Thank you for signing up!

Subscribe to more newsletters here

Happy Wednesday! It's another hot day in D.C., so stay hydrated and don't forget your sunscreen!:

In today's issue:

• White House refutes Iran nuclear strike report
• Trump compares Iran strike to WWII atomic bombs
• NATO chief calls Trump ‘Daddy’ (yes, really)
• Mamdani win sends Dem shockwaves
• Shake Shack’s Dubai chocolate shake

🎤️ NATO SUMMIT

The bee in Trump's bonnet:

The White House has spent today disputing several news outlets’ reporting that the U.S. strikes against Iran did not decimate the country’s nuclear program.

If you missed the reporting: CNN, The New York Times and NBC News all cited an internal preliminary classified report that determined Saturday’s bombing only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, challenging President Trump’s assessment that the strikes set the country back years or destroyed it entirely.

💡 Why this matters: Carrying out the strike against Iran was a sophisticated maneuver in foreign policy. Even if the initial report is correct in that it pushed back Iran’s nuclear program by just a few months, that’s still a win for the White House. But Trump has set the bar incredibly high by suggesting the U.S. strikes decimated Iran's nuclear materials, setting Tehran back by decades.

Trump closed out the NATO summit this morning with a wide-ranging press conference but spent much of it pushing back on the reporting.

He even equated the Iran strikes to WWII: Trump compared the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites to dropping atomic bombs in Japan near the end of World War II. “It was so devastating. Actually, if you look at Hiroshima or if you look at Nagasaki, you know, that ended a war, too,” Trump said. “This ended a war in a different way, but it was so devastating.”

^ Keep in mind that roughly 200,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He also dismissed the report’s assessment that Iran moved its nuclear materials before the strike: “If you knew about that material, it’s very hard and very dangerous to move,” Trump said.

Earlier this morning, Trump bashed the news outlets as “scum.”

From Trump: “This was an unbelievable hit by genius pilots and genius people in the military, and they’re not being given credit for it because we have scum that’s in this room. And not all of you are … CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick,” Trump said. “And what they’ve done is they’re........

© The Hill