Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson said that it's clear to him that President Donald Trump appears intent on full-fledged war in Iran.

Speaking to CNN on Wednesday, Anderson said that sending 1,000 troops to the Middle East tells him that "they're serious about conducting some kind of a ground operation in Iran."

"Why else would you be sending the immediate ready brigade from the 82nd airborne?" he asked. "And of course, that would be a tremendous logistics operation. I mean, it would probably take 22 hours or so to actually deploy over there to some sort of a staging area."

He explained they would likely be housed in Qatar and "have a couple squadrons of C-130s in order to conduct some kind of an air assault into Kharg Island or one of the other islands in the Strait of Hormuz."

There are also two Marine Expeditionary Units (MEU) en route, with one that may already be "at the mouth of the Persian Gulf." MEU's are described by the Marine website as a kind of rapid-reaction force of roughly "2,200 Marines and Sailors."

"But, you know, this tells me that they're very serious about conducting ground operations," he continued. "And all I can say is, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you're going to love Iran."

Brown University's Washington School of International and Public Affairs charted the full cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing that 7,052 U.S. soldiers died in the wars, 21 Defense Department civilians also died, along with 8,189 U.S. contractors, 680 journalists or media workers, and 892 humanitarian aid workers were killed in the wars that took place from 2001 to 2024. It doesn't count the civilian death count, which is somewhere between 363,939 and 387,072. In economic terms, it will ultimately cost the U.S. about $8 trillion, including veterans' care, over the next 30 years.

Thus far, Trump has already asked Congress for an additional $200 billion to fund the war. This does not include the over $12.7 billion the U.S. spent in the first six days of the war, The Guardian outlined last week.

National security analyst David Sanger, who also serves as the correspondent for the New York Times, reported Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud is pushing the U.S. to go "all-in" and "defeat the Iranians."

Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio appears to be feeling more venom than usual. On Friday Catoggio lit into the no-explanations secrecy with which President Donald Trump and his lieutenants conduct business, particularly the quick removal of four-star Gen. Chris Donahue.

Donohue was the top Army commander in Europe who led Delta Force in battle against ISIS. As commander of the 82^nd Airborne, Catoggio said he was also famously the last man out of Afghanistan when U.S. troops withdrew in 2021.

Before his removal the Atlantic reports he was “leading the service’s effort to take lessons from Ukraine and apply them to future conflict.

“Not a man the military would lightly part with, one might think. He must have done something awfully bad for our defense secretary, who famously loves warfightin’ warriors, to send him packing,” said Catoggio. “… Or maybe it simply bugged Hegseth to have someone in the chain of command as universally admired as Donahue is. It’s not just a matter of jealousy (although it probably is that too). An officer as distinguished as Donahue having to answer to a cosplaying yutz who used to host Fox & Friends Weekend only made Hegseth’s yutziness more glaring by contrast to the brass, I’m sure.”

But there’s no official explanation coming on why exactly Donohue is out — and you’re not going to get one in this administration, said Catoggio.

“[E]lecting a figure like Trump implicitly amounts to a sort of waiver by voters of their right to accountability from their government,” Catoggio said. “You don’t hand power to a nationalist strongman expecting that he’ll dutifully explain his thinking on policy periodically like some egghead technocrat. You do it because you don’t expect that. You trust him. Your vote is a vote of confidence in him and his instincts.”

Under Trump, “the people’s role in government ends on election night. (Unless the Democrats win, of course, in which case rigorous oversight going forward is a must.) The administration couldn’t be any plainer about that,” said Catoggio. “‘TRUST IN TRUMP,’ the official White House Twitter account declared a few weeks ago amid spiking anxiety over gas prices, going on to quote the president: "Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!"

And that’s your answer as to why Chris Donahue was fired, said Catoggio. It’s what Americans supposedly agreed to do in 2024, so that’s all the explanation they’re entitled to.

“The last 16 months are littered with examples of that ethos at work,” Catoggio added, referring to DOGE running “roughshod” over federal agencies with little explanation to Congress or voters about what was getting cut or why. It also explains the complete silence behind dozens of “outrageous” federal pardons being issued without explanation, just like Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade war, and his disastrous war on Iran.

“Even the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, an obsession of the president’s own base, would still be hidden if not for a revolt in Congress that forced their publication. MAGA fans who turned out in 2024 may have thought they were voting for transparency on Epstein by voting for the president, but that’s not how postliberalism works. To Trump, they were voting to signal their absolute trust in him,” said Catoggio. “If he thought they shouldn’t see the Epstein material, that should have been good enough. No further explanation required.”

