What did Donald Trump do today?

He retreated deeper into the fantasy that he is winning the Iran war so he didn't have to deal with planes getting shot down.

This morning, news broke that two American jets had been shot down by Iran. One was an A-10 Warthog that crashed in Kuwait, with the sole pilot safely ejecting. The other was an F-15E fighter, carrying two crew members. One was rescued; the other is missing, and is either dead, or stranded inside Iran. Both Iranian forces and U.S. helicopters were searching inside Iran throughout the day.

Trump, who has been insisting for over a month that Iran's military capabilities had already been "annihilated," including its anti-aircraft weapons, ducked the press entirely today except for a few quick phone interviews.

Faced with predictable Iranian retaliation that he was completely unprepared for, and that is by his own staff's account, Trump has employed two coping strategies. One has been to simply pretend it's not happening. That was how he reacted to the news of the downed planes: by diving into a fantasy on social media where Iran was not only already defeated, but its oil resources were being plundered by the United States. The two posts below were the last he made before and the first he made after the news of the downed jets broke:

(In reality, Iran is selling more oil than ever, and more easily, since Trump canceled sanctions against Iranian oil in a desperate and futile attempt to keep gas prices down in the United States.)

The other strategy is to pretend that Iran's counteroffensives against the United States and its regional allies don't really matter. Trump has tried to convince Americans that higher gas and heating oil prices are actually good for them, since "we" (meaning American oil companies) benefit from high prices too. He's also tried to shrug off the inconceivably bad outcome of Iran gaining a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, declaring it a problem for the rest of the world to solve even though it is already causing massive disruption in American industries ranging from agriculture to air travel.

He's even tried to pretend that the loss of American lives is nothing to worry about. He literally shrugged and smirked at the prospect of more American deaths at the outset of the war, and to drive the point home, wore a campaign baseball hat for sale on his website to the solemn ceremony in which the bodies of the first American casualties of the war were received at Dover Air Force Base.

Why does this matter?

• Nobody this incompetent or out of touch can be trusted with command of the United States military forces. 

• No matter what Donald Trump thinks, it actually is a big deal if American servicemembers die, especially in a pointless war that will achieve no good purpose for the United States.