A “high-risk” commando raid plan requested by President Donald Trump, which involves building a runway in Iran to seize Iran’s nuclear stockpile, is being blasted by experts.

“The U.S. military has given the president a plan to seize nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium in Iran that would involve flying in excavation equipment and building a runway for cargo planes to take the radioactive material out,” the Washington Post, citing two sources, reported in an exclusive. “The complex plan was briefed to the president in the past week after he asked for a proposal, they said, as were its significant operational risks.”

“This would be one of, if not the largest, most complicated special operations in history,” Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and retired CIA and Marine officer, told the Post. “It’s a major risk to the force.”

The operation, never before attempted during wartime, would take weeks and “would require the airlift of potentially hundreds or thousands of troops and heavy equipment to support the excavation and recovery of radioactive material.” Those troops would be subject to being under fire inside Iran.

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Asked about the plan, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt did not appear to deny the Post’s reporting, stating: “It’s the job of the Pentagon to make preparations in order to give the Commander in Chief maximum optionality. It does not mean the President has made a decision.”

Last month, Brendan P. Buck at The Cato Institute wrote of an apparently similar idea, stating that in “reality, the so-called ‘commando option,’ while perhaps technically feasible, would be extraordinarily risky, operationally complex, and unlikely to accomplish its stated mission.”

The Trump plan was quickly denounced.

Foreign policy and defense expert Ilan Goldenberg, who has extensive government experience covering Iran’s nuclear program according to his bio, slammed the plan.

“An operation to seize Iran’s HEU [Highly Enriched Uranium] by force is the worst of all the bad ideas that are on the table right now,” wrote Goldenberg, a former advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. “I cannot see this being a realistic military option.”

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“Every single thing about this idea screams disaster, to the point where I wonder whether even Trump could be this dumb,” wrote Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur.

“If Trump goes ahead with this and it’s a high-casualty debacle what do you think he’d do then?” asked Mike Prysner, executive director at the Center on Conscience & War. “Take the L and deescalate? A ‘commando raid’ would only remain as such if it was a huge success.”

“This zero dark thirty: uranium plan is so goofy,” declared author Adam Johnson. “Everyone knows they cant possibly get it all. At best it’s a delusion / distraction for our idiot president, at worst it’s a pretext for a regime change invasion designed to create hostages and deaths to rally public sentiment.”

“Feels like Trump wants his version of the Bin Laden raid, and he’ll take on enormous risk–or, more accurately, he’ll place that risk onto U.S. military forces–to get it,” noted Jacob Stokes of the Center for a New American Security.

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President Donald Trump’s prosecution of the Iran war has been “stunningly incompetent,” exposing “the worst wartime political leadership America has ever had,” says political scientist Eliot A. Cohen in The Atlantic.

While giving Trump a break on his changing war objectives, Cohen, who served as a counselor under Bush-era Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, says: “What is not normal, and what is stunningly incompetent, is just about every other facet of the administration’s conduct of the war.”

He offers a plethora of “egregious failures,” such as the “failure to explain the war to the American people, aside from a presentation by the president in his summer home while he wore an unserious white baseball cap.” There’s also Trump’s failure to consult with Congress, “or at least secure its approval for the war.” And there’s Trump’s “failure to bring allies along with a minimum of surprises and a maximum of persuasion to support the war.”

Rather than attempting to “minimize internal friction and feuds,” Trump has been picking fights over Homeland Security funding, while making “doomed attempts to revoke birthright citizenship and to meddle in states’ election administration” — moves that appear “almost calculated to enhance internal divisions.”

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The concept of national unity “in a time of war seems utterly beyond this president, who follows his capricious instincts and continues, as ever, to spray venom at domestic opponents (and, for that matter, allies) when they are needed to wage and win the war,” writes Cohen, a military history expert.

Worse, says Cohen, are Trump’s own advisers, whom he likens to “an array of toadies and lickspittles, operating beyond their competence in an atmosphere of organizational chaos.”

“Never has the United States had a secretary of defense less capable, more egregiously belligerent, or less suited to provide civilian direction of a war than Pete Hegseth,” Cohen says. He charges that Hegseth has exhibited “unconscionable stupidity” by going to war “with an Islamist power” while the U.S. “has partnered with other Muslim states,” but then deciding” to place his own, peculiarly militant Christian beliefs at the center of his public rhetoric.”

Cohen scorches Trump’s other key advisers, including Vice President Vance, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, all of whom have “avoided leadership in this war as best they can.”

He closes with this dire warning: “With political leadership so feckless, so dysfunctional, so incapable of planning, so willing to betray friends and allies for short-term advantage, so willing to lie and advocate criminal behavior, our military is simply not in responsible hands.”

READ MORE: ‘Nothing but Lie’: Trump Ripped for Iran Rhetoric as He Preps Prime-Time Address

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President Donald Trump’s inadvertent “TACO” strategy is the vehicle that drove America to its current catastrophe.

Andrew Egger at The Bulwark writes on the eve of the one-year anniversary of “Liberation Day” — when the president imposed “an unbelievably strict regime of massive tariffs,” Trump’s eventual retreat from those measures, now dubbed “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”), has become ingrained in how markets and nations interpret the American president’s every move.

After holding firm for about one week, Trump caved on his massive tariffs — after markets went haywire.

“This was the moment that the world learned the lesson that Trump would, in the final and bitterest moment, respond to normal economic stimuli,” Egger writes.

Trump’s momentum had seemed “unstoppable,” until Liberation Day, but, “faced with the prospect of inevitable economic calamity, he had blinked.”

Trump’s actions created a clear lesson for the markets: if they got spooked, Trump would “see reason.” So, those who rode out the wave of Trump’s “nightmare” policy swerves stood to benefit “when Trump abruptly chickened out.”

“Overnight, the TACO trade was born.”

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But now, everyone assumes Trump will ultimately chicken out. So when he says or does something that creates chaos in the markets or the headlines, the reaction is no longer as severe, because everyone is wise to his apparent strategy.

“The only thing that seems to get through to Trump is catastrophic market movements—but those market movements are not only reacting to Trump, but trying to predict him, too,” Egger writes. “The more the TACO trade philosophy permeates through the markets, the less the markets respond to Trump’s rash impulses and grandiloquent proclamations—because they expect him to reverse course once the damage becomes obvious.”

Now, Trump risks “a global depression by precipitating Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—and has now apparently deluded himself into thinking America can actually get on just fine without solving that problem.”

Markets have yet to go “truly berserk … in part because they’re expecting Trump to change course. But he has convinced himself he has little incentive to change course, since they haven’t yet gone berserk!”

Liberation Day, writes Egger, “wasn’t just the economic catastrophe that set the tone for the 2025 economy. By introducing us to the TACO model, it sowed the seeds of our present catastrophe, too.”

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