When Americans want to know why things are such a "mess," the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump's first administration knows why.

Taylor, who sounded the alarm about Trump in his infamous "anonymous" column in The New York Times, revealed that many of the staff in the White House were desperately trying to keep Trump from his worst impulses. As one Times opinion columnist explained it, "no one is allowed to say 'no' to Trump."

"There was a rule when I was in Trump's first term," Taylor wrote in a social media post. "If a memo had a staple in it, it was too long for him to read. Life-or-death decisions were cut to one page. Or a half-page. Or less. Bold fonts. BIG pictures. When you’re wondering why everything’s a mess, remember that."

Taylor infamously wrote in his first book that there was a one-page rule for Trump making decisions on complicated policy issues like peace in the Middle East or health care policy. During the first term, it was reported that Trump seemed indifferent if he had to read a lot of words.

“I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel everyday,” Trump reportedly told Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in a 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.

“That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo told the Washington Post.

NBC News reported last year that new director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was struggling to do the same thing: deliver vast amounts of important information using pictures and as few words as possible.

She told the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, “There was bipartisan consensus that the PDB was in need of serious reform. DNI Gabbard is leading that reform and is ensuring the President receives timely, relevant, objective intelligence reporting.”

White House Spokesman Davis Ingle called reports that information had to be short and feature lots of images “libelous garbage from unnamed sources."

"I remember the first piece of advice I got on briefing President Trump in 2017: He doesn’t read. Bring pictures. Only try to impress ONE thing on him. And if there has to be words, single page only," Taylor said earlier this year when mocking White House staffers claiming the president was "well read."

In one 2024 interview, Taylor recalled that he was forced to take a 50-page memo on the situation in Afghanistan and turn it into a slide show with bullet points.

"I summed up this highly classified memo into Trump's sort of bombastic language because it was the only way he was gonna understand. I mean, I literally said in there, 'You know, if we leave Afghanistan too fast, the terrorists will call us losers. But if we wanna be seen as winners, we need to make sure the Afghan forces have the strength to push back against these criminals.' I mean, it was that dumb and that's how you had to talk to him," Taylor said.

Estimates of the total cost of U.S. President Donald Trump's war with Iran vary. According to analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the war's cost, as of June 23, was somewhere between $34 billion and $42 billion. But NBC News, on July 14, reported that internal U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) analysis found a cost as high as $80-100 billion — a major increase from earlier Pentagon estimates around $30 billion. And the Daily Beast's Will Neal reports that the war is putting a massive budgetary strain on the Pentagon.

"The Pentagon is frantically shuffling cash around in a desperate bid to plug the hole blasted in its budget by Donald Trump's war with Iran," Neal explains in the Beast. "Current and former department officials told the Washington Post just how dire the situation has become, describing how the Pentagon has been forced to limit training and maintenance that help maintain military readiness. Trump, 80, is begging Congress to fork over $67 billion to make up the shortfall caused by the conflict he launched in the Middle East almost five months ago, after failing to secure a lasting peace."

Neal notes that this Tuesday, July 21, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will make the case for greater Pentagon funding during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. And Russell Vought — head of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and a prominent figure in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 — is also, according to Neal, expected to ask lawmakers for more Pentagon funding.

"Vought has previously suggested Trump's war has cost taxpayers about $30 billion," Neal reports. "Several independent analysts say the true figure likely dwarfs that sum, noting it does not include the estimated cost of rebuilding American bases devastated by Tehran's strikes across the Middle East. Current and former officials told the Post that efforts to plug the gap have seen combat readiness training and exercises 'being limited or canceled,' along with spending set aside for facilities, maintenance and equipment 'also being drained.'"

The Daily Beast reporter continues, "The growing strain on taxpayers ultimately funding Trump's war with Iran comes hot on the heels of a new poll by Ipsos and the Post that found just 28 percent of voters say the conflict 'has been worth fighting.' The newspaper notes those figures are 'on par with the worst assessments of the war in Afghanistan'…. Secretary Hegseth has previously been dismissive over concerns about how expensive Trump's war has proven, insisting that depleted U.S. stockpiles are, in fact, 'great, and they're only getting stronger."

