At 8:03 this morning, Easter Sunday, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy b*stards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
There are many things that could be going on with this ultimatum, which actually doesn’t sound like Trump’s usual style, in the same way the post of yesterday morning didn’t.
The post appears to be threatening to commit war crimes by attacking civilian infrastructure, and it appears to suggest Trump is considering using tactical nuclear weapons. He emphasized the production of such weapons in his first administration. He seemed to encourage this interpretation in an interview with Rachel Scott of ABC News today. She said Trump “told me the conflict should be over in days, not weeks but if no deal is made he’s blowing up the whole country with ‘very little’ off the table. ‘If [it] happens, it happens. And if it doesn’t, we’re blowing up the whole country,’ he said. I asked if there’s anything off limits. ‘Very little,’ he said.”
In 2023 a book by New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt alleged that in 2017, when Trump was warning North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on social media that North Korea would be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” behind closed doors he was talking about launching a preemptive strike against North Korea and of using a nuclear weapon against the country and blaming someone else for the strike .
Schmidt reports that Trump’s White House chief of staff at the time, retired U.S. Marine Corps General John Kelly, brought military leaders to try to explain to Trump why that would be a bad idea and finally got him to move away from the plan by telling him he could prove he was the “greatest salesman in the world” by finding a diplomatic solution to his fight with the North Korean leader.
In his own book about that period, journalist Bob Woodward wrote: “The American people had little idea that July through September of 2017 had been so dangerous.”
But Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo told Woodward: “We never knew whether it was real or whether it was a bluff.”
And that is another way to look at the post from Trump’s social media account: that he is panicked that he has not been able to bully other countries into fixing the mess he created by attacking Iran and precipitating the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and is now simply trying to bully Iran. In The Guardian last Monday, Sidney Blumenthal noted that Trump “has declared ‘victory’ more than eight times,” says he has “won” more than ten times, and said Iranian forces have been “obliterated” or suffered “obliteration” more than six times. Blumenthal noted Trump is now threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power grid and has used the words “decimate” or “decimation” at least six times.
Trump’s crazy post does, after all, push back yet again the deadline for his threats to rain destruction on Iran, which he then extended again in another post at 12:38 P.M. saying: “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!”
This dynamic was not lost on Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, who noted: “It was March 23rd. Then March 27th. Then March 30th. Then he gave that weird address on April 1st. [N]ew deadline April 4th. Then April 6th at 7 AM. Then April 7th at 8 PM. And now another address tomorrow at 1 PM. The chaos is intentional.” She also noted that his deadlines and his abandonment of them often seem tied to the rhythms of the stock market.
In an interview with Barak Ravid of Axios today shortly after this morning’s post, Trump reiterated that “if they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there” but also said the U.S. is “in deep negotiations” with Iran and that he thinks a deal can be reached. Trump told Ravid that his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—not Secretary of State Marco Rubio—are talking with the Iranians. Sources told Ravid that mediators from Pakistan, Egypt, and Türkiye are facilitating the talks.
But Iranian officials are refusing to deal with Witkoff and Kushner after they apparently misunderstood earlier negotiations and instead told Trump the talks weren’t going well before he launched strikes. Neither Witkoff nor Kushner is a trained diplomat, and both have deep financial ties to the Middle East. Notably, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who urged Trump to start the Iran war, has invested at least $2 billion in Kushner’s private equity firm.
On March 13, Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell of the New York Times reported that Kushner is trying to raise $5 billion or more for his private equity firm from Middle East governments at the same time as he is also supposed to be negotiating peace in the region.
But Stephen Kalin, Eliot Brown, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has already cost the Saudis about $10 billion, and the grand plans of MBS were already falling short of money. Some of those plans were U.S. investments. The reporters note that even before the war, the Saudi’s sovereign-wealth fund, the same one that invested in Kushner’s private equity firm, had sold much of its U.S. stock portfolio. Last year, MBS promised to invest up to $1 trillion in the U.S. Those investments are now under review.
Regardless of the inspiration for Trump’s post, by itself it tells a very clear story. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi posted: “The American president has lost his mind.”
Journalist Steven Beschloss wrote: “This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “If I were in Trump’s Cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment. This is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.”
