What did Donald Trump do today?

He bragged about war crimes he ordered, again.

This morning, Trump posted photos of a destroyed highway bridge leading into Tehran, threatening to continue to ruin the country's civilian infrastructure "UNTIL THERE IS NOTHING LEFT" if Iran's government didn't "MAKE A DEAL." (Trump declared victory in the war and Iran's imminent "unconditional surrender" almost a month ago.) 

 

It is a war crime to destroy civilian infrastructure. It is especially a war crime to hit a civilian target a second time, after rescuers have arrived, in order to drive up casualties—and that is exactly what the United States appears to have done. Trump has ordered these "double-tap" strikes on the boats he claimed were smuggling drugs out of Venezuela. The attack on the girls' school that killed 165 students and teachers was also carried out this way.

Before Trump, these kinds of premeditated attacks on rescuers were more closely associated with the atrocities of the Yugoslav wars or the Putin regime. But Trump seems to equate this kind of thing with his idea of manliness that actual military veterans generally react to with disgust. Trump has even begun to echo his Secretary of Defense's mocking language about bombing Iran "BACK TO THE STONE AGE." 

That phrase was originally coined by Gen. Curtis LeMay in 1965, as American military involvement in Vietnam was ramping up, and characterized the now completely discredited belief that wars could be won simply by bombing a population into submission. (Trump dodged the Vietnam draft with a fake doctor's note.) Vietnam is much smaller in area and population than Iran, or for that matter Afghanistan, whose victorious faction resisted U.S. invasion and bombardment for 18 years.  

News about the bridge destruction comes on the same day as still more reporting confirming that the Trump White House was completely unprepared for even the possibility of Iranian counteroffensives or anything more than "performative" responses.

And yet behind the bluster has been a growing recognition within the West Wing that the situation may be slipping out of its control. Key Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were surprised by the barrage of retaliatory attacks Tehran launched against U.S. and Israeli targets across the region, including in countries long assumed to be off-limits: Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, a state that had both harbored Iran’s terrorist proxies and served as a conduit for backchannel diplomacy between the U.S. and Hamas. The response shattered the assumption that Tehran would confine itself to performative retaliation. In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran's muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war. Hegseth “was caught off guard. There’s no question,” says a person familiar with his thinking. 

But there was at least one sign that Trump and Hegseth are starting to realize what an incredible fiasco the Iran campaign has become: they purged several top Army officials, none of whom were involved in the day-to-day conduct of the war. It's not clear exactly why those officials were fired tonight, but Trump and Hegseth's clumsy attempts to demand personal loyalty from professional military personnel have gone over poorly. One of the people fired tonight, Gen. Randy George, had ordered an investigation into a bizarre helicopter fly-by of Trump backer Kid Rock's house that appeared to have been staged for social media. Hegseth immediately ordered the investigation shut down and called the pilots "patriots."

Why does this matter?

• Nobody as incompetent at "warfighting" as Trump or Hegseth should ever be allowed anywhere near military command.

• Only dictators try to purge the military of "disloyal" troops because only dictators need to.