What did Donald Trump do today?

He attacked Iran without a plan, public support, or the legal authority to do so.

Early this morning, Florida time, Trump ordered a series of attacks against Iran and its leadership. Almost a full day later, the situation is unclear, although Iran has confirmed that the strikes killed the de facto leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Here is some of what is known.

Mar-a-Lago. Trump was photographed monitoring the attacks at his luxury resort in Florida. It's not clear how much of the operation Trump was cognizant of, or how long he stayed awake during the several hours in which the attacks took place. The national security apparatus was split between Mar-a-Lago and the White House Situation Room, but Trump's half was conducted in what was almost certainly an informationally insecure room: images released by the White House show Trump in an area of a large room cordoned off with drapes, not the electronically hardened walls of a SCIF. In what appears to have been an attempt to project confidence, Trump's White House also released images showing monitors with classified information on them that had not been obscured. 

Insider trading. Trump has put his full political weight behind so-called "prediction markets," legalized gambling sites that allow people to place bets on almost anything—including the exact timing of the attacks, which White House insiders would be in a position to know before the general public. Millions of dollars in winning bets now appear to have been insider trades placed by new accounts that were created and funded mere hours before the attacks began. Not only is that illegal, but it raises the possibility that Trump administration officials are making military decisions based on what will yield the most profit. 

This is not the first time that suspicious bets have been placed on actions taken by the Trump administration.

Timing and civilian deaths. Attacks of this nature are normally carried out at night in order to limit civilian casualties: fewer people out and about means fewer people in harm's way. But the attacks began at about 9:45 AM local time, and on a Saturday morning, which in Iran is more like a Monday morning would be for Americans in terms of civilians going to work and school.

That likely contributed to an apparent tragedy in the town of Minab, where local officials say that more than 100 children were killed when a missile hit a girls' school there, and there is independently confirmed video evidence supporting that claim. 

Where it was the middle of the night at the time of the attacks, and at the quietest part of the weekly news cycle, was the United States.

Khamenei already replaced. The government led by the Ayatollah Khameini had been facing substantial internal pressure from Iranian moderates angry at its mismanagement of a number of domestic crises. But, as Trump was warned would be the case, the attacks do not seem to have disrupted his faction's control over the nation. A caretaker government consisting of people loyal to Khameini's regime has already been announced by the Revolutionary Guard, and appears to be exercising power within Iran.

Trump seems to have hoped that the Khamenei regime's internal opponents would somehow seize control of the state apparatus. If Khamenei, who was 86, had died of natural causes, that might very well have happened. But Iran is a very large country—in both population and size, comparable to the entire east coast of the United States—and neither its military nor its bureaucracy are likely to radically shift allegiances, especially with Khamenei already being proclaimed a martyr. Even if they did, the Iranians that had been protesting against Khamenei are not inherently friendly to the West and are particularly unlikely to be sympathetic to any government led by Trump.

"Americans will die." Three independent sources within the Trump administration have confirmed to Zeteo that Trump was told that a likely outcome of this attack is the deaths of Americans, either as collateral damage in retaliatory attacks, or as military casualties in a war that grows beyond a one-sided barrage of missiles. These administration sources made clear that, when and if this happens, they expect Trump to plead ignorance and claim he wasn't told:

The two people familiar with the matter say that the gaming out of different scenarios included so many possibilities of how the regime in Tehran could kill American soldiers, potentially roil the global economy, or inflict other forms of damage, that many US officials did not mince words: It would be “very” likely, both sources say, that Americans would get killed days or weeks in, if Trump went ahead.

“It’s in a lot of [internal] documents, we also wrote it down a lot,” says one of the people briefed. If you are Trump, or Vice President JD Vance, or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, or their colleagues, “you can’t really say you didn’t know,” this source adds. 

For his part, in a taped message to the American people that Trump released on his private microblogging site (rather than through official channels less subject to hacking), Trump made a casual reference to the possibility of American casualties, saying that "the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost." Trump, who dodged the Vietnam draft by getting a fraudulent doctor's note for a medical condition he's never shown any actual symptoms of, did not say under what circumstances he expected Americans to be killed, and his administration has given no indication that it knows what will come next in the conflict.

No legal authority. Presidents do not have any inherent legal authority to launch preemptive attacks on foreign countries. To do so requires either a declaration of war by Congress, or a Congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force. Trump has neither, nor would he have obtained one: there is strong bipartisan opposition in Congress to unprovoked hostilities with Iran. 

The American people are also deeply opposed, with shockingly few people supporting the attacks on the first day. Polling for military action is almost always at its highest at the very beginning, due to a "rally 'round the flag" effect, but Americans have seen Trump look for reasons to stir up conflict with Iran since he first took office, and are firmly hardened against it.

Why does this matter?

• The lives of Americans in and out of the military are more important than Trump's political ambitions. 

• The existence of a hostile authoritarian government does not give the President of the United States a free pass to commit atrocities of his own. 

• Presidents are not kings and the armed forces of the United States are not their personal playthings.