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On March 14, Trump posted on Truth Social a list under the heading, “President Trump Is Reshaping the Media,” with three sections: GONE, REFORMS, and WINNING.
Under GONE, Trump claimed these accomplishments:
PBS Defunded
NPR Defunded
Joy Reid Out at MSNBC
Terry Moran Out at ABC
Lester Holt Out at NBC
Chuck Todd Out at NBC
John Dickerson Out at CBS
Jim Acosta Out at CNN
Colbert Leaving CBS
Massive Layoffs at the Washington Post
Big Decline in MSM Ratings
No More Biased ‘Fact Checking’ at Meta
Under REFORMS, he listed:
Record Setting Interviews with Trump
Truth Social Booming
Most Accessible POTUS ever
1st POTUS to join NFL Broadcast
FCC Broadcast Accountability
$15 Million Settlement from ABC
News Bias Ombudsman at CBS
New Ownership at CNN
Saved TikTok
Disney Ends Key DEI Practices
Free Speech on X
Equal Time on Broadcast Television
And under WINNING:
Guardian headline: “Trump is waging war against the media—and winning.”
Trump on TIME cover, “Trump’s World”
3 Million Followers on TikTok
The Hollywood Reporter headline: “Trump’s Media Pitbull Is Off the Leash”
Trump is trying to affect a state media takeover, in which only journalists and media outlets that parrot his views and applaud all of his decisions are allowed to function.
Also on March 14, Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr posted a threat to pull the broadcasting licenses of all US news outlets that are asking difficult questions about the war in Iran. Trump went even further on Truth Social, saying that media outlets that question his prosecution of the war “should be brought up on Charges for TREASON!” He also claimed that “The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (in particular), and other Lowlife “Papers” and Media actually want us to lose the War . . . . They are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America.”
But the truth is that a majority of Americans are against the war, and are not deterred from their opposition by Trump’s histrionics. A Quinnipiac University poll on March 9th found that 53% of voters oppose the US military action against Iran, and 74% of voters oppose sending US ground troops into Iran.
It appears that Trump had no strategy or plan for the future when he began the attack. Regime change is highly unlikely now and making it impossible for Iran to get a nuclear bomb is an extremely risky move. Robert Pape, author of The Escalation Trap, says that Iran has about 1000 pounds of 60% enriched uranium and 10,000 pounds of 2-5% enriched uranium, and that they got a lot of this material out before the sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were bombed by Trump in June 2025. He said that when the Iranians found out the bombs were coming, they moved the material out and dispersed it widely, in canisters about the size of scuba tanks.
Trump keeps saying everything has gone great and he’s winning the war, but what’s becoming clear is his incredible lack of planning and incompetence. Disruption of world oil supplies could cause a global recession. Most experts agree that we have backed ourselves into a corner. On March 16, Lt. General Mark Hertling (Ret.), who served for 38 years in the Army and held various command positions, culminating as the Commanding General of the United States Army Europe and Seventh Army, was asked on Morning Joe for his assessment of where we are in the war in Iran, and he replied, “We’re in dire straits, and there’s more to come.”
Being backed into a corner, Trump may try to pull off what David Sanger of the New York Times called on March 17 “one of the boldest and riskiest military operations in modern American history;” namely, to send a commando force in to extract the enriched uranium held by Iran. Sanger enumerated a few of the difficulties: “No one is certain where all the fuel is. If the canisters holding it are pierced, the escaping gas would be both toxic and radioactive. If the canisters come too close together, there is the risk of an accelerating nuclear reaction.”1
Sanger says that the difficulties of pulling off such an operation are so great, and the risks are so high, that Trump might now reconsider a proposal put on the table by Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, just before the US-Israeli attack on February 28. The foreign minister said then that Iran was willing to “blend all of the nuclear material in its possession down to the level used in nuclear reactors, under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency.” Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff rejected the proposal.
1. David E. Sanger, “Trump’s Next Decision: Whether to Retrieve Iran’s Nuclear Fuel, Whatever the Risk,” The New York Times, March 17, 2026.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.