The 25th Amendment establishes a process through which a majority of the Cabinet and the Vice President, or another body Congress designates, can remove a president deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Murphy was not the only one thinking along those lines. Hollie Silverman of Newsweek reported that on the prediction market platform Kalshi, which allows traders to buy “yes” or “no” shares on the question “Will the 25th Amendment be used during Trump’s presidency?” “yes” has moved in recent days from 28.6% to 35.1%
“It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is,” journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice told George Grylls of The Times about President Donald J. Trump. Rupar explained that political journalists are trained to think, “‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you…convey that to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch his rallies, you see that they’re full of hatred, he’s lying constantly, and a lot of it is incoherent.”
Rupar spends as much as eighty hours a week watching Trump and members of his administration, clipping videos of their noteworthy statements into a few minutes at a time. His work is indispensable for translating Trump’s long, meandering speeches to people who need shorter versions of them. In this quotation, he nails the real problem of this moment in which the president of the United States is threatening “obliteration” if another nation doesn’t do as he demands: the noteworthy story is not what the president says; the story is the president himself and his obvious mental deterioration.
Today was another surreal day in the second Trump administration.
At the traditional White House Easter Egg roll this morning, Trump, whose right hand was swollen and covered with makeup after his weekend away from the cameras, stood with First Lady Melania Trump on a White House balcony, accompanied by a human-sized Easter Bunny. The columns of the White House stood festooned in soft red, white, and blue plaid over the crowd of young children and their parents in festive pastel clothes excited for the day’s events. The band played “Hail to the Chief.” After a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Trump told the audience that “it’s a day where we celebrate Jesus, it’s a day where we celebrate religion, and it’s an honor to be the president of the United States.” Then things veered off course. He continued: “Our country is doing so well like it has never done before. You’ll see that very shortly, and things that we’ve done have not been done before. We’ve broken every record on the stock market, we’ve broken every record on our military.”
And then he launched into a speech about Iran and wars and bombing and rescues. The Easter Bunny’s blank eyes seemed first shocked and then desperate. It was a scene out of a surreal movie: the president of the United States describing a war next to a giant rabbit with big, vacant, eyes. Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts wrote: “Every day, I think: there’s no possible way it can get dumber and more embarrassing. And then Trump does something like this. And yes, this is real. It is all too real.”
While the children were rolling their eggs along the ground with spoons, Trump spoke to reporters, telling them about Iran, “If it were up to me, I’d like to keep the oil. I just don’t think the people of the United States would really understand.” He suggested that attacking Iran’s infrastructure wouldn’t be a war crime because “they killed 45,000 people in the last month. More than that. It could be as much as sixty. They killed protesters. They’re animals, and we have to stop them, and we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
He claimed again that former presidents are telling him they wish they had done what he did in attacking Iran; all four living ex-presidents have denied speaking to him. Sitting with children drawing pictures, he told them they could sell his autograph on eBay for $25,000. He signed their pictures, and while he signed, he told the children that former President Joe Biden was “incapable of signing his name” so he had aides follow him around with an autopen machine.
A later press conference at the White House continued the wild lies and non sequiturs. Trump began the conference by greeting the reporters with “Happy Easter. We had a great Easter. This is one of our better Easters, I think, in a lot of different ways. I can say, militarily, it’s been one of the best.”
The celebratory speeches about the war compared a rescued airman to Jesus Christ and gave a great deal of detail about the rescue operation, but they didn’t deliver much information to the journalists packed into the room about negotiations or goals or the president’s ultimatum that Iran must agree to his demands by 8:00 tomorrow night or face “obliteration.”
Trump reiterated: “The entire country could be taken out in one night. And that night might be tomorrow night.” He said that while the regime governing the country has changed—meaning its leadership, because the actual regime is still in power—that his reason for undertaking the war was not regime change, but rather to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
He assured the journalists that he has had a plan all along. “I saw somebody said, ‘Oh, he doesn’t have a plan.’ I have the best plan of all, but I’m not going to tell you what my plan is. You know, they want me to say, Here’s my plan, we’re going to attack at 9:47 in the morning, and then we’re going to do this, and then we’re gonna, and if you don’t do that, they say, I have a plan. These people know what the plan is. Everybody here knows what the plan is…. Every single thing has been thought out by all of us. But I can’t reveal the plan to the media. So, you know, but we’re just thrilled by the success of this operation.”
Trump has said Iranians are upset when the strikes stop, and a reporter challenged him to explain “Why would they want you to blow up their infrastructure, to cut off their power?” He answered: “They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom. The Iranians have, and we’ve had numerous intercepts—’Please keep bombing.’ Bombs that are dropping near their homes. ‘Please keep bombing! Do it.’ And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding, and when we leave and we’re not hitting those areas, they’re saying, “Please come back, come back, come back!’”
