Somebody inside the government once handed America’s war plans to the New York Times and CNN.
President Trump never forgot it. He hasn’t forgiven it, either.
And the punishment he floated at an Arizona rally has the press corps clutching its pearls.
Trump Goes Scorched Earth on the “Sleazebag” Behind the Bomber Leak
President Donald Trump rolled into Bullhead City, Arizona, for his latest midterm rally and got around to a subject that clearly still makes his blood boil.
Leakers.
“In my opinion, leakers should be shot,” Trump told the crowd. “In the old days, we used to shoot leakers, you know?”
A big slice of the audience cheered him on.
The President was talking about Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 mission that sent American bunker busters crashing down on Iran’s nuclear sites. According to Trump, a “sleazebag” inside the government tipped off the New York Times and CNN that the military had “totally stealth” B-2 bombers ready to go. Trump said the leaker even passed along that the planes would leave from Missouri and what time they’d launch.
Trump told the crowd he talked over scrubbing the whole mission with General Dan “Razin” Caine. In the end, he let the bombers fly.
But going ahead with the strike didn’t cool him off one bit. Trump said the attack was “really for defense, because you don’t want them to have a weapon that can blow up millions of people at one shot,” and he insisted “leakers should be dealt with very, very strongly.”
Then he went further.
“To me, they’re the scum of the earth,” Trump said.
Fourteen American Airmen Were Riding on That Secret
Strip away the rally theatrics for a minute and look at what that mission actually demanded.
The Pentagon sent seven B-2 Spirit bombers out of Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri around midnight, each with a two-person crew aboard. Planners sent a decoy group of bombers west toward the Pacific so anybody glued to the flight trackers would look the wrong way. The real strike force turned east, flew roughly 18 hours with barely a peep over the radio, and dropped 30,000-pound bunker busters on Iran’s underground enrichment plants.
General Caine told reporters afterward that it didn’t appear Iranian forces fired on the American jets at all.
That’s what surprise buys you. And surprise is the very first thing a leak kills.
Think about it from the cockpit. Fourteen Americans flew into the airspace of a hostile regime that had spent years building air defenses for exactly that moment. If Tehran had known the departure base and the launch window, the regime could have had every missile battery in the country switched on and waiting.
The leaking didn’t stop once the bombers landed, either. Within days, details from a classified preliminary assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency turned up at CNN, the New York Times, and other outlets, suggesting the strikes hadn’t done as much damage as the President said. The White House fired back and pinned it on an “anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community.”
Nobody has ever stood up and owned it.
The Press Will Obsess Over Four Words and Shrug at the Crime
The usual suspects in the corporate press will spend days wringing their hands over “leakers should be shot.”
Is Trump actually calling for a firing squad on the South Lawn? Of course not. Anybody who has sat through one of his rallies knows the difference between a line built to light up a crowd and an executive order.
But the anger underneath it is awfully hard to argue with.
Leaking classified military information is a federal crime. Espionage law already hands out stiff prison sentences for spilling national defense secrets, and the harshest provisions on the books allow the death penalty in the most serious cases of handing secrets to a foreign power. Washington sent Cold War spies who passed atomic secrets to Moscow to the electric chair. So “in the old days” isn’t some line Trump pulled out of thin air.
And here’s the part the newsrooms will skip right over. The same outlets that will now act horrified by Trump’s words happily printed whatever those anonymous sources slid across the table. If Trump’s account of the pre-strike leak holds up, somebody in the permanent bureaucracy decided that scoring points against the President mattered more than fourteen American lives.
That’s a heavy charge. Maybe the full story turns out messier than a rally riff can capture. But the post-strike leak of a top secret assessment isn’t in dispute, and it landed right where the leaker knew it would do the most political damage.
This isn’t new territory for Trump. A 2021 book by a Wall Street Journal reporter claimed Trump exploded at aides after somebody leaked that he spent time in the White House bunker during the 2020 riots outside the gates. “Whoever did that, they should be charged with treason!” Trump yelled, according to the book.
Two terms. Same fury. Same faceless leakers who never seem to face consequences.
And it fits a pattern Trump voters know by heart. The deep state intelligence apparatus that missed warning after warning before September 11 never seems to miss a chance to feed a damaging scoop about Trump to friendly reporters.
Trump’s “Too Far” Line on Iran Says More Than the Headlines Will
Buried in the same speech was a remark that probably deserved more attention than the leaker line.
Trump quipped to the Arizona crowd that he “might’ve went too far” in wiping out so many of Iran’s theocratic leaders. His point was that taking out that many of them left the White House with precious few people on the other side of the table to negotiate with.
Read that again. A President itching for an endless war doesn’t worry about who’s left to make a deal with. Trump wants the shooting to stop and the talking to start, which is precisely why the neoconservative crowd that cheered two decades of regime-change adventures keeps sniping at him.
But that America First approach depends on short, sharp operations that end fast. And those only work when the enemy doesn’t get a heads-up from somebody in Washington, DC with a reporter’s phone number.
The Bullhead City stop was just one leg of a coast-to-coast swing. Trump has hit Alabama, Texas, Nebraska, and Ohio, among others, promising crowds that Republican candidates will shock Democrats and the pollsters when they “shove it up their a**” in November.
Democrat strategists will clip the leaker line for attack ads before long. Count on it.
And the next would-be leaker sitting on a war plan now knows exactly how the Commander in Chief feels about him.
The crowd in Bullhead City didn’t seem to lose any sleep over it.
Sources: Mediaite; Fox News; Breaking Defense; Military Times; AVweb; Forces News; Sky News; KTVZ/CNN