Writing in a new piece for The i Paper, a former Special Forces lieutenant colonel warned that President Donald Trump is leaving the U.S. "exposed," creating divisions that "our enemies are looking to exploit."

In addition to his time in Special Forces, Mike Nelson also currently serves as the chief of staff and communications director for the University of Pennsylvania's office in Washington D.C. In his Tuesday piece, he wrote that the U.S. "has grown accustomed to coalition warfare," but it is now jeopardizing its most vital coalition partnerships thanks to "Trump’s petulant anger" over European allies opting not to participate in his war with Iran.

"The President seems furious at the fact that countries did not sign up to fight in a war about which they were not consulted in advance, with undefined goals and an unclear, shifting plan," Nelson argued. "His anger lingers today, evident in his personal feud with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who he had previously counted as one of his closest supporters in Europe. His frustration that countries can make individual choices, rather than respond slavishly to his beck and call, seems exacerbated by his conflation of NATO, the EU and the countries that make them up. The Trump administration appears to view our European allies not as partners, but as client states from whom to extract contributions or satrapies from whom to demand loyalty."

He continued: "If the Trump administration were more aware, it might start worrying about whether Europe will show up the next time we need a coalition. It’s hard to imagine a worse approach to enlisting allies than the one the US took in the war with Iran – providing no forewarning, creating economic chaos and then threatening and reprimanding nations for not marshalling resources to solve the problem of our making. Even before this most recent conflict, the seeds of European reluctance were planted by Washington."

Even before going to war in Iran, Trump, Nelson noted, had degraded and "belittled" the contributions of European allies in places like "Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria," calling those conflicts "stupid wars" and "terrible mistake[s]." This sort of treatment means that it is "no wonder" that European allies are less than thrilled at the prospect of sending their children off to fight in another U.S.-led conflict.

Nelson further chastised Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for their "one-way street" understanding of alliances and treaties. In their view, NATO allies must join the U.S. in any conflict or allow the use of their bases "without question," and all without "guarantees that America will provide support in their hour of need."

"The storm clouds growing around the world are too dark and numerous to desert the framework that prevented communist domination during the Cold War and preserved the international order since it ended," Nelson concluded. "America cannot do it alone – we need European partners to continue to expand their armed forces, shouldering a greater share of the collective defense of the free world. We must therefore maintain, nurture and repair our historical alliances. Bonds built over decades can be dashed in the blink of an eye through vitriol, resentment and mistrust."

Families of the sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are raging that their loved ones are exhausted and running out of amenities as the carrier enters its ninth month at sea and its fifth consecutive month of combat operations against Iran.

“Moldy showers. Food shortages. Sailors running out of toothpaste, deodorant and soap,” said MS NOW reporter Priya Sridhar to Deadline White House anchor Nicole Wallace, citing statements from families of ailing, exasperated soldiers.

MS NOW spoke to a dozen family members who say they are extremely concerned with the morale, safety and conditions on the ship as soldiers grow increasingly frustrated and weary. They described a crew straining under the demands of an unexpectedly long deployment, as President Donald Trump continues to extend his military campaign against Iran with no clear end in sight.

“The families told MS NOW there is no indication of when their loved ones are going to return home, as the routine seven-month deployment for the 5,000-plus crew members appears to have been extended for a second time,” reported Sridhar. “Three family members agreed to make their names public, while others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns the military would retaliate against their loved ones on the ship.”

Meanwhile, most sailors are working excruciatingly long shifts, say families, while others rarely get a day off. One father — a Navy veteran — claimed his son claimed to have seen holes worn through the Lincoln’s flight deck.

“Deployment was extended for a second time, and they're concerned that this could lead to accidents that could potentially turn deadly,” said Sridhar. And then on top of that, … they're telling me that the sailors and the marines can't take hot showers, that the toilets are nonoperational, that for weeks at a time, there are no access to working laundry facilities, and that they're having to stand in lines to get into the ship's store for 1 to 2 hours. And when they get there, there are no basic hygiene items like toothpaste, deodorant or soap.”

The families’ frustration, added Sridhar, is that they’re hearing about the nation’s winnowing stockpiles of munitions and weapons, which Trump and his defense secretary keep blowing on Iran, and a $67 billion Department of Defense request, and they want their loved ones to be part of the conversation too.

U.S. Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) told Wallace that the Trump administration has been funneling money budgeted for soldiers into his personal agenda items.

