Mister President, it’s not really your fault – well, not totally your fault – that failings by your top advisers and even the bureaucracy have so often made you seem so embarrassingly uninformed and misinformed during our multiple and overlapping crises of war and peace.

You have been put into an awful position of having to serve as the world’s most powerful commander-in-chief – but do it without having a full-time national security adviser there at your side, keeping everything coordinated and giving you the last-minute advice presidents always need. I saw how it helped presidents who had Kissinger and Brzezinski and Scowcroft and other top tier advisers.

But you haven’t been well served by those who left you in the mess you’re in. If only you’d had a second Marco Rubio who could really function as your 24/7 national security adviser, world leaders would be saying better things about you behind your back. You’d have had someone with years of Senate intelligence and international relations experience right there, helping you avoid those global gaffes you can never un-say.

It happened as recently as this past Monday, Mr. President, when you declared on Fox News that America would be paid “at the rate of 20 percent” for all cargo that sails safely through the Strait of Hormuz. Oh-oh. Secretary of State Rubio had repeatedly assured the world there would be no fees. “No country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway,” Rubio said in June. “That’s existing international law.” So on Tuesday, Trump officials spread the word the 20% fee wouldn’t happen after all. Meanwhile, Team Trump scrambled and came up with a non-fee money-paying solution: Gulf region oil countries would simply invest roughly the same amount in America.

But this has been happening throughout your 2.0 presidency, Mr. President. The world remembers your reflexive attempt at instant denial after that tragic Feb. 28 airstrike on that Iranian girls’ school, on Day One of the war you started. Some 175 persons were killed – most of them between 7 and 12 years old. But when asked about that girls’ school tragedy, on Mar. 7, you told reporters: “In my opinion, based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran… We think it was done by Iran because they're very inaccurate with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

Speaking of inaccuracy: Ever since, you’ve been saying you’ve seen nothing indicating that it was a U.S. airstrike that hit the girls’ school. But the Pentagon investigation’s report – finished but still un-released – apparently concluded otherwise, according to multiple news reports. Informed but unnamed sources said the girls’ school tragedy was the result of a U.S. military missile strike on a major Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) facility in Minab, in southern Iran. U.S. target analysts reportedly used a decade-old intelligence database that didn’t show the building at the edge of that IRGC base had long been the Shajareh Tayyiba (“Good Tree” in Farsi) elementary school for girls. It has become the worst tragedy in modern U.S. military history.

Reader alert: You are about to read about target verification failures and misjudgments by military and intelligence officials that will probably strike you as amateurish and infuriating. That’s because they are.

The target deciders had been forced into a major time crunch – and apparently that led to a tragic targeting misjudgment. When the CIA had discovered Iran’s Supreme Leader was about to meet with his top tier officials on Feb. 28, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to massively attack the meeting to kill Iran’s leaders and simultaneously destroy Iran’s military targets. So officials were racing to compile the target list – and every hour counted.

U.S. military intelligence target databases use two systems – old and new: The old one, built in the 1980s, requires slow manual updating by analysts. The new one updates automatically, via artificial intelligence. But it just became operational this year (years behind schedule) and was only rapidly updating top-tier mobile sites that were considered most dangerous to U.S. forces. The second-tier sites were largely stationary – things like that IRGC facility, that were considered less of a challenge to U.S. forces because they weren’t going anywhere.

Then this reportedly happened: As a U.S. targeting analyst looked at an intelligence database for that IRGC military site, an embedded warning message reportedly popped up on the screen. According to a detailed July 7 CNN website article by Zachary Cohen, the message warned that the intelligence was years old and needed to be re-vetted for approval by a senior officer before that Iranian military site could be added to the target strike list.

But the senior official who was contacted by the target analyst decided there wasn’t time for revalidating. So, without updating the intelligence, the senior official authorized adding the IRGC facility to the airstrike target list – apparently not realizing America was also targeting schoolchildren.

Here’s what an update could have shown the target list-makers: A separate U.S. intelligence database had 2013 satellite imagery showing a school was using that corner building of the IRGC military site. Also, 2016 images showed a new fence separating the school from the military buildings (making it potentially easy to avoid accidentally blasting the school). And in December, 2025, satellite images showed dozens of persons (children at play!) in the school’s courtyard, CNN reported.

And here’s more: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, showcasing his Fox talking head experience, had long ago gutted and virtually eliminated spending and staffing for the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program that was statutorily created to protect civilians from wartime harm. But Hegseth bragged he’d created “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

Mr. President, you may also be feeling outraged as you read this – especially if you just discovered any of this for the first time. You’re reading evidence showing how you’ve been let down by the least experienced in your cabinet’s national security wing – Hegseth and former Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

You’ll be discovering more evidence that you haven’t been served as well as a president deserves. You may recall a scene in your Oval Office on June 24. Reporters asked if you knew which side was at fault in that Iranian girls’ school airstrike.

“I don’t know that they are ever going to solve that problem in terms of whose fault was it because there were missiles flying all over the place and it’s horrible what happened,” you said. “Somebody said it was our missile. Maybe it wasn’t our missile, but I have seen nothing to lead me to believe ‌it ⁠was. I don’t think it was us.”

Once again, Mr. President, you deserve better than that.

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