WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has thrown out the blueprint for the wartime American presidency — and it has hindered his management of the Iran conflict, former officials and analysts said.

Those experts said this week that where previous U.S. commanders in chief have sought to portray a steel will and generals-based message, Trump has opted for a scattershot message he has driven himself.

But his approach has sowed far more confusion than clarity about his goals and endgame, the former officials and analysts said.

“The funny thing is he’s the most involved wartime president since Abraham Lincoln,” Edward Lengel, a former chief historian for the White House Historical Association, said in an interview. “At that time, Lincoln’s level of involvement was widely viewed as a major flaw. There was a lack of a consistent, single plan being decided by the commanders.”

“Most presidents since have actively tried to avoid that and be seen as behind the scenes, leaving the tactical and strategic decisions up to the generals,” added Lengel, a military historian by training. “Instead of a cold and calculating explanation of his reasons for going in, Trump has sounded much more impulsive and emotional. The problem, then, is any backtracking or scaling back undermines his own ego and posturing.”

Aaron David Miller, a former State Department adviser to both Republican and Democratic administrations, said part of the problem was that Trump had no “adult supervision” to keep his commentary in check.

“There is no Jim Baker telling George H.W. Bush when he’d ventured off the highway,” said Miller, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to the 41st president’s secretary of State-turned-White House chief of staff. “And you don’t have anyone here, presumably, who has the stature, the credibility or the guts to basically tell Trump when he’s wandering off the highway.”

“You saw that Cabinet meeting today,” Miller said Thursday after the president’s top aides praised him when called upon to speak during a lengthy televised session from the White House. “I mean, these are minor planets circulating around the sun.”

Trump has opted for lengthy exchanges with reporters in the Oval Office, on board Air Force One and on the White House’s South Lawn as the basis of his wartime messaging campaign.

Lengel noted that other wartime chief executives, from Woodrow Wilson in World War I to Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II to Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam opted to, more or less, let their military commanders and civilian Pentagon leaders make and explain tactical and strategic decisions.

“From a Republican-to-Republican standpoint, Nixon largely left it to others to articulate things, mostly [Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger,” Lengel said. “This has been far more personalized and emotional. It can come over as impulsive.”

Take a one-minute exchange with reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office. Trump vacillated between nearly declaring victory and vowing to continue pounding Iran — when he wasn’t railing against men participating in women’s sports and declaring that the children of his new Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, hit the genetic jackpot.

“You’re talking about to end it? Well, I think we’re going to end it,” Trump said.

But when?

“I can’t tell you for sure,” he replied with a slight shrug.

Then, unprompted by the day’s press pool, Trump again flirted with a victory declaration: “You know, I don’t like to say this, we’ve won this — this war has been won.”

Despite being the one government official who could end the bombardment with a single order, Trump tried out a scapegoat for his continuing the unpopular Iran war.

“The only one that likes to keep it going is the ‘fake news.’ I mean, the New York Times, you read the New York Times, it’s like we’re not winning a war where they have no navy and they have no air force, and they have no nothing,” Trump said.

‘There’s no playbook’

After his latest claim of the U.S. having “won,” Trump then signaled that the fighting would continue for some time and include many more targets.

“We literally have planes flying over Tehran and other parts of their country, they can’t do a thing about it. For instance, if I want to take down that power plant, that very big, powerful power plant, they can’t do a thing about it,” he said. “It’s not a close battle. They’re totally defeated.”

A short time later the same day, on the typically Trump-friendly Fox News Channel, a show hosted by conservative commentator Will Cain aired a segment summarized by a chyron that read: “What are U.S. goals in Iran?”

But Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said a big reason Trump’s wartime presidency seems so unprecedented is “this White House is at huge disadvantage because how are you going to have embedded reporters for an air war, and the Democrats are hell-bent on making this war look as bad as possible to gain power after the midterms.”

“There’s no playbook for any other president needing to overcome those factors. … Trump is also talking to two distinctly different audiences almost simultaneously: one is the American people; the other is the combination of Iran, China and Russia,” O’Connell said. “I think Trump will be praised in the end for having done this, but it’s going to be a slog when you’re up against the Democrats and legacy media day in and day out.”

But one of the most hawkish members of the Trump administration, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, made clear this week her boss is prepared to keep going.

“If Iran fails to accept the reality of the current moment, if they fail to understand that they have been defeated militarily and will continue to be, President Trump will ensure they are hit harder than they have ever been hit before,” she told reporters in the White House briefing room. “President Trump does not bluff — and he is prepared to unleash hell.”

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