The Washington Post Made Up a Story About Trump Hating On Hegseth And, Well, Now Trump Has Responded
The Washington Post thought it had a scoop. Two anonymous sources. A dramatic scene at Camp David. A furious president dressing down his defense secretary over supposed munitions shortages. The kind of story that, if true, would signal chaos at the top of the administration during an active military conflict with Iran.
It wasn’t true. Not a word of it.
Karoline Leavitt was at Camp David. She said so plainly: the confrontation the Post described “literally never happened.” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed the administration told the Post directly that the story was false before publication. The Post ran it anyway, with the anonymous sourcing and the dramatic framing intact, because the story served a narrative it wanted told regardless of whether the facts supported it.
Trump’s response was personal and public. In a Truth Social post that the White House press office amplified Thursday, the president defended Hegseth in the strongest possible terms while tearing into the Post by name:
“The Fake News, as usual, is spreading false and completely unfounded rumors. I am extremely happy with the job that Pete Hegseth is doing. Everything has been extraordinary, including our attack on Venezuela, where the result was accomplished in less than one day, allowing us to bring one of the worst criminals anywhere in the World, Nicolas Maduro, to Justice!”
He credited Hegseth with the Iran operation, with eliminating DEI from the military, and with driving recruitment to historic levels. And he ended with the word that matters most for understanding what the administration believes about the Post’s sourcing: “treasonous.”
This is not the first time the Washington Post has run with anonymously sourced stories about administration chaos that didn’t pan out. The same paper ran the MS NOW-featured Kash Patel firing story — five reporters, eight anonymous sources, an admission buried in the middle that they didn’t know why Patel was summoned to the White House. Patel was working on a leak investigation. The story was fiction assembled from hostile sources.
The pattern is consistent: anonymous officials with axes to grind, dramatic framings that imply dysfunction, publication despite denials from the administration, and zero accountability when the story falls apart. The Post’s own slogan — “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — has become a punchline precisely because the paper so reliably generates its own darkness through exactly this kind of anonymous-source journalism.
What the Post actually produced this week is a coordinated influence operation — the munitions shortage story and the Camp David confrontation story both appeared in the same news cycle, both built on anonymous sources, both painting the same picture of an administration in crisis. Both false. Both timed to land while Iran is deciding whether to accept deal terms.
Trump called it treasonous. Parnell confirmed the denial was ignored. Leavitt said it never happened.
The Washington Post ran it anyway because they’ve long since stopped being a legitimate news outlet in lieu of being propagandists for the never-Trump left.
Biden, Obama Judges Get All Stompy Feet Over Trump's Ballroom - He Can't Believe What Just Happened
A man tried to assassinate the President of the United States at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April. Trump’s response was to build a more secure venue on White House grounds — a $400 million, 22,000-square-foot ballroom that eliminates the need to hold major events at external venues where security gaps are harder to control.
Two judges just told him he can’t.
The D.C. Circuit Court ruled 2-1 that the Trump administration likely cannot demolish the East Wing or proceed with above-ground construction on the new White House Ballroom without congressional authorization. The two judges in the majority — Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee, and Brad Garcia, a Biden appointee — apparently believe that the executive branch needs legislative permission to renovate the president’s own residence and working facility.
Judge Neomi Rao, the lone dissenter and the only Trump appointee on the panel, disagreed — and her dissent goes to the heart of why this ruling is constitutionally dubious. The executive branch has inherent authority over the White House compound. The president lives and works there. The security infrastructure of the presidency is an executive responsibility. Requiring congressional authorization for White House construction and renovation decisions turns a fundamental executive prerogative into a congressional veto over the president’s ability to run his own house. And never mind that many previous presidents have renovated parts of the White House without fussy political hacks disguised as judges interferring.
There’s also a small logistical problem with the majority’s ruling that the article notes almost in passing: the demolition of the East Wing has already happened. The construction is already underway. The court is issuing an order to stop something that is partially built — raising the question of what exactly it expects the administration to do at this point.
The 14-day pause gives the Trump administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court. They should do so immediately and they should win. The legal argument for congressional authority over White House construction decisions is weak. The president controls the White House. The White House is both a home and a national security facility. A court ruling that Congress must authorize specific renovation decisions at the executive residence would create a constitutional framework with no historical precedent and severe practical consequences.
President Donald Trump walks off of Air Force One at Newark Liberty International Airport on August 7, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey. President Trump is...
The broader pattern here is as important as the specific ruling. Democrat attorneys general coordinated secretly for months before Trump took office to build a legal war machine against his presidency. Democrat judges have been issuing nationwide injunctions against executive actions at an unprecedented rate. And now two Obama-Biden appointees have decided they get to weigh in on the president’s construction plans at his own residence — based on a legal theory that the dissenting Trump-appointed judge found insufficient to justify the intervention.
May you like
This is going to the Supreme Court. The court that just cleared the way for the SAVE America Act’s mail ballot verification order — with a 6-3 conservative majority — is the right venue.
Build the ballroom. Win the appeal.
