What did Donald Trump do today?

He said nobody knows what his plans are for Iran, which may very well include him.

Asked today about the growing Iran-Israel crisis and whether he intended to bring the United States into the war, Trump smiled, joked about nosy reporters, and then gave a coy answer: "I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” 

There are two ways to interpret Trump's remarks. 

The first is that "nobody" includes him. Trump is uniquely vulnerable in this situation, in ways no other American president would be, because he has been politically co-opted by both sides of the conflict at once. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister, boxed Trump in by forcing him to endorse Israel's initial attack, even though it was done without consulting the United States and blew up Trump's last-minute attempt at diplomacy in the process. (The State Department's instantaneous response was that it had been done without US involvement, but Trump told a different story the next day, apparently so that he wouldn't look weak and out of the loop.)

But Iran is a military ally of Russia, and Trump is personally and politically beholden to the Putin regime no matter what the consequences for the United States. 

Domestic politics won't help Trump decide either. A substantial majority of the American people—including a majority of Trump voters—do not want the United States to get involved in a war with Iran, and keeping the country out of foreign entanglements was one of Trump's main campaign themes. But politics are transactional for Trump, and voters can't give him anything now. 

Meanwhile, there are hardliners in Trump's party who have been calling for war with Iran for years, and with many other wedge issues splintering his Congressional base of support already, he can't easily afford to alienate them.

The second possibility is that Trump does know what he intends to do (or is going to be forced to do), and is simply trying to draw attention to himself. Trump has covered for flip-flops, embarrassments, and outright mistakes before by insisting that he was merely pretending to be unstable or incompetent. 

In fact, he's tried to rationalize his behavior that way in another nuclear crisis—sort of. In 2017, after suddenly escalating tensions with North Korea, he retweeted a Fox News host's explanation: that he was acting erratically on purpose, to keep his adversaries off guard. 

Of course, if that's your actual strategy, it tends to work better if you don't announce it.

Why does this matter?

• It shouldn't be this hard to think that a president contemplating a Middle East war has any clue about what he's doing. 

• You cannot have national security unless that's actually a priority for the president.