Trump's Iran strike revealed a second surprise: a competent White House
Operation Midnight Hammer, this weekend's US bombing raid on Iran's nuclear facilities, was a revealing moment on multiple fronts.
First, it confirmed that Iran's story about peaceful energy development, never very believable, was false. Nobody does peaceful research under hundreds of feet of rock and concrete.
And former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev came right out and admitted that Iran was building nuclear weapons. We knew that, but still . . .
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It also established that most of the 'anti-war' crowd are just anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-West activists.
Mobs carrying Hamas flags turned overnight into mobs carrying Mexican flags, then into mobs carrying Iranian flags — and they're the same mobs.
And it highlighted the hypocrisy of Democratic politicians and pundits who cheered President Barack Obama's bombing attacks on Libya, Syria, Yemen and others — and are now calling President Donald Trump's bombing 'unconstitutional' and 'a war crime.'
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But the most jaw-dropping reveal isn't any of these things.
It's that the Trump administration 2.0 is, in fact, highly competent — amazingly so.
Think about it: The Iranian government was caught completely by surprise.
The United States sent B-2 bombers to the other side of the globe, penetrated Iranian airspace without being noticed, dropped 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs down the ventilator shafts of deeply buried facilities and exited the country without a shot fired at them.
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The world didn't know a thing until Trump announced it on Truth Social, as the bombers were heading home.
Impressively, there were no leaks about the operation. (How? Basically, they didn't give any Democrats details about what was coming. Take note.)
In addition, Trump and the diplomatic apparatus kept the Iranians in the dark, feigning White House waffling even as military assets were in motion.
He received unintentional help from Sen. Chuck Schumer, who for some time has been pushing the 'TACO' acronym — Trump Always Chickens Out — in service of a storyline that Trump was all bluster and no follow-through.
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The Iranians, apparently dumb enough to believe Democrats and the mainstream news media (but I repeat myself), were snookered.
This followed a previous deception operation that made the Iranians think Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu were bickering ahead of the IDF's initial air raids. Actually, it was all a show.
This is quite a contrast with Trump 1.0. The early months of the first Trump term were, let's just say, not marked by hypercompetence.
That wasn't entirely Trump's fault: His campaign was a late effort, and he was too busy campaigning to put together much of a governing team before he was sworn in.
Thus his administration was initially made up of a mixture of people Trump knew personally — remember Omarosa's brief White House stint? — and establishment GOP figures.
He thought he could trust them (hey, they were Republicans, right?), but many of them were actually stabbing him in the back. Hence all the leaks.
Not this time.
The Democrats' over-the-top efforts to deny Trump the 2020 election worked, at the cost of four years of President Autopen.
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But Trump, unlike most career politicians, is very good at learning from his mistakes — and they gave him four years to put together a team, and a strategy, for governing after 2024.
Pete Hegseth has shown himself to be an extremely competent secretary of defense. Critics dismissively called him a 'Fox News anchor' when he was nominated, ignoring his distinguished military record, but it shows now.
Marco Rubio, who I confess struck me as a lightweight when I interviewed him over a decade ago, has shown himself to be a smart cookie, and a tough one.
JD Vance is pretty clearly the brainiest VP in my lifetime.
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Trump's Cabinet in general has been vigorous, shrewd and aggressive since Day 1.
And all kinds of problems that previous administrations called insoluble are now . . . being solved.
Our political establishment at some level wants things to be complicated and intractable: It boosts their influence.
We were told before that addressing illegal immigration required legislation from Congress that would be complicated and require many interests to be greased. Trump just enforced the law, and illegal border crossing basically stopped.
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We were told that government spending was impossible to control. DOGE showed us otherwise, as the first of several recissions bills works its way through Congress.
Obama told us we couldn't drill our way out of oil shortages. But Sarah Palin was right, and Trump's first-term 'drill, baby, drill' policies did just that — while, not so coincidentally, strengthening our hand in bringing about the Abraham Accords, and in dealing with Iran today.
Iran's nuclear program, we were told, was just something we'd have to live with. Not so: Turns out it's something the Iranians could die with.
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Competence in American government? What a welcome change. It's about time.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
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