After noting he was responsible for the killing of Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, he added: “I did one other but this one was not picked up. Osama bin Laden—If you read my book, I said you’ve got to take him out one year before the World Trade Center came down. So I wish you’d read the book. To be a good president, I believe you have to have good instincts, and a lot of this is instinct.”
A special operations team located and killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in 2011, when Barack Obama was president. Trump’s frequent claim that his book called for a raid against Osama bin Laden has been just as frequently debunked as a lie.
Today was an exhausting day as Americans seem to have little choice but to pay attention to a man who is bizarrely threatening what appear to be war crimes against Iranians while spinning wild tales. The members of both chambers of Congress are away for another week and Republican leaders are showing no sign of calling them back, leaving the American people to face whatever Trump has in mind for tomorrow on our own.
In contrast to Trump’s vision of government according to the whims of a single man, no matter how bonkers those whims might be, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani—who, as a naturalized citizen, is not eligible for the presidency—is illustrating what it means to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Mamdani’s videos about governing New York City inform New Yorkers about what their government does. At the same time, though, they lift up and honor the workers who make the wheels of government turn. During his campaign, Mamdani promised his administration would see to it that potholes got filled, and as the road maintenance workers made the trip to fill the 100,000th pothole of the year, he tagged along. The video humanized the process and dignified work that often doesn’t get attention.
Another video today about the 311 call center in New York City that helps residents find resources to help solve everything from where to recycle a mirror to how to get an apartment repaired featured Tangie Williams putting a face to the people in the center as she coached Mamdani himself through a call. Williams told Mamdani that the calls that “tug at my heart” are elderly people who have no family and need both to be heard and to access help, which she provides with evident joy.
We’re now at severe risk of entering the opening stages of the next world war. The world at a civilizational level is now repeating the financial, economic, and structural cycles that led to the last two. If there is to be another world war, it begins like this.
I’m hesitant to speak to you openly anymore. You can sense it. My words are too often misinterpreted by lesser minds. I’m weary of it. When I say that “we are at risk,” that is what I mean. We are speaking of probabilities and possibilities. Please understand the nuance before you read what I am going to write.
Very, very few people understand what I am now going to teach you.
The last world war broke out this way. Germany was the world’s largest debtor nation (and we’ll leave aside the fact for now that many modern nation-states didn’t yet exist.) It owed reparations for the First World War to France and England. Which it couldn’t repay. As a result, it’s economy stagnated, went into hyperinflation, and Weimar Germany became Nazi Germany.
Perhaps you already glimpse the parallels I’m about to recount.
“Imbalances” triggered the last world war. Not in trade, but in capital. Germany was the world’s largest debtor, and it couldn’t repay its debts, which led to economic ruin, that in turn, caused to it to turn to violence, expansionism, as a source of growth. Here laid the seeds of fascism. Fascism is an economic problem in the beginning, a violent solution, which isn’t my discovery, but that of Keynes, who reinvented finance and economics, not to mention laid the foundations of the modern world. We’ll discuss that another time. Think of the Nazis stripping everything from corpses.
Now let’s fast forward to today.
America is the world’s largest debtor, by a very long way. As so many times in history before it, it is turning to violent expansionism. That’s predictable, given America’s long run economic stagnation—real incomes are at Great Depression era levels now as a share of the economy (yes, that’s a fact, and like I said, I tire of quibbling over facts with unlearned minds.)
America’s President has already sown the seeds of expansionism in many, many ways. From Greenland to Canada. But these were mere beginnings and bagatelles. The prize he appears to have his eyes on is to control the world’s oil supply.
Why is that?
China is often painted as America’s “enemy.” America needs an enemy. Societies often do, for the sake of cohesion and order. The truth though is that China is hardly America’s enemy. America is doing a fine job of destabilizing itself, with nobody’s help.
What China is is America’s largest creditor. Or among them, at any rate. The extent of its holdings of American debt are unknown, because they are held by “entities,” not just the state itself. What’s certain, though, is that China and America are caught in precisely the same set of imbalances that Germany and France plus England were exactly a century ago.
Please understand how crucial that is. If it seems eerie, it is. Here we see history repeating itself with brutal mercilessness.
This is what the war on Iran is about. Control of the world’s oil. Trump himself has said it openly many times. “Wouldn’t it be great if we took the oil?” I paraphrase. I’m sure you’ve heard the words by now.
Why does this matter?
