As every day of Trump's War progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that Trump and his entire administration are completely clueless about what they are doing. Which (it will come as no surprise to learn) they truly have no one to blame for but themselves. Six months ago, as NOTUS reports, "the Department of State fired its oil and gas experts... the administration laid off staff who would have been responsible for gaming out possible scenarios if the Strait of Hormuz was closed."

The story gets even worse:

The agency also let go of staffers with close professional relationships at oil and gas companies in the Middle East and experts tasked with maintaining diplomatic contacts at foreign energy bureaus.

"I'm sure Secretary Rubio wishes he had that expertise available today," said Geoffrey Pyatt, who served as assistant secretary of state for energy resources during the Biden administration. "Most of that institutional knowledge was lost with the elimination of the bureau and [employee firings] last fall."

. . .

NOTUS spoke with nine former oil and gas experts across the State Department, the Treasury Department, Energy Department and the National Security Council, all of whom were either laid off by the Trump administration or left their respective agencies within the last six months.

All nine oil and gas experts, granted anonymity to speak without the authorization of their current employers and because of their ties to family members and friends still at the agency, told NOTUS that they believe the Trump administration's lack of preparation for a global oil crisis is becoming increasingly clear.

. . .

The usual process of analyzing, reporting and debating before decisions are made all but ceased, said three people who quit their positions at the National Security Council the Treasury and the DOE in the last six months. Before the Trump administration, those three agencies, alongside the State Department, would have engaged in a robust interagency debate about how to handle a global oil crisis like the one currently unfolding in the Middle East.

"You dismantled the framework that any other administration would have used to engage on these very issues," one former State Department energy official said. "In a normally functioning administration, I don't know that we would have gotten here, because there would have been a process that would have examined the derivative, second-order and third-order effects. You probably would have had a lot more forethought that would have gone into this situation."

Instead, what we've got is a seat-of-the-pants war being waged by Donald Trump's personal whims and gut feelings -- which is turning out exactly how you'd expect such a venture would go. Trump got all excited by scenes he saw on television of Iranian protesters, and rashly promised that the U.S. would have their backs. He then tried to make good on this promise, but it took a month to get the ships in place to do so. By then, Bibi Netanyahu had realized what an opportunity this was and pressured Trump to go ahead and bomb the country because all the leaders were meeting in an easily-bombable building.

Trump, now convinced that he could wage any war he wanted and have it be over within a week (two, tops), eagerly joined in. He was not prepared for the Strait of Hormuz to be blocked, because he refused to listen to anyone who warned him of this eventuality. Now that it has been blocked, once again, Trump doesn't have the right military equipment in place to do anything about it (and won't, for weeks). So he tried to bully Europe into taking on the task for him, and when they collectively laughed in his face he insisted that he didn't even need their help at all, which any parent of a petulant 6-year-old could easily see straight through.

Now the stakes are being raised as Israel just bombed a natural gas field under Iranian control, and Trump muses about sending in some Marines to take over Kharg Island, where 90 percent of Iran's gas flows through. That's if the Marines are even in place yet, since that was another oversight -- Trump had to belatedly move them to the region when he realized he might just need some boots on the ground after all.

If Trump does move on the island, the price of oil might just skyrocket up to $200 per barrel, since it would completely shut off the supply of Iranian oil to the world markets (oil is currently trading at an already-sky-high $110 per barrel). Iran has signalled they are now going to target oil production infrastructure in the Gulf states, which could have a similar effect on oil prices.

All of this -- all of these things -- was predictable. And the American government used to have experts on the payroll who could make such predictions so that the president and policy-makers would have some deeply-thought-out opinions on what to expect. But they all got fired by Elon Musk, so their expertise is completely absent.

Sooner or later, Trump is just going to want to throw up his hands and walk away from the mess he created. He will no doubt use the old "declare victory and go home" tactic, or he will attempt to, at any rate. But (to mix a metaphor) it requires two to stop tangoing, and Iran may well have a different plan in mind.

The longer oil prices (and gas prices at American pumps) stay high, the more political damage it is going to do to Trump and his fellow Republicans. Iran knows this. Gas prices here at home have already risen over $1.10 from the low point they reached in mid-January. The average price of gas in America is getting very close to the psychological milestone of being four bucks a gallon. Trump, of course, is going to want those prices to quickly come back down after he declares victory, but that is not likely to happen (nowhere near as quickly as Trump would like, at the very least).

This is just the biggest and most spectacular mess that has happened on Trump's watch that can directly be traced back to firing experts for purely political reasons. Trump doesn't like to be contradicted, so Musk was given a free hand to purge anyone who had any sort of expertise or technical knowledge who might ever say something that didn't perfectly match with Trump's worldview. This created other immense gaps in institutional knowledge in the federal government -- it wasn't just oil and Middle East experts who were fired. To put this another way, while this sort of seat-of-the-pants fiasco was entirely predictable in Trump's War, the same sort of danger exists in all sorts of other places in the federal government where intelligent trained experts used to have jobs explaining things to the political leaders. This won't be the only time such short-sightedness blows up in Trump's face, but to date it certainly has been the biggest and most notable of them.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant