What did Donald Trump do today?

He ignored experts on the Iranian nuclear program in a crisis over the Iranian nuclear program.

Days after being effectively forced by the Netanyahu government to endorse its attacks on Iran, Trump was asked today about his latest swerve in policy where that country's nuclear ambitions are concerned.

REPORTER: You've always said that you don't believe Iran should be able to have a nuclear weapon, but how close do you personally think that they were to getting one, because [Trump's Director of National Intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard—

TRUMP: Very close.

REPORTER: Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said that Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon.

TRUMP: I don't care what she said. 

Normally, there would be good reason to mistrust what Tulsi Gabbard said about intelligence in her capacity as Director of National Intelligence. A former Democrat, she was appointed by Trump after she endorsed him in 2024. Gabbard is one of the few American politicians whose connections to the Putin regime in Russia are as overt and troubling as Trump's, and she has repeatedly spread disinformation and conspiracy theories that were debunked by the very same intelligence agencies she now leads.

But when Gabbard testified to Congress in March that the United States intelligence community did not believe that Iran was attempting to manufacture a nuclear weapon, she appears to have been accurately summarizing the consensus. 

Gabbard's statement would have been written by actual intelligence professionals. The statement itself is subtly critical of the role that Trump himself played in setting up the current crisis, which is the result of Trump's 2018 abandonment of the JCPOA, the international pact that kept Iran from being able to stockpile enriched uranium. This means that Iran now has the ability to decide to assemble a nuclear weapon on short notice, but not necessarily that it sees doing so as to its advantage—yet.

In other words, Trump's decision to suddenly treat Iran as though it was just about to acquire a nuclear weapon—even though it isn't—is the result of Trump himself having effectively given Iran that option in the first place.

Why does this matter?

• The United States' national security needs to be based on facts, not whatever it's convenient for a president to believe at any given moment. 

• This is a situation where it'd really be helpful if a president actually read his intelligence briefings.

• One reason not to appoint unqualified cronies to critical national security positions is that they discredit the work that actual experts do.