Trump’s ‘highlight reel’ briefings on Iran war raise concerns about U.S. intelligence

Mar. 26, 2026, 4:01 PM EDT

This is an adapted excerpt from the March 25 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

Right now there are real questions about the ability of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to provide this country’s commander in chief with accurate information.

On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Donald Trump is getting his “daily briefing” on the war in Iran in the form of a “highlight reel.” Three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official told NBC News that since the start of the war, military officials “compile a video update for Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours.”

According to those officials, the montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer. One official described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up” — national intelligence in the form of Instagram Reels, basically.

Now, to be clear, the sources stressed that Trump also receives more traditional briefings. But given what we know about how much reading this president does, it’s fair to question how much information he actually retains or understands.

Following NBC News’ reporting, the Iranian foreign minister mocked Trump on social media, essentially calling him a patsy for his own intelligence agencies.

“It is said that Edward Bernays, a pioneer of mass persuasion, served on Committee on Public Information and worked to help Woodrow Wilson rally Americans for war in Europe. When he and Walter Lippmann met president in 1917, they reportedly said ‘We can sell the war to the public,’” Abbas Araghchi wrote. “More than a century later, little has changed — except that now, it seems, the war is being ‘sold’ not once, but daily, even to the president himself, through carefully curated videos.”

It is completely unclear who is putting together these little highlight reels in the first place. Is it a “best of” reel from Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense? From National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard?

Gabbard previously told lawmakers that Trump was getting the “best objective intelligence available to inform his decisions.”

“All the best intelligence” — and the most awesome explosion videos, it appears.

But this is a symptom of a much wider problem. Right now it does not seem like there is a functional truth-telling process in the intelligence apparatus. By many accounts, it has been hollowed out. Experts have been replaced with MAGA loyalists, and we’re seeing the consequences.

On the very first day of the war, the U.S. struck a girls’ elementary school in Iranapparently while meaning to target a nearby military installation. Almost 200 people were killed, most of them children.

As one mother whose child was killed told NBC News this week, “Trump should not think that killing our children has made us despair … He should cry for himself, because he will end up in hell.”

This administration’s total lack of competence has had effects like what we saw in Iran in plenty of other places. Do you remember earlier this month when the Pentagon announced it had conducted a joint operation with the military of Ecuador? According to the U.S. Southern Command, they were targeting “narco-terrorists.” The Department of Defense posted a video to social media that showed a large explosion and told the public it was a “narco-terrorist supply complex.” According to the government of Ecuador, the attack was based on “intelligence and support” from the U.S.

But as The New York Times reports:

The military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound, according to interviews with the farm’s owner, four of its workers, human rights lawyers and residents and leaders in San Martín, the remote farming village in northern Ecuador where the strike took place.

Workers on the farm told the Times that Ecuadorian soldiers arrived by helicopter on March 3, doused several shelters and sheds with gasoline and ignited them after interrogating workers and beating four of them with the butts of their guns. Some of the workers said the soldiers later choked them and subjected them to electrical shocks before letting them go.

Three days later, on March 6, the Ecuadorian military reappeared in helicopters, residents said, and dropped at least two explosives on what the Times called “the farm’s smoldering remains.”

You have to wonder if that explosion made it into the president’s daily highlight video.

But this is the apparent product of U.S. intelligence during the second Trump administration: garbage in, terrible garbage decisions out.

On Wednesday, Iraq said the U.S. struck a medical clinic on a military base there, killing seven members of the country’s military and wounding more than a dozen.

The U.S. denies targeting a clinic, but it’s a fair question to ask: Did they know what they were targeting?

Right now, as this war spirals throughout the region, it is not even clear if Trump knows whether or not our country is actually negotiating an end to it. He keeps saying we are, while Iran insists negotiations are a nonstarter.

So here we are, with Iran using its leverage to run a “toll operation” in the Strait of Hormuzmaking their own deals for safe passage with China, Russia, India, Iraq and Pakistan. Maybe they’ll decide to negotiate with the U.S. — and maybe they won’t.

But according to the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, it’s clear who has the upper hand here. Alex Younger told The Economist“The reality is the U.S. underestimated the task, and I think, as of about two weeks ago, lost the initiative to Iran. In practice, the Iranian regime has been more resilient than I think anyone expected.”

Trump thought this was going to be a cakewalk. He thought it would be a quick process to depose a regime, as it was in Venezuelaand now the war is dragging into its fourth week. As the human toll grows with each passing day, I don’t know if the commander in chief is even aware of the costs of this mess.

Allison Detzel contributed.

Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).