Trump & Hannity Spread Iran Bombing Disinformation: Fake Videos Claim Victory

 Dis­in­for­ma­tion spread by US Pres­i­dent Trump has flood­ed social media with false claims of total vic­to­ry fol­low­ing U.S. strikes on Iran­ian nuclear facil­i­ties. On June 23, 2025, WIRED report­ed that Pres­i­dent Trump and Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty pro­mot­ed unver­i­fied claims that the For­dow facil­i­ty was “com­plete­ly oblit­er­at­ed,” using fake videos and anony­mous social media posts to con­tra­dict their own mil­i­tary offi­cials, who said it was too ear­ly to assess dam­age. The arti­cle begins:

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and his most vocal sup­port­ers have been using dis­in­for­ma­tion, fake videos, and men­tal gym­nas­tics to try to spin the US mil­i­tary’s bomb­ing of three Iran­ian nuclear sites as a com­plete and total vic­to­ry that sig­nals the end of a war instead of the begin­ning. On Sat­ur­day night, with the B‑2 stealth bombers that dropped a dozen GBU-57 “bunker buster” bombs on the For­dow under­ground nuclear facil­i­ty just begin­ning their flights back to the US, Trump declared the mis­sion a com­plete success.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/trump-iran-bombing-disinformation/

Key Points

• Trump relied on an anony­mous X account linked to a “Zion­ist cloth­ing com­pa­ny” rather than his own intel­li­gence agen­cies to declare “For­dow is gone” despite mil­i­tary pushback.
• Han­ni­ty post­ed a video of a Decem­ber 2024 Israeli strike on Syr­ia, false­ly claim­ing it showed For­dow’s destruc­tion, gar­ner­ing over 5 mil­lion views before deletion.
• X’s AI chat­bot Grok incor­rect­ly ver­i­fied fake explo­sion videos as authen­tic when users sought ver­i­fi­ca­tion, ampli­fy­ing false claims across social platforms.
• Con­ser­v­a­tive activist Char­lie Kirk per­formed a dra­mat­ic U‑turn, redefin­ing his oppo­si­tion to “regime change” after Trump sug­gest­ed replac­ing Iran­ian lead­er­ship with “MIGA” (Make Iran Great Again).

MAGA- The US Version of National Conservatism

The MAGA (Make Amer­i­ca Great Again) move­ment, forged around Don­ald Trump’s polit­i­cal rise in 2016, is a dis­tinct­ly Amer­i­can expres­sion of the Glob­al Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Alliance (GNCA). It cham­pi­ons nation­al sov­er­eign­ty over inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion, favors pro­tec­tion­ist trade mea­sures like tar­iffs and reshoring, and pro­motes a cul­tur­al­ly exclu­sion­ary vision root­ed in “West­ern civ­i­liza­tion” and tra­di­tion­al fam­i­ly struc­tures. Cen­tral to the move­ment is a strin­gent anti-immi­gra­tion stance, with poli­cies that lim­it asy­lum, build phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers, and frame immi­grants as cul­tur­al threats.

MAGA oppos­es pro­gres­sive reforms such as diver­si­ty and inclu­sion pro­grams, LGBTQ+ rights, and gen­der non­con­for­mi­ty, advo­cat­ing instead for a return to a 1950s-style moral order. It empha­sizes an “Amer­i­ca First” doc­trine in for­eign pol­i­cy, increas­ing defense spend­ing while crit­i­ciz­ing mul­ti­lat­er­al insti­tu­tions. The move­ment also seeks to dele­git­imize inde­pen­dent media by brand­ing crit­i­cal out­lets as “fake news” and pro­mot­ing its nar­ra­tive through tight­ly con­trolled social media chan­nels. While pop­ulist in tone, MAGA con­sis­tent­ly advances poli­cies that favor cor­po­ra­tions, reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives, and a mil­i­ta­rized nation­al iden­ti­ty. It mir­rors near­ly all ten prin­ci­ples of Nation­al Con­ser­vatism, as out­lined in the glob­al frame­work, and serves as its most promi­nent West­ern embodiment.

Ref­er­ences:

– The Rise of Nation­al Con­ser­vatism: A Glob­al Per­spec­tive (GIOR)

– Inside MAGA’s fight for “West­ern civ­i­liza­tion” (Axios)

– A new kind of Repub­li­can Par­ty is form­ing at the RNC (Politi­co)

– J.D. Vance poised to take Trump­ism into the future (Reuters)

– Make Amer­i­ca Great Again (Wikipedia)

– Trump­ism (Wikipedia)

Disclaimer

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) employs AI through­out the post­ing process, includ­ing gen­er­at­ing sum­maries of news items, the intro­duc­tion, key points, and often the “con­text” sec­tion. We rec­om­mend ver­i­fy­ing all infor­ma­tion before use. Addi­tion­al­ly, images are AI-gen­er­at­ed and intend­ed sole­ly for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es. While they rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als dis­cussed, they should not be inter­pret­ed as real-world photography.