During remarks at the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, Donald Trump took some time to say he had a “very sad day yesterday,” having attended the dignified transfers at the Dover Air Force Base for service members killed in the war with Iran. If he’d stopped there, there wouldn’t have been a problem.
But he didn’t. “Four great American patriots killed,” the president added. “That’s 18 in two wars, and one is too many, but it’s 18 — whereas in Vietnam, we lost 200,000.”
Nearly everything about this was wrong. Trump again trying to downplay the deaths of American service members continues to be offensive; he appears to be counting a brief offensive in Venezuela as a “war,” which is difficult to take seriously; and U.S. fatalities during the war in Vietnam were nowhere near 200,000, as he really ought to know.
But one thing the Republican did get right was the total number of U.S. troops who’ve been killed during the ongoing war with Iran: Trump said the latest tally is 18, which is correct.
Unfortunately, his Defense Department has chosen to promote a different number. The New York Times reported:
On Wednesday, the Pentagon reported on its casualties website that a total of 18 American service members had been killed during the war in Iran.
By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number, reporting that 14 American troops had been killed in the war.
The Times’ report, based on comments from three military officials, added that one reason behind the change “was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list — three in Jordan and one in northern Iraq — because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”
That reasoning seemed rather absurd on its face, which is probably why a Pentagon spokesperson told the newspaper the website would soon be fixed.
That said, as of this writing, the Defense Department’s Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks war casualties, continues to show a total of 14 fatalities, not 18.
The same Pentagon spokesperson proceeded to criticize the Times for publishing “a non-story” that reflected “temporary data disruptions” and “site anomalies.”
I disagree, not only because manipulating casualty data during an ongoing war is absolutely a story, but also because of the larger context. Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who commanded U.S. forces in Europe at the start of Trump’s first term, told the Times, “The administration seems to have a real hard time being honest about what is going on — not just about casualties, but about the whole war in general.”
Quite right. It’s like watching the Trump administration’s response to Covid all over again, complete with contradictions, deceptions, efforts to downplay avoidable deaths and clumsy efforts to manipulate politically inconvenient data.
“For nearly five months, Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran,” The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols wrote this week. “When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. … At this point, after more than 20 weeks of hostilities and at least 18 Americans dead and hundreds wounded, the people of the United States do not — cannot — entirely know what is happening, what progress U.S. forces are making, or what the president’s goals are.”
Misleading data on a Pentagon website, in other words, is about far more than just an online statistic.
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