President Donald Trump has escalated his longstanding assault on the mainstream media, denigrating individual reporters and threatening legal action against major outlets over their coverage this week of US military strikes on Iran.

Trump has staked significant political capital on the success of last weekend’s strikes, which he ordered despite criticism within his own support base for breaking his campaign promises to avoid foreign military interventions.

The president has blasted press coverage of a preliminary classified report from his own administration that suggested that Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear facilities were “obliterated” was overstated.

The unusually scathing attack on reporters underscores what many observers view as Trump’s effort to put the media — already battling record low public trust — on the defensive and stifle scrutiny of the bombing raid.

“Having made the decision to join the fight against Iran, being able to claim that the intervention was brief and successful has obvious political upside for Trump in repairing rifts within his coalition,” Joshua Tucker, co-director of the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics, told AFP.

“The discussion by the media of the preliminary intelligence report therefore complicated the president’s preferred narrative about the US attack.”

The preliminary intelligence assessment, first reported by CNN and The New York Times, then picked up by other mainstream media, suggested that the strikes may not have destroyed the core parts of the nuclear sites and had set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months.