not nothing but dust and sadness. You knew they were lying just because he's Donald Trump. You know, anything Trump-qua-Trump is going to end up with lies in it. But you knew they were lying almost immediately because they started saying, why are you attacking the pilots? Why are you attacking the troops? Why are you attacking the men and women who carried out this mission? Literally no one did that. Find me an elected official or a media person of consequence who was attacking the troops, and I'll give you 500 bucks for your favorite charity, because it didn't happen. But they love this narrative construct. They love this shield that they believe that their, quote-unquote, love of the military gives them. They want to frame Democrats and Trump skeptics as people who are not friendly to defense, not friendly to national security, not friendly to our military. It's an absurdity. It's a ludicrous absurdity. But I will say this. It's a great tell. I think what has probably happened is DIA, CENTCOM, and other folks that are involved in the BDA, the battle damage assessment of this target, have come back and said, yeah, got six holes in the ground, man. Great job, Shaq, right on target. But we don't know what was down there. We don't know what was left down there. There were trucks for days outside of Fordow. We don't know what they took in or out of that complex. We are hearing from a lot of sources out there in the press and elsewhere that a lot of the 60% enriched uranium was already out of Fordow. It's somewhere else. And again, let's be very clear. There's another frame that they keep throwing out there in their desperate attempts to explain this thing, and that's, well, if you don't say that the troops did a great job and the pilots were brilliant and bold, then you want the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon. Their non-sequiturs have non-sequiturs of their own at this point. The ludicrous nature of those accusations, it just winds and winds and winds. It never stops getting more ridiculous as time goes by, right? As we look at the rest of this week that has transpired, they've gotten louder and louder and angrier and angrier and more and more pissed off about anyone who would say, well, what did happen? Will you brief us? Now, they won't brief Congress. They're gonna have a limited briefing of the Senate, but they're not gonna brief the rest of Congress, which is a departure from the eternal tradition that the people that are in this country allowed to declare and make war technically, it's Congress. I know no one wants to say this is a war, think this is a war. It's a war. It's just not gonna be fought on the terms that Donald Trump thinks it's gonna be fought on. But they keep explaining it. They keep revving up their story. They keep jacking up the tension. They keep getting louder and louder and madder and madder and madder about this thing, leading to Donald Trump over in NATO, bouncing off the walls, looking like a damn fool, saying that they call me daddy. Mark Ritter, the NATO chief, who is your friend, he called you daddy earlier. Daddy has to sometimes use strong language. Do you regard your NATO allies as kind of children? No, he likes me. I think he likes me. If he doesn't, I'll let you know. I'll come back and I'll hit him hard. Okay? He did. He did it very affectionately. Daddy, you're my daddy. First off, creepy. Second off, have y'all noticed this pattern? This is a brief aside here. The European leadership, they've all figured out how to play this ******. They've all figured out how to hook Donald Trump. They send him these notes or these text messages like, you are so bold, sir. You are the greatest president ever, sir. No one could achieve this, sir. But Trump was very, very angry when confronted with this. And he wasn't confronted with questions like, was this a good idea or a bad idea? Or did this work or did it not work? He was asked simple questions like, have we got a battle damage assessment? Who's doing it? Why is your intelligence community saying one thing and you are saying another? What does totally obliterated mean? Who are the sources you keep citing? And as the week's gone on, they keep doing this. Because in politics, folks, that rule I mentioned at the very beginning, if you're explaining, you're losing. They've been explaining every day this week. They've been explaining nonstop. They can't stop explaining the explanations that were explained yesterday. So Friday, as I'm recording this on Thursday, excuse me, on Thursday, as I'm recording this late Thursday afternoon, this morning at 8 a.m. Greasy looking, I mean, it looked like an ad for hair product, but a greasy and bellowing Pete Hegsa took to the stage. First off, they rolled out that new creature from the catalog of imaginary demons. The alleged attacks on the pilots, the men and women who flew these aircraft over there. No one's done that. It hasn't happened. No one said it. No one. He leaves off with that lie. He starts telling reporters how they should cover the story. You should write that these were the bravest, boldest, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then he goes in and tells a particularly in the explaining it lie. He goes, this was the most complex and most secretive operation ever in history. May I introduce you to D-Day? May I introduce you to the opening salvos in the Gulf War Part I in Desert Storm? May I introduce you to the opening night of air power in the attack on Saddam Hussein in 2003? May I introduce you to Operation Bolo? May I introduce you to any number of air battles throughout history and air operations throughout history that are vastly more complex than this? These men and women who fly the V-2, they're at the pinnacle of military aviation. They're flying an incredibly sophisticated aircraft. They are all incredibly talented people. This is what they do. They're mentally tough. They don't need you to pat them on the head and say, oh, what a good job you did. They know the good job that they did. They take satisfaction in delivering for our national security needs at risk to themselves. Hexoth and Trump seem to be infantilizing the men and women in the military. And the men and women in the military that I know and have known do not need the foot massage. They don't need the, oh, aren't you a brave boy? They want to be recognized for what they've done. They want to be acknowledged that they're professionals because they are. When I was involved in the beginnings of the V-2 program, we were selling the V-2 to Congress, okay? We were pitching Congress, like, this is a platform for the ages. And we were supposed to build 232 of them. We only built 22 of them. There are 19 operational today. There was a period of time where we're outside of, like, the engineering spec. I knew about the V-2 program more than I knew about the back of my own ass, okay? It is a remarkable platform, the training and screening for the men and women that fly this platform. And remember, it is not just meant to drop conventional munitions, as we saw this week in Iran and that we saw in other conflicts throughout the recent period in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, Syria and elsewhere. The men and women who fly this aircraft are qualified to carry and deploy nuclear weapons. So do you think Pete Hexoth's explanation, his whiny, bitchy, stompy foot, overly emotional explanation, that