He’s called it a war, a major combat operation, and, on Wednesday, “an excursion, a little excursion.” He has suggested that the United States would take over the Strait of Hormuz in order to secure safe passage for oil tankers, and also that there was no problem at all with the Strait of Hormuz as it is. He made news by claiming that it was not the U.S. but possibly Iran itself which had sent an American-made Tomahawk missile to kill at least a hundred and seventy-five people at a girls’ school on the first day of the war. Never mind that Iran does not possess Tomahawk missiles.

Perhaps his most closely scrutinized statements have been those concerning when and how the war might end. These, too, have been confounding to the point of nonsensical. This week, Trump has said that “we won,” but also that “we’re not finished yet.” He has demanded unconditional surrender and regime change, and also denied that victory would require either of those things. At his rally in Kentucky, he spoke of staying the course, whatever that course is, almost as though trying to convince himself. “We don’t want to leave early, do we?” he asked the audience. “We got to finish the job, right?”

In the past, perhaps the only reassuring thing that could be said about Trump was that he was not so reckless and unhinged as to take the United States into a major new war. Avoiding armed conflict was, after all, one fixed principle—besides the magically transformative powers of tariffs—that he truly seemed to believe. As he ran for reëlection in 2024, his two key campaign promises, aside from mass deportations, were that he would fix the economy and not start any wars. Even his voters might have thought twice about granting Trump unchecked life-and-death power over millions if they thought he might actually use it. And yet here we are, scrutinizing Trump’s voluminous and incoherent ramblings for clues to the future of a conflict that may well rewrite the map of the Middle East for years to come.

The need for this level of Trumpology itself is a sign of how swiftly America’s democratic institutions have declined. Congress, despite the Constitution’s specific grant of warmaking powers to the national legislature, has opted out. The weaklings around Trump in the most senior positions of our government can do nothing other than agree with him.