US President Donald Trump has threatened to widen a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against The New York Times, accusing the newspaper of fabricated and treasonous reporting on the state of Iran after almost four months of war.
In a series of posts on his Truth Social network on June 21, the President rounded on an article that questioned how much the war had actually changed. He rejected its central conclusion and said its authors had acted without regard for the facts.
The piece, written by the paper’s Neil MacFarquhar, carried the headline “What Changed After Almost Four Months of War? Analysts Say Not Much.” It reported that neither the fighting nor the subsequent agreement had removed what US and Israeli officials regard as the main threats from Tehran.
Trump dismissed that assessment and set out what he presented as the war’s results. Iran’s “Military is DONE, their Navy is GONE, their Air Force is GONE,” he wrote, before claiming its missiles, drones and weapons production had been all but destroyed.
The President went on to assert that inflation in Iran had reached 250 per cent, that its economy was broken and that its soldiers were going unpaid. He also said the country’s two top tiers of leadership had been removed.
He said he would fold the newspaper’s reporting into his lawsuit and branded those running it criminals. Trump refiled a $15 billion (€13 billion) defamation claim against the paper in October, which it has said is without merit.
The attack came as the President defended the memorandum of understanding signed with Iran the previous week, which set up a 60-day ceasefire and a framework for talks now under way in Switzerland. He insisted the Strait of Hormuz remained open and that oil was flowing freely.
Those points matter for Europe, where economies lean heavily on imported energy. Shipping through the strait has returned to roughly pre-war levels, according to US officials, and oil prices have dropped from wartime highs above $100 (€87) a barrel to three-month lows.
The fall has eased inflationary pressure as the European Central Bank weighs further rises in interest rates. It followed reports that Washington and Tehran would reopen the waterway under their accord.
Trump has long been at odds with much of the US press, a tension that has sharpened over competing accounts of the conflict’s military and economic toll.
