Trump's obviously winging it — and it may be his undoing

Trump said Monday that the United States would continue attacking Iran for “whatever it takes.”

But what’s the “it” in that sentence?

He also said: “We’re destroying Iran’s missile capability” and “annihilating their navy” and ensuring that “this sick and sinister regime” in Iran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”

But how will we know when we’ve achieved any of this?

American intelligence officials say Iran has not tried to rebuild its main nuclear sites since the U.S. attack in June. Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium are still buried deep under rubble. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says his agency has found no evidence that Iran resumed enriching uranium since June.

Yet even more U.S. forces are headed to the Middle East, and Trump says bigger waves of airstrikes are coming. He hasn’t ruled out sending in ground troops.

Neither Trump nor anyone else in his regime has provided any clarity about how we’ll know whether we’ve “won” this war.

He has no endgame. He’s given out different timelines and goals, depending on when and to whom he’s speaking. Asked by NBC News what his objectives are, he said, “Number one is decapitating them, getting rid of their whole group of killers and thugs.” He told The Washington Post, “All I want is freedom” for the Iranian people.

Trump told ABC News’ Rachel Scott on Sunday that he had a “beautiful plan” for Iran’s future. He told other outlets there were “good” candidates to take over, but later told ABC’s Jon Karl that the people he had in mind were all dead.

I can’t help thinking about the Vietnam War, which preoccupied much of my youth (and, since he’s almost exactly my age, presumably Trump’s as well). There was no clear endgame there, either.

The biggest difference between Trump’s Iran war and Lyndon Johnson’s in Vietnam was that during Vietnam, America had a draft — which meant the administration had to repeatedly justify the war to the American people. As that misbegotten war escalated and its justification became ever more elusive, it grew to become a central focus of American politics, eventually causing LBJ to drop out of the 1968 presidential race.

But Trump feels no pressure to justify or explain anything. He has no f------ clue what he’s doing in Iran. He’s winging it. He believes he can somehow pull it off because he thinks he’s invincible.

It’s Trump’s M.O. He loves to create chaos because chaos allows him to improvise — to impose his own narrative on a flood of events, dodge responsibility for failures, take credit for successes, and create illusions of glory and victory.

But the chaos he’s ignited in the Middle East is so large that the narrative may already be out of his control. The conflagration is escalating and spreading too fast. Just three days in, he’s making conflicting and inconsistent decisions and providing conflicting accounts.

He assumed a war would be helpful to him. It would justify emergency measures at home. It would deflect attention from his multiple failures. It would make him seem larger.

But it is already making him smaller, more hostage to what’s occurring than leader, more Netanyahu’s patsy than senior partner, another American president sucked into the giant maw of the Middle East.

Americans have short memories, but they do recall that Trump was reelected to accomplish three things: First, to get prices down. He hasn’t done this. Inflation is growing at an annualized rate of nearly 3 percent. Oil prices are about to go through the roof because of the war he’s ignited in the Middle East.

Second, he promised to get control of the nation’s southern border. He’s done this by unleashing immigration agents inside America on people here legally, and doing so with such barbarity — including at least two murders — that most Americans think he’s gone too far.

His third promise was to avoid foreign entanglements. He said during the 2024 campaign that he’d “break the cycle of regime change” and avoid “reckless” policies. He noted that toppling regimes without plans creates “power vacuums that are filled simply by terrorists.” He wanted to shift America away from being “the policeman of the world.” He repeatedly promised to “expel the warmongers” from government. On election night in November 2024, he declared, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Trump has broken this pledge with astounding negligence. He has launched a war in the Middle East without a plan, without a strategy, and without any clear idea about where it leads or how it ends.

Even absent a draft, Americans will not tolerate this for long. If Trump’s War costs many American lives, they will not forgive him.

For all these reasons, Trump’s War may be his undoing. I pray it’s not also the undoing of America.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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