He Sounds Like He's Winging It

As bombs fall on Iran, President Trump’s own words--scattered across interviews with reporters--expose a war launched without clear aims, a defined outcome, or an endgame.

Homer knew it. Grant knew it. Every man or woman who has seen battle knows it.

War clarifies leaders. It forces choices, calls on character, and demands honesty about costs and ends.

President Donald Trump is now in the crucible of war. Not quick strikes to kill terrorists, not lightning raids to seize a dictator. War. The great, capricious beast of men’s dreams and terrors.

We have seen this trial by the fires of war in so many of our presidents. Washington—winning our Revolution through a calm strategic grasp of the American situation and an iron character under pressure. Lincoln—learning on the job, looking for the right general, reading military classics at night, and fashioning our of the bloodshed a new birth of freedom for our country. FDR—unshakeable confidence, flexibility, grit.

There were the failures, too. Wilson, a vain intellectual and dreamer, lost the peace. Poor GW Bush, in way over his head.

And Donald Trump? We shall see.

Trump’s phone interviews aren’t reassuring

But what the president offered, in a remarkable series of phone calls with several journalists over the weekend, is not reassuring.

Since ordering a massive bombardment of Iran and killing its supreme leader, Trump has spoken only in these scattered conversations—brief, contradictory, and revealing interviews with The New York Times, ABC News, The Atlantic, Fox News, MS Now, and more.

The cumulative effect when you read the various reporters’ accounts of these interviews is unsettling. The United States appears to be at war without a clearly articulated end state.

Asked how long the conflict might last, Trump said the assault could continue for “four to five weeks” and assured reporters that sustaining it “won’t be difficult” because America has “tremendous amounts of ammunition.”

No one had asked about “ammunition.”

But there is genuine concern in the Pentagon that US missile inventories are not unlimited. The burn rate is very high right now, and Iran is demonstrating a capacity for firing back—especially with drones. Recent operations have shown that it has sometimes taken several interceptors to kill one drone. That math catches up to you real quick.

Missing was the more important question: What happens after the bombs stop? On that point, Trump offered mutually incompatible visions.

In one interview, he suggested Iran’s ruling security forces might simply “surrender to the people.” Come again? Those same security forces recently slaughtered tens of thousands of “the people” of Iran in the streets. Now he is suggesting it’s gonna be kumbaya in Tehran? Minutes later, he praised what he called the “perfect scenario” in Venezuela—where much of the existing regime remained in place but agreed to cooperate with Washington.

Revolution or continuity? Popular uprising or negotiated accommodation? Regime collapse or regime recycling.? Trump presented them all as plausible outcomes, sometimes within the same interview.

Pressed on leadership in a post-Khamenei Iran, Trump said he had “three very good choices” but refused to name them. Soon afterward, he acknowledged that many potential successors had been killed in the strikes themselves: “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead.”

Even the definition of victory appears elastic. “There are many outcomes that are good,” Trump said. “We could do the short version or the longer version.” He added elsewhere, “So we’ll see what happens.”

Those are striking words from a wartime president.

Trump has urged ordinary Iranians to rise up — “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny” — while simultaneously declining to say whether the United States would protect them if they did. “I don’t make a commitment one way or the other,” he said. In other words: revolt at your own risk.

Meanwhile, even as American casualties were announced, the president emphasized that the operation was “ahead of schedule” and predicted it would become “a great deal for the world.”

He’s already looking for an exit ramp

The pattern across these interviews is revealing. To me, Trump sounds less like a commander executing a plan than a negotiator searching for an exit ramp—keeping every option open so that whatever emerges can later be declared victory. Members of Congress, allied officials, and military leaders privately say they see no clear articulation of war aims, succession planning, or measurable success.

All wars contain uncertainty. But in war, presidents who try to disguise uncertainty as confidence are quickly exposed by events, and by the great good sense of the American people. When they pay attention—as they do during war—you cannot buffalo them. Be straight with the American people. Or else.

The danger is not only strategic. It is democratic. Americans are being asked to accept war on faith, to trust that Trump’s improvisation—always in pursuit of his own interests first, and the nation’s second—will somehow produce order.

It sounds to me like he’s winging it.

—Terry