Appearing at a NATO meeting at The Hague in the Netherlands, Trump was asked by NBC reporter Kelly O’Donnell to address a recently leaked assessment from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency that indicates the strikes did not achieve Trump’s goal.

“Real scum, real scum come out and write reports that are as negative as they could possibly be. It should be the opposite, you should make [the pilots] heroes and heroines,” Trump said.

Trump also claimed he got a “call from Missouri” that said the pilots who flew the missions were “devastated” because reporters were “trying to minimize the attack.”

Trump constantly claims that he receives phone calls from unnamed figures that reinforce the falsehoods and narratives that he wants to promote. Those claims are part of his tradition about lying on issue after issue, big and small.

An assessment of the bombing leaked from the Pentagon to CNN indicates that the bombing did not destroy the core components of Iran’s nuclear program. The report did say that the attack set Iran’s nuclear timeline back a few months.

Trump has argued that the bombing runs “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s facilities, a sentiment echoed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Trump also called the media “scum” on Tuesday when reporting first called into question his proclamation about the success of the strikes.

There has yet to be a publicly available, independent assessment of what the bombings accomplished. But what is known is that Trump has a record of serial lying and is the current leader of the Republican Party, which was infamous for lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq under former President George W. Bush.

Trump has lied dozens of times about the results of the 2020 election, falsely arguing that he defeated former President Joe Biden, who handily won the election that year. Trump recently lied and claimed that “professional agitators” were behind protests against his attacks on immigrants in Los Angeles. Trump has lied about issues like egg prices, falsely describing price declines under his presidency despite economic data showing otherwise.

Perhaps most infamously, Trump lied for nearly a decade about former President Barack Obama, in the process becoming the most notable figure pushing the racist and thoroughly debunked birther conspiracy that Obama was born abroad and was ineligible for the presidency.

In fact, during his first four-year term in office from 2017 to 2021, the Washington Postcatalogued 30,573 lies from Trump.

A person with a track record like that needs far more evidence than just his verbal assurances to sell the world on the result of something as serious as a military strike.