Fox News Hosts Are Really Confused How an “Obliterated” Iranian Military Keeps Killing U.S. Soldiers
What will the Fox talking heads say when they learn that the Pentagon has also been hiding dozens of wounded American soldiers?
Photo via Unsplash, Dottie Di Liddo Splinter Iran War
The war in Iran went this weekend from primarily being deadly just for innocent Iranian civilians on the receiving end of U.S. bombs back to including fatalities for members of the United States armed forces–a notable turnaround, given that Iranian missile fire had not been directly implicated in the deaths of U.S. troops for months at this point, since the opening days of the war this spring. Newly released information on Monday reveals the names of two U.S. soldiers killed in Jordan as 25-year-old Tyler James Feehan of Hawaii and 19-year-old Isabella Gonzales of Texas, although there may be a third name coming from the same attacks there–in truly macabre fashion, the U.S. military is testing unidentified human remains to see if they match a soldier who is still missing. Another as-yet-unnamed U.S. soldier, meanwhile, was also reportedly killed by Iranian fire over the weekend in a separate incident in Iraq.
That’s up to four deaths in the U.S. military in one weekend–an outcome that is shocking, but one that literally anyone paying attention should have been expecting at some point. United States journalists have been writing for months that despite President Donald Trump crowing as loudly as possible about how thoroughly destroyed the Iranian military capabilities supposedly are, the country actually retains almost all of its missile capabilities in particular. In May, the New York Times reported that our own intelligence assessments found that Iran had “regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities,” and that it still had operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it would be using to target the Strait of Hormuz in particular. It all implies we’ve just been playing the waiting game to see when a missile strike would successfully kill U.S. troops again, and now the right random numbers have been generated. Leave it to every single Fox News host, though, to react with complete and utter confusion, voicing MAGA America’s cognitive dissonance out loud as they ask how U.S. troops in multiple Middle East nations can be killed by an Iranian opponent who has supposedly been “obliterated.”
The utterly clueless Maria Bartiromo. Remember, this woman is a trustee of NYU.
— Scott Horton (@robertscotthorton.bsky.social) 1:19 PM · Jul 19, 2026
“You know, CENTCOM says there will be outsized action in retaliation, but I don’t understand how it’s possible that Iran has the capabilities to fight this way and continue to try to lash out at Gulf countries and U.S. military bases,” said particularly consternated Fox News host Mario Bartiromo, hosting Sunday Morning Futures. “Because the U.S. has obliterated Iran’s military, and the President continues to reiterate that.”
Well, I don’t know quite what to tell you, Maria. It seems like when you’re confronted with unimpeachable evidence that the Iranian military was not in fact “obliterated,” in the form of U.S. soldier corpses, you would be forced to reevaluate the veracity of the President’s words. It does seem like the sort of situation that would call for consideration of the question, “Could it be that Donald Trump has been lying about all of this shit?”
Thankfully for Bartiromo’s viewers, who might have been forced to ask themselves exactly that question, Fox also had former Trump national security adviser Victoria Coates on hand to explain that the number of missiles Iran is now able to fire is “seriously degraded,” so therefore it doesn’t matter how many U.S. soldiers are actually killed by those missiles. Or as Coates put it: “So I think their capabilities are lessened, but they’re not zero, and that’s the important thing. They are a nuisance.” Do you think the Trump administration calls the Iranians a “nuisance” to the families of the dead soldiers as well, and promises to do something about that whole nuisance war we’ve spent $30 billion or so on to this point?
Bartiromo, however, was just one of many Fox News voices expressing their disbelief that Iran is still able to kill 19-year-old Americans at will. Marine combat veteran and The Big Weekend Show host Joey Jones said that the deaths of those three or four U.S. soldiers has caused “reality to hit us in the face,” and added the following: “What we do understand very well is when two Americans are killed in an airstrike, most Americans say: ‘How is that even possible?'” He went on to complain that “simply dropping bombs isn’t working,” but in vintage Fox fashion, and as you would no doubt expect from a former Marine, implied that even though bombing isn’t working, the solution is more and bigger bombs, saying that Trump needs to “drop a big stick” rather than merely carry a big stick. Makes sense to us!
Trump, meanwhile, when answering questions from reporters on an airport tarmac on Sunday afternoon, said the country “feels very badly” about those dead U.S. soldier teenagers, but that they had died “out there fighting that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” something that I think you will agree is very relevant to soldiers being exploded by missiles in Jordan or Iraq. He then reiterated just how destroyed the Iranian military was, despite the fact that one sentence earlier he was talking about the U.S. troops they just successfully killed: “Iran has been very, very badly damaged. They’ve lost everything, almost, militarily. They’ve got very little left. They’ve got some missiles. They’ve got some drones. They’ve got some manufacturing ability, not much. We control the strait; they don’t control anything.”
Trump on US troops who were just killed: “We feel very badly, but … “
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 8:57 PM · Jul 19, 2026
The reality, of course, is that there are far more incidents involving U.S. casualties than any of us realize, because we aren’t privy to that information. New reporting from the New York Times indicates that beyond the actual deaths, those “heroes that paid the ultimate price” to quote Marco Rubio on Sunday, there have also been dozens of undisclosed, wounded U.S. soldiers in recent weeks throughout the region in another series of Iranian attacks. Because U.S. Central Command is not explicitly required to release information about these incidents, the attacks in which soldiers were merely wounded–which the administration always phrases as “injured,” because that sounds less serious–have not been acknowledged at all, because doing so would run counter to the depiction by Trump and Pete Hegseth of Iran as an utterly defeated foe (that can shut down the Strait of Hormuz at will somehow). Quick, someone get this information to the constellation of Fox News hosts who can act performatively flabbergasted about it!
Before “the Iranian attack on Friday that killed two U.S. soldiers and left one service member missing in Jordan, Iran carried out three other strikes … [that] injured dozens of U.S. service members …
But the Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage.”
— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) 7:11 AM · Jul 20, 2026
It is ultimately impossible to accurately state at this point how many U.S. soldiers have actually been wounded in the course of the Iran War, although we can say that it has killed more than 1,700 Iranian civilians. Current estimates place more than 400 U.S. service members receiving those pesky “injuries” from our “nuisance” enemy in the region, although Central Command has stopped actually updating this figure, contemptibly denying such information to the American public. At least 17 United States soldiers have been killed in the war that was sold to the American public as a quick in-and-out lasting a few weeks.
Five months later, it’s only getting more deadly for the average member of the U.S. military in the region. You can choose to understand why, or you can channel your inner Fox News host to quizzically ask yourself how this could possibly be happening.
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