Because China is the world’s largest importer of oil. It imports oil to the degree of 75% of its consumption. That means three quarters of its economy depend on imported oil. China is the world’s second largest oil consumer. Guess who the first is? America, of course.
So. Here we have a situation of financial imbalances, precisely repeating history from a century ago: the world’s largest debtor, versus its largest creditor. Only the names have changed in this story. The plot, theme— and perhaps even the conclusion—have not.
America’s President has decided that the best way to revive a moribund economy is to control the world’s oil. The trade wars didn’t work. They were too lightweight to accomplish the task. If one controls the world’s oil supply, then one has “leverage” over China. And Trump is a figure who is always looking for “leverage,” and it should also be said that this is a very American way of thinking.
(Can you even define leverage, which is why I put it in quotes? What is it? A way to blackmail, to force, to punish, to control. Americans understand what it is without ever even having had to think about it.)
Now we approach the path to world war.
Trump controls the world’s oil. How does China respond? It has one obvious response. It invades Taiwan. Because then it controls the world’s microchips.
The world is now a thing of chokepoints. It is a neck to be suffocated and snapped.
How does this game end?
Trump, it’s true, can bring China to its knees, by controlling the world’s oil supply. Even at the margins, through effectively controlling 25-30% of it. That’s why China’s Premier, recently, has called for a new energy system for the world. He’s worried, and in China’s ruling classes, panic must be setting in now.
Here is “leverage.” With it, he can try to force China to give him what he wants, which is basically money. It’s what he always wants, and in this case, he’s been open about China “investing” more in America, which is funny, an oxymoron, because if you have to force it, it’s not exactly an investment, LOL, is it? Here, Trump is trying to rebalance the imbalances now looming over the world like a terrible spectral figure from history.
But China can equally bring the world to its knees, in many, many ways, Especially America. It can dump American bonds, as we should all know by now, setting off a chain reaction that begins with a stock market crash, and ends with bank failures that make 2008 look like a nice day in the park.
That’s only the beginning. If it seizes control of the world’s microchips, the global economy as we know it comes to an end. Without oil, we are back in the Stone Age. Without microchips, we are back at the Iron Age, perhaps.
The pattern here is easy to see from this far away. Let me now summarize it so you can see it clearly. Trump controls the world’s oil supply, in war after war, to suffocate China. China is hardly likely to just accept this, and retaliates, by seizing the world’s microchips. And perhaps it’s remaining sources of other critical resources, like rare earths. And it ignites a capital war which plunges America into chaos.
Does all that sound unlikely? Or likely? I won’t remind you how many of my predictions have come true. That’s needless if you understand the above.
We will make a great deal of money from this. As we have been doing. That’s regrettable. All the money in the world isn’t worth one moment, one glimmer, of human civilization. Money is only worth what you can buy with it. In the world we are in now, that is less and less by the hour.
We are talking about risk here, remember. I’m not saying there is “going to be” a world war. I am saying that if you understand history well, and know it seriously, then we appear to be entering the beginning stages of one. Only time can tell if it proceeds the way the last two did. What we can say now is this: if a world war was to be beginning before our eyes…
Financially, economically, strategically, civilizationally…
It would look exactly like this.
(Or they might be worse. The president is basically promising to wipe a civilization off the map.)
In the city of Isfahan, Israeli airstrikes have damaged several of Iran’s most cherished cultural jewels, Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Heritage said. The Ali Qapu Palace and the Chehel Sotoun palace and garden, dating to the 17th-century Safavid dynasty, sustained serious harm, photos and videos released by the ministry show.
The blast waves on Monday also sent the turquoise tiles of the iconic Jameh Mosque crashing to the ground, with ministry photographs showing a massive plume of smoke rising from behind the mosque. The mosque, with its brightly colored minarets and domes covered in Persian calligraphy, is renowned as a gem of Persian and Islamic architecture.
The strikes on Isfahan on Monday came a week after another cultural icon, the Golestan Palace, was badly damaged during an attack on a police station in downtown Tehran, according to the ministry. Golestan Palace dates to the 14th century and eventually became the seat of the Qajar dynasty. Its famed hall of mirrors was shattered, and its symmetrical garden was covered in debris, photos and videos show.
Israeli military strikes in Isfahan were targeting the governor’s building, which sits near Naqshe Jahan Square, according to Iranian government officials. Many cultural landmarks also sat in close proximity.
The images of renowned historic sites shattered by missiles has left many Iranians enraged. In interviews and in posts on social media, some are asking how a war waged by Israel and the United States supposedly against the Islamic republic’s government and military has ended up damaging their cultural identity and sites.
