What did Donald Trump do today?

He got called out for his ignorance about the basic realities of attacking Iran, by his own staff.

The Trump administration has been at pains to convince Americans that, all evidence to the contrary, Trump was aware of the possibility that Iran could fight back, including by shutting down shipping through the critical strait of Hormuz. Yesterday, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt thundered that the Pentagon had been prepared for that threat for "decades," and that Trump had been fully aware of the risks.

That message is being challenged tonight—by the Trump administration. 

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that sources who were in the room with Trump when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reminded Trump that Iran could and likely would retaliate in a number of ways, including by using sea drones and mines to menace ship traffic in the Persian Gulf. That is, of course, exactly what has happened. Trump, those sources said, simply chose to believe that it wouldn't happen—or that if it did, the military would handle it somehow. 

Trump also appears to have kept the number of people in the loop on his Iran war ambitions to a tiny few—Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. None, including Hegseth, have any relevant military backgrounds. (Both Vance and Hegseth served in the military for a time, but mostly in low-level bureaucratic and public relations capacities.) Keeping himself isolated from people with actual military and strategic expertise appears to have contributed to Trump's miscalculation.

The WSJ story echoes a similar report published yesterday by CNN. 

It's not surprising that these details, which are embarrassing to Trump but paint the rest of his administration as helpless before his incompetence, is seeing print. Trump is notorious for burning through staff who were selected for their absolute loyalty, only to quickly become appalled at what they see from the inside. During his first term, a senior staff member even wrote an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times promising Americans that Trump's worst impulses were being carefully restrained by his staff.

The blame-shifting is also not happening in isolation: Vice-President JD Vance, the one person Trump can't fire, has been distancing himself too. Asked today whether he'd disagreed with Trump in private about the war plans, Vance smirked and avoided the question, saying he couldn't disclose what he'd said in a secure room. (The "secure room" was a curtained-off area in Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, and Vance wasn't there—they spoke while Vance was in an actual SCIF in Washington.)

Trump continues to publicly insist—and may even actually believe—that Iran is helpless and will stop fighting back any moment now. But the situation is looking increasingly like another Vietnam, the war Trump escaped fighting in with the help of a fake doctor's note. Like Vietnam, Iran cannot be bombed into submission, not even if the Trump administration is willing to commit more atrocities against civilian populations. Its population, including its sizeable dissident faction, is rallying behind its entrenched military-backed government against the United States. It was already under crippling economic sanctions, so can't be hurt more by them. It has considerable ability to sway regional politics, both through force and diplomacy. It can cause far more damage to the interests of the United States and aligned countries (for example, by blowing up oil tankers) than it can absorb simply because it has much less to lose. 

There are two respects in which the Vietnam analogy doesn't hold. Iran is roughly a quarter the size of the United States in area and population: much larger than Vietnam or even Afghanistan, which resisted occupation for more than a decade. And unlike Vietnam, Iran could actually build nuclear weapons with the material it already has on hand—something its ruling regime now has far more reason to want as a deterrent. That last fact is why essentially the entire world, even including Iran's traditional ally Russia, undertook a massive diplomatic campaign to bring Iran back from the brink of rogue nation status. (Trump unilaterally sabotaged those agreements in 2018, angry that his predecessor President Obama was getting credit for them.)

Asked today when he thought the war on Iran would be over, something he has given wildly different answers to over the past week, Trump responded that it would end "when I feel it in my bones." 

Why does this matter?

• A president who can't or won't even pretend to have a plan two weeks after he starts a war is a danger to the entire world and especially to Americans. 

• What the Pentagon knows for decades is useless if an incompetent president thinks he knows better.