President Donald Trump's Iran war is blundering into the dark, former Naval War College and The Atlantic writer Tom Nichols told MS NOW's Katy Tur on Monday — in part because the administration doesn't even have a functioning national security body capable of advising on the issue.

"The people that would have an idea of the contingencies and the knock-on effect, if you do X, you're going to get Y etcetera, were they all fired, or — is there nobody left in this administration? Or did Donald Trump, as far as we can tell, just dismiss them all? Or were those sorts of plans, those contingencies never even brought to him, because it's not the sort of thing he wants to hear?" asked Tur.

"Well, that's part of the problem," said Nichols, a longtime conservative analyst turned frequent critic of the Trump administration. "And when you ask, were they all fired, it kind of doesn't matter. The question is, would any of them be in the room?"

The issue, he continued, is that "there is no such thing as a typical briefing in this administration we are dealing with." Nichols referenced recent reports that Trump is so "emotionally unstable" and "cognitively impaired" that his aides have stopped informing him about problems in the war and his daily briefings are just video montages of the U.S. military bombing things. "That is not the way to brief the commander-in-chief. That's a way to keep him entertained while everybody tries to figure out what's going on."

"The other problem here is that even if people weren't fired, they've been moved out or silenced or, you know, sent elsewhere," said Nichols. "We basically don't have — the United States does not have a functioning National Security Council right now. In theory, Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor. But that's, that's just, you know, putting titles on desks. There isn't a National Security Council. The Pentagon is in the hands of a completely unqualified person in way over his head. You know, the State Department can't function with a part-time secretary."

"The whole business, you know, is kind of this rattle trap of people improvising," he added. "Because, as you know, we said at the start, this is basically whatever the president, whatever stray neuron happens to be firing or whatever passes in front of his eyes. This isn't a plan. This is improvisation at every level of the national security bureaucracy."

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