As President Donald Trump’s Iran war enters its fourth month, a prominent retired Lt. General is pressing the commander-in-chief to level with U.S. troops in the Middle East and tell them whether a plan exists.

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) served as commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2011 to 2012. He also served in Iraq.

Writing at The Bulwark, Hertling pointed to President Trump’s explosive “Meet the Press” interview from Sunday, citing his remarks that it “costs us very little” to keep troops where they are.

“I think we’ll keep them there until such time as we have a completion,” Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker. “And when we have a completion, you will see things like you’ve never seen.”

Hertling says that while the president may not have intended more than quick remarks, those remarks “land differently” for America’s military families, deployed service members, and allies. He warns, “comments from senior leaders matter.”

“They raise questions that should have been answered long ago,” says Hertling. “Is there a plan? Is there a timeline? Has a decision been made? Has anyone informed the commanders and troops whose lives will be affected as to whether they might stay or go?”

There was also Trump’s remark that he doesn’t define whether his Iran excursion is an actual war: “I don’t think about it. I just do what I have to do.”

Hertling recounted his time in Iraq, when his division had been in combat for a year and was planning to return home. One-third of the 20,000 troops had already left, but when the “security situation deteriorated” and violence increased “dramatically,” rumors quickly spread that the troops might be forced to cancel their return home and extend their stay.

“Soldiers began asking questions: Were we staying? For how long? What did this mean for families already preparing for our return?” he wrote. “Eventually, the decision came through official channels: The division would remain in Iraq. Even the soldiers who had already returned home would have to come back.”

While the “disappointment was searing,” troops and their families understood, because the decision to stay “was tempered by mission clarity.”

“The mission had changed because conditions on the ground had changed,” he explained. “The decision came through the chain of command. Commanders explained the operational realities. Soldiers understood the purpose, even if they didn’t like the outcome. Nobody celebrated the extension, but most accepted it because they understood why it was necessary.”

America’s soldiers can take bad news, says Hertling. They can handle “hardship, separation, and danger far longer than most people imagine—as long as the mission is clear and they know all the sacrifice is worth it.”

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A judge on Friday tossed out a lawsuit brought by the Kennedy Center against an artist who withdrew from a performance after the organization’s board voted to add President Donald Trump’s name to the venue, The Washington Post reports.

The artist, jazz musician Chuck Redd, pulled out over what he called “the defiant and illegal name change happening to the Kennedy Center,” according to the Post.

But, as D.C. Superior Court Judge Tanya Jones Bosier found, Kennedy Center officials had not made a legally binding agreement with Redd, and there could be no breach of contract claim as a result.

“There’s no dispute that he did not sign the 2025 agreement,” the judge said.

In a statement, Redd’s attorney, Lisa Banks, said Redd had been sued “because he publicly and rightly objected to adding Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center, a living memorial to former President John F. Kennedy.”

Banks called the lawsuit “political retribution, pure and simple, by the Trump Kennedy Center,” and said that “the Court correctly saw it as such in dismissing the case with prejudice.”

According to the Post, after Redd withdrew, then-Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell said in a letter to Redd, “This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt.”

In December, Redd told the Associated Press, “When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert.”

On Thursday, the general counsel for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts ordered Trump’s name to “immediately” be removed from the building after a federal judge found adding the president’s name to the Center was unlawful, The New York Times reported.

“The memo gave staff members detailed instructions on the materials that needed to be updated, including social media accounts, email signatures and voice mail messages,” the Times reported. “It specified that outdoor and indoor signage with the barred name must be altered by June 12.”

Late last month, a federal judge ordered that President Donald Trump could not rename the Kennedy Center, nor could he close it for what the Trump administration said were two years of renovations.

“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so,” the judge wrote, CNBC reported. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

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“All presidents lose. Trump loses more often, on more things, than most,” says political scientist Jonathan Bernstein in a written conversation with New York Times Opinion editor John Guida.

Bernstein argues that Trump is an “inept” president who “actually gets worse at all of this as he goes along.”

“Trump thinks winning elections is like winning a prize — the United States of America — to do with as he pleases,” he writes. “But what actually happens in elections is that the voters hire you to do a job. It’s a job with some 340 million bosses. And like all jobs, it has constraints and obligations.”

Trump “just doesn’t see that,” says Bernstein, who also notes that “Trump has hardly had a week where his approval exceeded his disapproval.”

What Trump is actually good at is being “a really good reality TV star.”

“He’s very good at grabbing attention,” which “can help a president set the agenda,” Bernstein says. “Political scientists have found that presidents aren’t very good at changing what people think, but they can be good at changing what people think about.”

Trump has been good at creating “a Democratic Party eager to fight — and that may even, in time, undermine the 50 years of successful G.O.P. gains in the courts,” but he has not worked to get his agenda passed in Congress.

“With the power to set the agenda, skilled presidents can get things done: by pressing Congress to vote on something they would rather not vote on or by pressing the bureaucracy to pay attention to their directives,” says Bernstein. “Trump is an inept president, so he mostly squanders the attention he gets — and at least half the time, he winds up drawing attention to things that don’t help him at all.”

Trump has not been successful at getting Congress to pass his most important legislation: the SAVE America Act, or at getting the Senate to kill the filibuster. Recently, even some GOP lawmakers crossed the aisle in a significant rebuke of the president — namely the War Powers Act legislation — and some have balked at Trump’s $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund.

Meanwhile, “Trump has managed to do a lot of damage that will be truly hard to undo,” says Bernstein. “Legal talent has drained from the Justice Department. The same thing is happening virtually everywhere in the federal Civil Service, especially after work force cuts.”

It will “take time to rebuild,” but it will “be hard for any future president to recover from the foreign policy debacles,” he warns.

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