“Not only are they not doing their job and they're derelict in their duty, but they're … literally stealing money from pots of funding that Congress has allocated for wellness for our troops and their families,” said Crow, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran. “We allocated last year billions of dollars for construction of new barracks and new housing on our bases. This administration stole that money for Trump's border wall. We allocated money for … health care for our troops. And time and time again, they reprogram — they take money out of those pots that we put into welfare and quality of life for our troops and their families, and they allocate it to contingency operations for their endless war to border operations.”

“So enough is enough,” said Crow. “We are going to retake power in November. We're going to put some guardrails in place, and we're going to start doing the right thing.”

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Psychologist Mary Trump often argues that her uncle, President Donald Trump — for all his bluster — is deeply insecure and needs constant validation. New York Times opinion writers Bret Stephens and Frank Bruni examine those "titanic insecurities" in a Q&A-style discussion, arguing that Trump's troubled state of mind is the source of the many bad decisions he is making.

Bruni lamented, "Trump doesn't have ideas. He has only his instincts, — base ones — and his insecurities, which are titanic." And the conservative Stephens interjected, "Except his titanic insecurities never seem to sink him, only the rest of us."

Stephens told Bruni, "Trump never pays the price he should. He makes sure of that. He's so shameless and emphatic — no, operatic — in his insistence that total failure is nonpareil triumph that most of his supporters question and then dismiss any serious stirrings of disappointment they feel. Gullibility is so much easier than skepticism, and it keeps you tucked comfily in your tribe. Trump also benefits from our thoroughly polluted information ecosystem: His loyalists dwell in a kingdom of propaganda to which you, me and this exchange of ours aren't granted access."

Trump, Stephens and Bruni warned, is pushing a range of terrible policies, from tariffs to alienating longtime U.S. allies. And they believe that his troubled state of mind is playing a prominent role in his decisions.

Both of them are highly critical of Trump's ceasefire agreement with Iran, which Bruni described as "less a deal than a debacle."

Stephens told Bruni, "I supported the war from the outset and thought the cause was necessary and just. But facts are stubborn things, as John Adams said. And the central fact of our time is that we are led — I am using that verb in the loosest sense — by a man whose idea of courage is bullying, whose idea of honor is knavery, whose idea of loyalty is convenience, whose idea of patriotism is self-idolization, and whose idea of principle is anything that suits his need and his pleasure. Now excuse me while I throw up…. If this deal is as bad as I fear it is — marking an ignominious defeat in the Middle East — will it hurt Trump politically the way that Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan hurt him? Or might Americans shrug and move on, especially if the price of oil continues to fall and the markets continue to rise?"

The conservative New York Times columnist added, "In other words, will Trump pay no political price for his foreign policy fecklessness?"

President Donald Trump is not only underwater with Democrats and Independents, but now he's losing young Republicans.

CNN data analyst Harry Enten revealed that when it comes to the Iran war and foreign policy in general, Trump has lost his own base.

"Trump [has a] historically strong performance with younger voters. And here we're talking about voters under the age of 45. He beat Kamala Harris with them, or at least beat the prior Republican baselines with them," said Enten. "And you can see it right here on foreign policy. He absolutely crushed Kamala Harris, who was more trusted under the age of 45, on foreign policy."

Trump had a nine-point lead over Harris on foreign policy, but that has shifted significantly.

"He has a net approval rating now on foreign policy — 40 points underwater, a nearly 50-point switcheroo," Enten said.

"So, after putting in the strongest performance, more trusted on foreign policy, the first since George W. Bush all the way back in '04, [Trump] has completely lost that advantage way down there. He is no longer groovy. According to the young people of America," Enten said.

Those foreign policy numbers are coming from Trump's failure in the Iran war.

"Just take a look at how people under the age of 45 feel about Iran not being worth the cost," said Enten. "Look at this: four in five —81 percent said the Iran war is not worth the cost. And look at Trump's disapproval. Basically simpatico with this, 77 percent of those under the age of 45 say the Iran war, or, excuse me, say that Trump's disapproval of the Iran war is way up there, up there like a rocket at 77 percent."

The generations make it clear that it isn't worth the cost.

The older end of those under 45 are members of the Millennial Generation, who faced the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Brown University's Costs of War Project showed that the casualty and injury rate for the 19 years of war come overwhelmingly from the Millennial Generation.

The Harvard Institute of Politics showed that "young adults [18 to 29] are overwhelmingly skeptical about the current U.S. strategy in Iran."