“For me, ancient monuments are as important as human lives, because they connect me to my past,” Mojtaba Najafi, a prominent Iranian scholar and researcher, said in one post. “And their destruction means my memory is being demolished.”
A spokeswoman for UNESCO, the United Nations agency that seeks to protect global culture, said her organization had been able to verify damage at several World Heritage sites in Iran. They include the Golestan Palace; the Chehel Sotoun pavilion of the Persian Garden, the Masjed‑e Jameh of Isfahan, as well as on buildings located near the buffer zone of the prehistoric sites of the Khorramabad Valley.
“UNESCO is deeply concerned by reports of destruction affecting cultural heritage sites in the Middle East, notably in Iran and neighboring countries,” said the spokeswoman, Monia Adjiwanou.
In a statement last week, UNESCO said “cultural property is protected under international law.” It said it had contacted all parties in the Iran conflict and shared the geographical coordinates for sites on its world heritage list, as well as for national symbols. The hope was that they might be spared.
“These sites carry historical memory that transcend ideology,” said Naghmeh Sohrabi, a professor of Middle East history and director for research at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. “They are living breathing monuments to beauty and creation, not just for Iranians but for all of us in the world.”
On Sunday, an ancient hilltop castle and military barracks dating to Persia’s Sasanian era, from the 220s to 650s A.D., was seriously damaged in a airstrike on Sunday, according to Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which said Israel struck the ministry’s local offices in the province. The castle, known as Shapur Khast Castle and Falak ol-Aflak, is in Khorramabad, in Lorestan Province.
The ministry said that the strikes targeted Lorestan’s cultural ministry, destroying the building, and that the blasts had damaged the castle and two museums.
The mosque, the two palaces in Isfahan’s Naqshe Jahan Square and the Golestan Palace in Tehran are listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites, with the goal of protecting them from alterations. The castle is on Iran’s list of cultural heritage sites.
Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Heritage said it had installed blue flags, in keeping with international wartime protocol, on all of its cultural and heritage sites to signal to Israeli and American jets that they were protected. But to no avail.
Israel’s military said it did not target these cultural sites directly. But it did not respond to questions about cultural sites being damaged as a result of strikes on nearby targets.
In Isfahan, the blast wave reverberated across Naqshe Jahan Square. The 964,000-square-foot plaza, constructed in 1598 during the Safavid empire, is known for the majestic green garden in its center and the labyrinth of its bazaar, along with its towering palaces, with turquoise domes and minarets adorned with Persian calligraphy.
At the Ali Qapu and Chehel Sotoun palace, videos and images on state television showed painted murals knocked to the ground, floral tiles broken into pieces, hand-carved wooden panels blown out and hanging off walls and ceilings. Tiny mirrors that had been arranged into ornate stars and hexagons shattered across the floor.
A video verified by The New York Times shows the destruction to Chehel Sotoun, a 17-century palace with a Persian garden compound. There, the 20 towers of the palace are reflected in a shallow blue pool in the garden, creating the illusion of 40 accounting for the name. In Persian, chehel sotoun means 40 columns.
The strikes are damaging sites that have remained standing though history’s upheavals. They made it through centuries of different monarchs, of invasions, coups, World War II, the Islamic Revolution, an eight-year war with Iraq and waves of uprisings against the current government.
Iranians are reacting with outrage, sadness and fear.
“What happened to their claims that this was war on the regime and not on Iran and its people?” asked Laleh, a 36-year-old from Tehran, reached by telephone. “They are lying.”
Isfahan is the hometown of Nasim Alikhani, the Iranian American owner and chef of the acclaimed Persian restaurant Sofreh in Brooklyn. Ms. Alikhani said she was devastated when she heard about the Isfahan strikes.
“Isfahan’s Naqshe Jahan Square is not just an extraordinary historical site — it is the heart and soul of every Iranian,” she said in an interview. “It has survived countless invasions, yet it did not survive the brutality of this unjust war. These places do not belong only to Iranians — they belong to humanity, and their destruction must never be accepted.”
Many consider Isfahan the most magical city in Iran. In Persian, it is often referred to as “Isfahan, Nesefeh Jahan” — meaning Isfahan is half of the world. An ode to the city by an Iranian pop star, Moein, is a staple singalong at Iranian parties and family gatherings.