their feelings were so hurt that the media didn't praise them? Because you, and I mean specifically you, the press, specifically you, the press corps, because you cheer against Trump so hard, it's like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump, because you want him not to be successful so bad, you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes. You have to hope maybe they weren't effective. Maybe the way the Trump administration's representative isn't true. So let's take half-truths, spun information, leaked information, and then spin it, spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the mind, the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful. How many stories have been written about how hard it is to, I don't know, fly a plane for 36 hours? It's bullshit. These people are so much better as officers, as aviators, as pilots, as professionals than Pete Hexoth and Donald Trump give them credit for. And the fact that they're trying to use them as a foil, the fact that they're going to use them to protect the shambolic, shitshow nature of the Trump administration and its so-called foreign policy and national security apparatus is more of an insult than them not getting a front-page story in the New York Times saying the bravest of brave B-2 bomber pilots. But if you're explaining, you're losing. So what else happened today on Thursday with Pete Hexoth and Raisin Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Trump, picked from a three-star and named CJCS, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? They tried to explain what the bomb did. It was after my time. It started being specced back in 2004, was developed by about 2011. It's an offshoot of the MOAB program, which had an aerial version and a penetrating version, the MOAB and the MOP, Mass Ordnance Penetrator. So it started out during George W. Bush and ended up being deployed during Barack Obama. So that's something to just, you know, cook your brain a little bit in August. But these weapons and these explanations over and over again, they're like, watch this video, how it works. Yes, we understand how it works. We've had penetrating weapons before, GBU-37 and others over the years. They show this piece of rehearsal footage or test footage, probably from 10 or 15 years ago. This is what it does now. This is why you have to write the story the way we tell you to write it. That's not how this works. Most of this press conference was an attack on journalists and journalism. Most of this press conference was trying to demand the media write stories the way they and the Trump administration want them to be written. That's why they keep explaining themselves over and over and over again. Let's consider this. Even with the unbelievable amount of demands and insults and garbage thrown at the media there today, they've covered this story in a very straight way. They've covered the story in a very professional, straight way. It's been that the intelligence community cannot yet assess that the words that Donald Trump used, absolutely obliterated, are valid. They can't, with certainty, say these brave men and women who did this mission accomplished the mission of destroying Iran's nuclear program. Did they **** up Fordow? Sure. I guarantee you. Caused some hurt. But we don't know what that is. We don't know the scope of that. And so far, the publicly named sources, the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, which the last time I checked is not part of either Mossad or Shin Bet, the two primary Israeli intelligence operations. So I'm guessing the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission doesn't have boots on the ground at Fordow. And Ratliff has come out and named a sort of obscure, like, used a sort of very elliptical intel language of a usually reliable source that has traditionally been, again, when you're explaining, you are losing. They can't stop explaining because Trump's out over his skis like he always is. He's bullshitting like he always does. There's nothing in this world that is more predictable than Donald Trump lying. This attack was consequential. This attack was probably, you could probably judge it as important. I think there will be many, many, many unintended consequences, many of which we can't even begin to contemplate right now, and none of them good. What we haven't seen is real facts. We are seeing is them trying to turn this into an attack on the media and an attack on people pretending that there are people in this country who are attacking the air crews that carried out the mission. When you're explaining you're losing, and Donald Trump on this issue right now is losing, America is not thrilled with this in the polling. He needs this to go on for a little while longer because we've got bad economic news. The economy is shrinking now. We are almost at 90 days, and there are no deals in the tariff war. Trump's ratings are down across the board. He's now in the high 30s. And by the way, folks, it's tough for Trump to get into the high 30s. He's got a very sticky floor, about 40% approval rating. This means even some of the MAGA base is gone. But he wants to be a wartime president. He wants to be a foreign policy president. He wants to be a president who doesn't have to be here where the messy part of the economy that he has wrecked starts to have political consequences on himself and his party. He doesn't want to be here handling the gory details. He wants Jerome Powell to quit or cut interest rates to zero or some other bullshit for the Donald Trump credit card. Not gonna happen, apparently. Keep this in perspective. There's a reason that when you're explaining you're losing is the elephant in the room. Because if you look at this moment, if you study this week, from the moment the bombs dropped to the disastrous Pete Hegseth press conference, which, by the way, did prove that Pete Hegseth is far too emotional to be Secretary of Defense. I have personally known seven secretaries of defense. Not one of them would go out there and throw a hissy fit like Pete Hegseth did today. Not one of them would have gone out and stomped his feet. Not one of them would have said, would have yelled at the media that they work fair, corrupt MSNBC. He's too emotional. He's too emotionally labile, as they say. He's not in control of himself. It's not surprising because he's a bloody alcoholic and a guy with some issues that I don't even think would pass the security clearance now for a guy, you know, guarding the gate at a parts depot in ass-crack Arkansas. But when you're explaining you're losing, and they're explaining over and over and over again, and none of the explanations add up. And folks, that's this week's Elephant in the Room. Thanks for listening to the Lincoln Project Elephant in the Room podcast. We love bringing this to you once a week. Peel back the curtain a little bit. You can also check me out on my other podcasts, the Lincoln Project podcast. I've also got the Enemies List podcast. Like and subscribe on all those things. You can catch these on all the Places to Find podcasts are found, Apple, Spotify, every other thing under the sun. You can also catch it on YouTube. And if you like, go ahead and join my sub stack over there at lewiswilson.substack.com. Would appreciate it. Means a lot. Thanks for all your support, folks. And we'll talk to you again on the next show. And good luck.