In a week described as perhaps the most successful of his entire presidency, President Donald Trump delivered a decisive, surgical, and devastating blow to global security threats, culminating in a secretive military operation that allegedly destroyed the heart of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. This feat of engineering, courage, and strategic patience, dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer, was not just a foreign policy triumph; it was a dramatic domestic litmus test, immediately exposing the deep-seated, nearly hysterical opposition within parts of the U.S. media and political class determined to see the administration fail, regardless of the cost to American credibility and national security.

The details of the strike, unveiled in a segment by Fox News host Jesse Watters, paint a picture of extraordinary military planning stretching back over a decade and a half. This was not a hastily assembled raid, but a mission 15 years in the making. In 2009, long before the current Commander-in-Chief ever took office, a dedicated team of U.S. military intelligence and technical experts began monitoring an ambitious, highly secret construction project deep inside an Iranian mountain—the Fordo enrichment facility. This facility was designed to be impervious to conventional attack, hidden beneath layers of rock and concrete, a literal fortress intended to secure Tehran’s path to a nuclear weapon.

For 15 years, a small cohort of dedicated officers, including one whose team “lived and breathed this single target,” meticulously cataloged every detail. They observed the Iranians digging out the mountain, analyzed the construction materials, the geology, the exhaust shafts, and the electrical and environmental control systems. They literally “dreamed about this target at night” and knew from the very beginning that the U.S. did not possess a weapon capable of neutralizing it. This realization spurred a decade-long journey to create the ultimate solution: the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a weapon so specialized that its development involved PhDs, geologists, and munition teams who practiced its devastating capabilities on dummy mountains until it was perfected. The bunker buster was born for Fordo.

The signal came on a Friday: President Trump gave the “go” order. The crews assigned to the mission—drawn from the active duty Air Force and the Missouri Air National Guard—were highly trained, mostly graduates of the elite Air Force Weapons School. Their task was staggeringly precise. The target? Two ventilation shafts, barely the size of a washing machine. To miss meant failure. The Iranians, anticipating a strike, had attempted to cover the shafts with concrete caps.

The execution was flawless, described as “perfectly executed.” The first weapon forcibly removed the concrete cover. The subsequent four weapons—two, three, four, and five—were tasked to enter the main shaft, traveling at over 1,000 feet per second, and explode deep within the mission space. The primary kill mechanism was a devastating mix of overpressure and blast, designed to rip through the tunnels and destroy the critical hardware necessary for enrichment. A staggering total of 420,000 pounds of these bunker busters were dropped, with an additional 30,000 pounds of Tomahawk missiles thrown in “just for dessert.” The cavernous lab, according to military officials, was “incinerated” after six bullseyes.

The immediate aftermath brought the expected Iranian retaliation, but this only served to highlight another layer of American military readiness. Iran lobbed missiles at the largest U.S. base in the region. Ready and waiting were the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s Patriot battery operators, fighting alongside their Qatari allies. The ensuing engagement, with “round after round” of Patriot missiles ejecting from their canisters, is believed to be the largest single Patriot engagement in U.S. military history. These “awesome humans,” who stood between an Iranian missile salvo and the safety of the base, were hailed as the “unsung heroes of the 21st century.” The Patriot operators were so successful that they were reportedly “hooting and hollering” as they intercepted missile after missile from the Mullahs.

Despite the monumental success, both the military strike and the defensive interception were immediately met not with bipartisan applause, but with a torrent of aggressive skepticism and outright denial from a segment of the mainstream media and the political opposition. This reaction, Watters argued, was driven by a “wicked case of TDS” (Trump Derangement Syndrome), a political affliction that compels certain individuals to “cheer against Trump so hard it’s like in your DNA.”

Leading the charge of denial was CNN, specifically featuring reporter Natasha Bertrand, dubbed “Nasty Natasha,” who pushed a “fake story” claiming the U.S. bombs were ineffective and Iran’s nuclear program remained intact. This attempt to undermine the success of the U.S. military was particularly galling given the overwhelming evidence. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission both confirmed the American payloads “completely destroyed the enrichment facilities.” Even Iran itself was forced to admit the damage, stating: “our nuclear installations have been badly damaged, that’s for sure.” Yet, CNN insisted on amplifying the denial of the Ayatollah, a man who famously came out of hiding to claim he “slapped us” like Bridget Macron.

Watters and his guest, Pete Hegseth, lambasted the media’s lack of journalistic integrity. They pointed out Bertrand’s history, including her role in falsely reporting the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation and pushing the “suckers and losers” hoax. She is accused of being “purposely used” by those who dislike Trump in the government to push false narratives. The consensus was clear: the media’s obsession with seeing Trump fail led them to “cheer against the efficacy of these strikes,” resorting to spinning half-truths and manipulating the public mind.

The political fallout was equally contentious. Following a classified briefing on Operation Midnight Hammer, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer offered a remarkably negative assessment, claiming there was “no coherent strategy, no endgame, no plan.” This statement was instantly mocked, with Watters pointing out the absurdity: the strategy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was, quite simply, “to bomb the places where they were making nuclear weapons.”

More alarmingly, the political opposition may be responsible for a far more serious offense: leaking classified information. Trump himself stated his belief that Democrats leaked the details of the “perfect flight to the nuclear sites in Iran” and should be prosecuted. Hegseth confirmed that the FBI is actively searching for the source of the leak, whether it came from the intelligence community or “someone on Capitol Hill who had access to this document.” The Justice Department has made it clear that “I’m not aware of an immunity clause that protects anybody in this country from disclosing classified top secret or even higher information to the New York Times,” confirming that a congressional leaker could face prison time. The irony, Watters noted, is that Democrats are now complaining Trump isn’t sharing all his intel with them—perhaps because “they keep leaking it.”

Operation Midnight Hammer stands as a monument to American military and technological dominance, a mission decades in the making that delivered a swift, lethal, and verifiable blow to a major global threat. Yet, the story’s true cautionary tale lies not in the deserts of Iran, but in the political trenches of Washington, D.C. The success of the U.S. military was instantly exploited by a political machine so consumed by animosity that it was willing to undermine the nation’s credibility, amplify enemy propaganda, and potentially commit treason through illegal leaks, all in a desperate and ultimately failed attempt to deny President Trump a definitive victory. The contrast between the courage of the pilots and Patriot operators and the conduct of the political and media elite has never been starker.