As you may have seen, since I wrote today’s BackChannel, CNN has reported the first initial U.S. intelligence assessment of the bombardment of the Iranian nuclear facilities. These results seem even more limited than the skeptical take I assumed in that post, putting the program back only months and dealing generally limited damage. I want to stress that these initial assessments are initial for a reason. The Iranians themselves probably haven’t fully assessed the damage yet. But if we assume this assessment is directionally correct, it changes the small picture but not the big one. You shouldn’t do this by tweet storm.

Donald Trump’s latest meltdown in response to “ceasefire” violations by both Iran and Israel but especially Israel brings out the uncanny quality of everything that has happened over the last week — the simultaneous existence of a very real hot war with what amounts to a social media campaign. They’re both happening. They’re clearly interacting with each other. But the dynamics of the two are so separate, distinct, operating according to totally different rules that watching the two together looks deeply unreal.

Subsequent reporting by The New York Times and other publications seems to confirm my initial assumption, which was that the entire U.S. involvement in this conflict was driven by especially Fox News’s reporting of Israel’s onslaught against Iran’s military infrastructure and nuclear program. Israel was “winning” and Trump wanted in on that winning. And that was really the entirety of it. But Trump’s decision to escalate the crisis to a level of destruction of underground facilities that only the U.S. is capable of had a very real result. And it’s not just whatever level of destruction those bunker buster bombs created — which appears substantial but not total.

A few points on the effect rather than the wisdom or possible fall-out of these attacks.

The President has repeatedly said the Fordow nuclear facility was “obliterated”. Clearly that is a party slogan rather than any kind of factual analysis. We’re now getting the first after-action reports out of the Pentagon and Israel which speak of the Fordow facility appearing to have sustained “severe damage” but not being destroyed. One thing that struck me last night was the US assessment that helped prompt this attack which, reportedly, was that the entirety of the Israeli assault had pushed Iran’s program back roughly six months. That’s pretty paltry in terms of any great change in the strategic outlook. I note that because we should wait a significant period of time before we conclude – if the evidence ever merits it – that the US has somehow put the Iranians back to square one in their ability to build nuclear warheads.

A few quick thoughts on Trump’s military strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities, in no particular order.

Trump has referred to this as very successful and — if I’m understanding his statement — essentially done. I don’t think that’s how it works. My understanding is that there’s real uncertainty about how many strikes it would take to destroy especially the Fordow facility, which is buried deep in a mountainside. So I think we should be skeptical about how we know how successful this was. You need after action reports to have any sense of what actually happened. The geography here, the composition of the mountainside, how it interacts with these particular munitions. These are incredibly complicated and make outcomes uncertain. (I’m going from memory since we’re reacting to breaking news. So keep that in mind.) The U.S. has conducted extensive testing on these “bunker buster” bombs. And there has been extensive planning going back a number of years on how this attack specifically would be carried out. The Pentagon produces and maintains war plans on almost everything. But this specifically has been planned out in great detail and over many years.

I wanted to flag your attention to a story bubbling up in the MAGA world that may amount to something or may be merely entertaining. It turns on a guy named Sergio Gor, a 38-year-old who is in charge of the Presidential Personnel Office. He’s in charge of vetting presidential appointees, but with an apparently very Trumpian emphasis on evidences of political loyalty as opposed to more conventional kind of reviews. But it turns out that Gor himself has yet to submit what is called an SF-86, the standard form for appointees who need a high level security clearance. So the guy in charge of vetting political appointees has yet to submit his own materials to be vetted himself. Not great, but the kind of mix of incompetence and probable sleaze that’s pretty standard in Trumpland.

But now there’s a bit more.

Kate and Josh discuss the Supreme Court decision upholding a trans care ban, Trump’s potential war and the shooting of Democratic Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses.

Our Executive Editor John Light discussed these hires already. But I wanted to share with you what we’re doing and how you fit into it. I don’t have to tell you that we are in the midst of a protracted national crisis. By some measures we’ve been in one for a decade. But I’m talking about the one that kicked off on January 20th and has continued, unabated and even accelerating, in various forms ever since. From the start of this we’ve been committed to upping and expanding our game, even within our limited resources, because the moment requires it. You’ve made that possible through your memberships and through your contributions to The TPM Journalism Fund. This week we added two new positions to our roster and two new members of our team. Allegra Kirkland, a TPM alum, has returned to TPM as a deputy editor. Layla A. Jones has joined us a reporter.

The idea that Trump or MAGA is in any sense “anti-war” is something between an absurdity and a misunderstanding. Kate and I had a good discussion of it in this week’s podcast. At one level it’s a simple fraud. Trump claimed he’d always been against the Iraq War at a time when the U.S. had been bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. It was a helpful attack line and it was completely false. Trump wasn’t in politics in 2002 or 2003 and to the extent he said anything, like a lot of people, he was for it when it was popular and against it when it wasn’t.

During his presidency he signed off on the assassination/targeted attack that killed Qasem Soleimani; he heavily involved the U.S. in the Saudi war in Yemen; he maintained or expanded the U.S. fight against ISIS in Iraq/Syria. Those are at least a continuity with the Obama years and in key respects an expansion of it. The one arguable exception is the deal Trump made with the Taliban to leave Afghanistan — a bad deal which Joe Biden was saddled with and followed through on and was endlessly criticized for, by Trump more than anyone else. Afghanistan captures Trump perfectly — his one notionally “anti-war” position was continuity by definition. And he turned against it as soon as he was unpopular. Trump has gotten “anti-war” mileage out of his opposition to Ukraine aid. But that’s pro-Russia rather than anti-war.

The Reality TV reveal version of war-planning and everything that is going on right now in the White House is so crazy I don’t know what to say about it. I’m reduced to trying to piece together what the various parties to the conflict and those adjacent to it may want or be trying to accomplish. I think TPM Reader JS is on to something in the email I just published a few moments ago. To the extent Trump may look to the Saudis and Emiratis as to what to do they may want him to finish this. When I responded to JS I told him that I agreed but with a major caveat. Even in the Move Fast and Break Things MBS era I think being a Gulf royal means being scared. Luck and geology made them fabulously wealthy and in part because of that wealth able to sustain deeply archaic political systems in which they have close to absolute power. That status is precarious. It’s one thing to build an anti-Iran coalition or an anti-Iran alliance with Israel. Blowing up the Iranian state is a very different and profoundly dangerous and unpredictable proposition.

From TPM Reader JS …

I agree with your reader that MBS and the Emiratis will be an important influence in Trump. And of course they are saying in public what they’re saying, but the entire basis of the normalization with the UAE and the aborted one with Saudi was this. They wanted a bloc against Iran and its nuclear program.