The Washington Post Made Up a Story About Trump Hating On Hegseth And, Well, Now Trump Has Responded

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.

I was at Camp David with President Trump and Secretary Hegseth. This literally never happened, and we told the Washington Post that repeatedly. This B.S. story was shopped to many outlets by someone clearly out to disparage the Secretary, for whatever reason. Unfortunately for… https://t.co/BUwn11nC52

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) August 6, 2026

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.