Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another just won the Oscar for Best Picture. It’s a multi-generational saga of political resistance. It’s a film about people fighting for something real, even when the odds are against them. It’s bloody, messy, and violent.
And then there’s the Trump administration’s version: One Lie After Another, a violent, bloody, and worse-than-messy narrative. No Oscars. No standing ovations. A zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics are panning it across the globe, and audiences are screaming back at the screen. And unlike Anderson’s film, this one is costing actual lives.
Since Operation Epic Fury launched on February 28, 2026, the Trump administration has subjected the American public to what can only be described as a thick, opaque fog of disinformation.
Every press briefing and gaggle, every social media post, every breathless statement from an interview or podium has been a performance of fabrication.
It’s a disaster of a disaster movie, with an ending that is sure to be an epic disaster.
The lies come so quickly and often — like the poof, parody, and slapstick of a Naked Gun movie — all delivered deadpan. Because of that frequency, we’ll cite just one lie from the main characters.
It begins with the offensive trailers. The Trump administration blended real war footage with video game, movie, and cartoon clips, and even athletes, to promote the war in Iran. Critics, including Pope Leo and former NFL players, condemned it, accusing the White House of reducing tragic human conflict to a video game and sanitizing it into propaganda.
The movie, which is a bloody reality, is far worse. There’s no “spoiler alert” for this review since the lies told about this war will live in infamy.
Donald Trump is the star, executive producer, casting agent, costume designer, and scriptwriter. He leads with more lies, falsehoods, and fairy tales than can fit into a single take.
Throughout, Trump lies constantly, often contradicting one lie with another. It’s his way of confusing the viewer, stripping away any semblance of rationality, and muddying the plot at every turn.
He delivered one of the dumbest statements a sitting president has ever made about a war he started. On March 10, Trump said Iran was responsible for a missile strike that killed schoolchildren in Minab, Iran, and claimed Iran possessed American-made Tomahawk missiles.
The problem? Tomahawks are U.S.-manufactured precision weapons available only to the United States and a small number of close allies. Iran doesn’t have them. Iran has never had them. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the accusation “beyond asinine.”
And since he’s the star, one more:
On March 16, Trump told reporters he was “shocked” that Iran retaliated by targeting U.S. allies in the Gulf. “Nobody expected it,” he said. Nobody—except the intelligence community, regional analysts, allied governments, and anyone who has spent fifteen minutes studying Iranian strategic doctrine since 1979.
It’s one of the many reasons preceding presidents avoided this path.
His co-star, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who would be an extra in Animal House, has been firing off fibs fast and furious, so much so that even his flag pocket square seems to wilt in real-time.
In one of the most stomach-churning moments of this already grim production, Hegseth claimed that parents and spouses of service members killed in action, “family after family,” encouraged him to “finish” the Iran operation.
One father, whose son died in the early stages of Operation Epic Fury went public to say he had never had such a conversation with Hegseth. Lying about families of the fallen may be the most loathsome act in the entire film.
And it’s not an isolated scene. This administration repeatedly invokes the grief of military families to justify decisions those families never endorsed. At one point, Hegseth even chastised the media for covering troop deaths instead of the “success” of the mission.
His wicked insincerity is the only thing resembling consistency in his performance.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio brings his own flair. When mediators in back-channel negotiations, reportedly making real progress on a new framework just before the bombs fell, described where talks had stood, Rubio dismissed the entire effort as “failed negotiations.”
Reporters who dug deeper found the opposite: multiple intermediaries said a deal had been closer than at any point in the previous two years. Rubio either didn’t know, or knew and said the opposite anyway. He also contradicted Trump about the reason for the war, which means one of them was lying, or both.
Not to be outdone, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has wandered into scenes where he clearly doesn’t belong.
On March 19, Bessent claimed the U.S. was not targeting Iranian energy infrastructure, a statement directly contradicted by reports of strikes on Kharg Island’s oil hub. The claim also conflicted with reporting about military activity near the Strait of Hormuz, another attempt to mislead the public.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright deserves his own credit line for a performance combining false optimism with spectacular self-contradiction, sometimes within the same breath.
Wright declared on television that the war would “certainly” end within weeks and that gas prices would fall along with it.
Here we are approaching four weeks with no end in sight, and gas prices are up roughly a dollar per gallon, and climbing.
When pressed, Wright conceded in the same interview that “there are no guarantees in wars at all,” apparently unaware he had just demolished his own prediction.
White House negotiator Steve Witkoff has a cameo. On March 7, Witkoff claimed Iran was “probably a week away” from acquiring industrial-grade material for a nuclear weapon, despite prior claims that Iran’s capabilities had been “obliterated” months earlier.
What Trump and his cast have produced in recent weeks is something else entirely - a chaotic, improvised, fact-free performance that has confused allies, emboldened adversaries, and left the American public with no reliable way to understand a war being waged in their name.
Zero stars. Do not recommend.
And the most unfortunate part: this is one film we can’t walk out of.