What did Donald Trump do today?

He talked about drapes while his administration tried to decide why it was in Iran and what its goals are.

On a day that saw three F-15s shot down, apparently by friendly fire, a US embassy set on fire by a drone attack, and three more American servicemembers confirmed dead, Trump himself was either unwilling or unable to say much about the Iran conflict himself. He briefly mentioned the increased death toll at an unrelated White House event, but used the opportunity to segue into a discussion of the golden drapes concealing the site of his future ballroom.

Trump gestures at the drapes during a White House Medal of Honor ceremony today, which he proceeded to talk about at length.

But Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts when Saturday's attack began, did offer what may be the first credible explanation for the timing of the attack. In so many words, Rubio said that Trump's hand was forced by Israel.

RUBIO: The second question I’ve been asked is: Why now?  Well, there’s two reasons why now.  The first is it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States.  The orders had been delegated down to the field commanders.  It was automatic, and in fact it beared to be true because, in fact, the – within an hour of the initial attack on the leadership compound, the missile forces in the south and in the north for that matter had already been activated to launch.  In fact, those had already been pre-positioned.

The third [sic] is the assessment that was made that if we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties.  And so the President made the very wise decision.  We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed, and then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act. 

This is a shocking admission, not least because it completely undercuts the only other rationale that the Trump administration has been willing to lean on—namely, that Iran was once again imminently ready to construct nuclear weapons. That never made much sense, especially because Trump's ludicrous claims that bombing a few facilities last summer had utterly destroyed that capacity are still up on the White House website—

 

—and Iran cannot have a nuclear program that is both "obliterated" and minutes from completion at the same time.

But more importantly, Rubio is all but admitting that the United States put decisions about its military forces entirely in the hands of a foreign government. Not as part of a military coalition where the governments involved collaborate on a shared strategy (like NATO), not because of battlefield necessity where an isolated unit from one country is temporarily integrated into an allied country's forces, but the entire military decision-making command subordinated to a country with very different long-term goals. 

In that light, the relationship between Israel's leader Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump takes on real significance. Like Trump, Netanyahu has spent much of his political career one step ahead of the courts for corruption in office, and more recently, for crimes against humanity. Like Trump, he is shielded from effective prosecution only so long as he holds office. Netanyahu has stoked conflict between Israel and other regional powers specifically because that makes him harder to oust democratically. Unfortunately for Trump's personal fortunes, the same trick isn't working for him at the moment: nothing about the last three days has made Americans warm to the prospect of a war with Iran that not even Trump is pretending can be brought to a quick and clean end.

To the question of whether this will become a war, Rubio made one other point on Trump's behalf today. Congress is expected to vote this week on a war powers resolution. The outcome of that vote is unclear, but Rubio launched his own preemptive attack on Congress's constitutionally guaranteed power to declare (or refuse to delcare) war, saying that "no presidential administration has ever accepted the War Powers Act as constitutional."

This is false—in terms of how both courts and presidential administrations have seen it. Individual presidents have debated whether it applied to specific actions in specific contexts. But the basic premise that the American people's representatives in Congress hold the final say on what the executive branch may order the military to do is not something that any president—not even President Nixon, over whose veto the War Powers Act was passed specifically to constrain—has ever challenged.

Or, rather, not before Donald Trump.
 

Why does this matter?

• Talking about drapes when asked about dead American servicemembers is more or less the same as fiddling while Rome burns. 

• A president—let alone an entire presidential administration—needs to know why it is starting a war before it does, and needs to be willing to tell the American people. 

• The United States military is not the personal plaything of the president or any other world leader.