Whether you take it verbatim or with a few grains of salt, a lot of what he says is utter nonsense - some of it deliberate lies, but as much or more is not so much deliberate lie as simply saying whatever comes to mind or whatever feels like the truth to him at that particular moment without any regard to the facts. Basically the stereotype of the snowflake for whom his feelings about a given topic are more important than actual facts or the real world.

But anyway, back to 'minions', that's indeed a pretty insulting term. But of course, looking at the Trump administration, the list of people who have left it or have been fired, and those who remain, it's hard to deny that nobody who dares to publicly stand up to Trump or his lies is still around - those who are left are either in fields that are politically low-profile so the chance of confrontations with Trump is minimal, or they are people whose primary skill is sweet-talking the boss. So you can kind of see where the 'minions' thing is coming from.

Well, for one thing, because Trump has degraded the reputation of the American presidency to such an extent that not only Democrats, but also most foreigners are automatically inclined to believe the exact opposite of what he says. Which, of course, is a bit silly - not everything he says is a lie, and anyway other people in his administration and in the Pentagon, who have at least somewhat more credibility, are saying the same thing. Then again, there is also the memory of the WMD debacle in the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, so people have grounds to be sceptical of American claims even regardless of Trump.

Your last sentence is a good point - I agree that it's not necessarily the case that 'Iran' is a monolithic entity whose actions are all decided by one leadership (Ayatollah Khamenei, I suppose). When people say 'Iran did it', the suggestion is their government ordered it, but there is indeed also a possibility of military or paramilitary elements acting basically on their own initiative and the Iranian government having no choice afterwards but to cover it up.

I wouldn't exactly call it conspiracy theory thinking to not believe the American narrative about Iran - especially since credible sources did immediately point out holes in said narrative, which didn't necessarily disprove it but still showed that there was considerable room for doubt. The frustrating part is that everybody seems to have forgotten about the incident and anyone who didn't immediately jump to a conclusion one way or the other, will apparently have to wait a long time and do a lot of effort to find serious, objective answers. Now if you imagine a similar event happening again but this time with a bunch of dead civilians or soldiers... that gets pretty scary.