The surreal reason Trump doesn't care about the USS Lincoln

Yesterday, the media's focus was on the administration's refusal to accept the reality of deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. But the real story was in plain sight: an aircraft carrier that has been forgotten by the commander-in-chief is a direct consequence of war. Iran defeated the United States. The Lincoln is part of the aftermath.

The Democrats were on the TV Monday blasting the president for allowing the situation to get out of control. The Lincoln hasn't touched land in nine months. At least two crew members have tried killing themselves by jumping overboard. Families of sailors have reported "food shortages, meals missed, spoiled and rotten food, broken toilets, lack of hot water, mold and mildew in areas where sailors and Marines are quartered, lack of essential personal items like toothpaste and soap and deodorant," according to Lucian K Truscott IV.

My US senator, Connecticut's Dick Blumenthal, told CNN yesterday that the deterioration of the Lincoln is evidence of the fact that "this endless war of impulse, without strategy and exit plan, is having a toll on our military readiness." (Blumenthal added that his office has been informed that the USS Washington is "finally" being deployed to relieve the Lincoln.)

Yes, I agree. But what military readiness? We got beat. A neglected ship is the result.

Truscott put the blame where it belongs. "The president, the commander in chief, doesn’t care," said the former military affairs journalist for the Post. "He thinks people in the military are suckers and he treats them that way. He is wrong. Everyone in our military, and the sailors and Marines on that vessel, deserve to be treated with respect and honor. That isn’t happening, and it’s why the US military has lost the war Trump started with Iran."

But there's something else that Trump doesn't care about: winning.

I know that sounds weird, given that winning is Trump's brand, but it makes sense to me. If he wanted to win, as Truscott says, he would treat the military well. He would know morale is key. "If you feed 'em and respect 'em and treat 'em right, soldiers honor you with their respect and their service," Truscott said, quoting his grandfather, "a famous general." With the strength of the military's respect and service, a leader has the best chance of victory.

But Trump doesn't care about winning, only the appearance of winning. Actually trying to win is risky and takes sacrifice. It requires work, commitment, motivation, principles, planning, rethinking when things go sideways, courage in the face of the possibility of failure – all that goes into achieving a goal against a determined adversary that is doing the same.

Trump doesn't do any of this. Sacrifice is for losers. Work is for suckers. It's why he's the laziest president of our lifetimes. The most he will do is pretend to be winning, which merely requires him to go on the TV and lie. When pretending to fight is your true objective, nothing else matters, especially not the well-being of the people who are actually doing the fighting.

The consequence? Defeat in war and a military that's deeply demoralized.

Last week, during an interview with PBS News, the top adviser to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the truth – that Trump doesn't care about winning, only the appearance of winning – is clear. Because it's clear, Tehran believes it can do what it pleases with the Strait of Hormuz, and the rest of the Gulf region, while dismissing Donald Trump as an irrelevance.

When asked if Iran plans to wait until he's gone, Mohammad Reza Naqdi said yes. "We have to attain deterrence so that the enemy never dares to attack us, so that we can live with security. One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency."

This should be a banner headline. No one alive can remember a time when the American president was ignored! And this isn't just bluster. The cause-and-effect is obvious. The Iranians do not fear Trump. They believe he is a paper tiger who can be hand-waved away. So they have closed the strait and may keep it closed for the balance of Trump's term, creating two more years' worth of highly volatile and unpredictable global economic conditions.

Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that God-levels of money cannot in the future defend America against determined adversaries, not when the commander-in-chief is exposed as a paper tiger. "We need to face facts that the US military is in terrible shape and it will continue to get worse under the present leadership," wrote military historian Phillips O'Brien last week. "This is in some ways the greatest scandal in US history. The US has spent about $9 trillion on defense since 2016, and has created this deeply flawed, deteriorating force.”

The fact that Iran can ignore the president without consequences has not caught the attention of most Americans, but Jon Ossoff is doing his part to correct that. In an interview Monday, the US senator, who is running for reelection in Georgia, and who has presidential aspirations, did not say Trump is a paper tiger but otherwise described him as such.

"The commander-in-chief has mired us in this geopolitical disaster," Ossoff said. "People have lost their lives. Our naval logistics are frayed. The global energy system is in crisis. And he retreats into this bubble of West Wing aides, who are his security blanket, to make him feel good about himself, to reassure him that he’s doing a great job, to help him while he designs his new ballroom, and he adorns the Oval Office in gold, and picks the interior decorations on this new luxury, flying palace he received from a foreign prince, when every single minute of every single day what the president of the United States should be doing is bearing his most solemn burden of care for the sailors and Marines and aviators, and all servicemembers deployed on his orders on the basis of his lies to this disaster in the Middle East."

No country can defend itself for long, not even with God-levels of money, when the commander-in-chief cares about appearances – his – more than anything else.