President Donald Trump thought Wednesday’s White House briefing was wrapping up smoothly until one question stopped him cold. Seconds later, he cut the event short after being pressed again on the unreleased video of the U.S. military’s second strike on a capsized boat.
The moment immediately fueled new criticism and intensified suspicions that the administration is trying to bury the footage.
The tense exchange unfolded during a roundtable with business leaders, where Trump appeared caught off guard when a reporter asked whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had explained why the full video still hasn’t been released.
“Mr. President, has Secretary Hegseth told you why he hasn’t released the video of the second strike?” she asked.
“No, he hasn’t told me. I thought that issue was dead,” Trump replied before abruptly pivoting to attack her credibility. “I’m surprised you bring— You must be… you must be CNN.”
As Trump repeatedly demanded to know whether she was “with CNN,” the reporter pointed out that lawmakers were still discussing the matter on Capitol Hill.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Trump snapped. “I don’t know about lawmakers. Which lawmakers you talking about?”
“Mostly Democrats talking about trying to release it,” she responded.
“You mean the people you work for? The Democrats?” Trump fired back. “You know, you work for the Democrat Party, don’t you? You’re basically an arm of the Democrat Party. Thank you very much everybody, I appreciate it.”
With that, Trump ended the briefing, leaving no room for any additional questions and a lot of room for critics to immediately interpret his actions as panic.
“He knows they were wrong in double taping that boat and killing the survivors!” one Threads user exploded. “Everyone responsible needs to be arrested!!”
“I’m sure he is hiding a lot! Hopefully it will all come out soon!!” another wrote.
“He’s trying to bully these reporters into silence,” another viewer warned. “Very dangerous game.”
And one critic dismissed Trump’s attempt to wave the matter off altogether, “‘That issue is dead!’ No donnie, the issue isn’t dead and won’t be until it’s resolved by our courts or the ICC.”
The meltdown came just days after Trump similarly erupted at ABC’s Rachel Scott, who asked whether he would release the full, unedited video of the September 2 strikes off the coast of Venezuela. Trump interrupted, bristling, “I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that.”
When she repeated the question, Trump lashed out again, “You’re obnoxious. A terrible reporter.”
The exchange stood in sharp contradiction to Trump’s public comments just five days prior, when he said he would “certainly” release the footage.
Online, reactions to Scott’s encounter had already begun centering on a single theme, Trump is getting nervous — and now, after Wednesday’s shutdown, that chorus has only grown louder.
“He knows that we see through him and it’s making him nervous,” one user wrote after today’s briefing.
Another demanded transparency, “If there’s nothing to hide, show the tape. If there is something to hide… well, this is exactly what it looks like.”
Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee seized on the contradiction, sending a letter urging Hegseth to turn over the full video, writing, “The American people deserve transparency.”
The urgency escalated after The Washington Post revealed that a second strike, captured on military drone footage, killed two survivors who had been left clinging to the capsized boat for up to an hour.
Lawmakers who viewed the classified footage last week emerged visibly shaken.
Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat, told reporters: “What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service. You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who are killed by the United States.”
The revelations prompted nineteen House Democrats to sign a letter demanding release of all audio and video related to the strike, while Republicans declined to join.
The pressure is also building through legislation. The annual defense policy bill now moving through Congress threatens to withhold 25% of Hegseth’s travel budget if he fails to hand over the orders behind the strikes and the full, unedited videos.
Meanwhile, lawmakers say Hegseth repeatedly refused, even behind closed doors, to commit to releasing the footage.
Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told The New York Times, “They’ve studied it long enough.”
As pressure mounts on the administration and Congress edges closer to forcing the video’s release, Trump’s increasingly defensive posture is raising new questions. Not just about what the footage will reveal, but about why the president now seems desperate to avoid it seeing the light of day.
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