Dire conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are due to Trump’s disassociation from reality.

In July, a parent whose son was serving on the Navy ship USS Abraham Lincoln wrote an alarmed letter to Stars and Stripes, expressing worry that the dire conditions aboard were harming sailors. The Abraham Lincoln has been deployed in the Middle East since last November and has seen combat in the Iran War. It was scheduled to return home in May, but its mission has been indefinitely extended.

“My son is currently on that ship and listening to him say that he and his shipmates constantly think about jumping off the ship just for relief is so hard to listen to,” the letter read. The writer added, “Our loved ones are out there fighting with no understanding as to what they’re defending.”

The anxiety was well grounded. Since then, reports in Stars and Stripes and The Navy Times have made clear that there have been multiple suicide attempts aboard the Lincoln. While the Navy denies that there is a widespread mental health crisis on the ship, the families of sailors, as well as political leaders, have begun to loudly decry the distressing conditions.

The roots of the critical situation go back to poor military planning by President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in the run-up to the Iran disaster. They had assumed that overwhelming U.S. airpower would lead to a quick victory, comparable to the coup the U.S. was able to pull off in Venezuela in January. This scenario radically underestimated the resilience and capability of the Iranian government.

As The New York Times reports, “The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln’s supply problems began soon after the first day of the war, as Iranian missiles and attack drones fell on a Navy base in Bahrain. The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran, destroyed much of the base. And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades.”

Iran had, in fact, destroyed or severely compromised U.S. military bases all over the Middle East. This meant the sailors on the Lincoln had to receive food from farther away and had no easy access to shore leave.

Even more demoralizing than that was the psychological toll of an interminable mission with no clear end goal or purpose. As one sailor told CNN reporter Pamela Brown: “At first when we learned that we would be doing combat operations it was intended to be a two-week thing. But unfortunately that became a seven-month thing… They told us it was to help Iranian protesters, then they told us we are out here to denuclearize Iran, now it’s to support a blockade.”

Trump was asked by a reporter if the deployment has gone on too long. He replied, “No. Not nearly long enough.”

The crisis on the Lincoln is one of Trump’s own making. It’s a result of his irresponsible handling of military affairs. Trump is alarmingly detached from reality. He has no concern for the flesh-and-blood sailors who serve in his Navy, much less the countless civilians killed in his imperialist wars.

JEET HEER is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, where this story first appeared.