Iran’s Red Crescent Society said Tuesday that since the start of the war on Feb. 28, almost 10,000 civilian structures had been destroyed or damaged in airstrikes. Of those, it said, 7,493 were residential; 1,617 commercial; 32 medical and pharmaceutical facilities; 65 schools and educational sites. Thirteen, it said, belonged to the Red Crescent.
And now at least six cultural gems: Naqshe Jahan Square, Jameh Mosque, Ali Qapu Palace, Chehel Sotoun Palace and Garden, Golestan Palace and Falak ol-Aflak Castle.
The governor of Isfahan, Mehdi Jamalinejad, called the attacks on his city barbaric. “They are targeting the world’s most ancient symbols of civilization with the most advanced weaponry,” he said in a social media post.
Vance says he prays U.S. is ‘on God’s side’ in Iran war
BUDAPEST — A day after President Donald Trump said God is on the side of the United States in its war with Iran, Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday declined to go that far.
A Catholic and Iraq War veteran who has long expressed skepticism of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, Vance said he believed his administration is acting correctly but suggested it was not his place to declare whether the deadly and destructive strikes on Iranian officials, civilians and infrastructure reflect God’s will.
“Is God on our side?” Vance said when asked by The Washington Post whether he agreed with some top U.S. officials who have framed the war in religious terms, including Trump. “I think my attitude towards military conflict has always been to pray that we are on God’s side.”
“And my own view is that we’re doing this for the right reasons: We’re doing this because we don’t want a regime that has committed acts of terrorism to have the world’s most dangerous weapon, because that would mean a lot of innocent people die,” Vance continued. “I certainly hope that God agrees with the decision that Iran shouldn’t have a nuclear weapon, but I’ll keep praying about it.”
Trump said when asked by The Post on Monday that he believes God supports the United States’ actions in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, a widening conflict that has killed thousands in the Middle East, wounded many more and left 13 U.S. service members dead.
“I do, because God is good,” Trump said in response to a Post reporter’s question during a White House press briefing. “And God wants to see people taken care of.”
Vance’s comments, made during a news conference boosting Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of Hungary’s election on Sunday, reflected both his own hesitation about rushing into complicated, deadly wars, and also a Catholic faith that has consistently called for governments to avoid war.
On Sunday, Pope Leo XIV did just that: “Let those who have weapons lay them down,” he said during his Easter message. “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace!” A week earlier, on Palm Sunday, Leo preached that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” and last week the American-born pope also urged Trump to work to end the war.
Calling himself a “skeptic of foreign military interventions,” Vance told The Post in an interview in February that “there is no chance” Trump would allow the U.S. to “be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight.”
After threatening in recent days to bomb Iran’s infrastructure back to “the stone ages” if the nation does not strike a deal he finds acceptable to end the war, Trump on Tuesday went even further. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, in another threat for Iran to meet U.S. and Israeli demands. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
President Donald Trump took a call from Vice President JD Vance to voice support for Viktor Orban during a rally alongside the Hungarian leader in Budapest on Tuesday, as the White House looks to boost the beleaguered prime minister ahead of what could be a bruising April 12 national election for his ruling Fidesz party.
No, I don't know if my refrigerator is running. Why do you ask?
At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
Trump has painted himself into a corner in his impulsive war against Iran. His job approval is dismal and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, is sending the cost of oil soaring, squeezing the global economy. Always in his life he has had someone to fix his mistakes—his father, Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, the “adults in the room” in his first administration who distracted him from catastrophic errors, and so on—but no one was willing to bail him out of the global disaster of his war on Iran.
So he threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” an open threat to push his current embrace of war crimes all the way to genocide. No one knew if he was gearing up for a ground invasion of Iran in a war that has never received congressional authorization, or a massive bombing campaign, or even the use of nuclear weapons.
Or if he was making yet another empty threat.
Within the announcement were signs that perhaps it was bluster designed to let him claim victory and walk away. Despite his claim, there has been no “regime change” in Iran: the regime is very much still in place, although it has changed leadership in the wake of the bombing deaths of previous leaders. The new leaders appear to be more radical than their predecessors.
There was also the unmistakable echo of television advertising in his announcement. Either “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” or “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
At 6:32 this evening, we learned that the horrifying announcement of the morning was, indeed, cover for Trump to declare victory and get out of the crisis he has caused in the Middle East.
Trump posted: “Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.
“We received a 10 point proposal from Iran,” Trump continued, “and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Michael Rios of CNN reported that Iran’s media is claiming it has achieved a great victory, forcing the U.S. to agree in principle to its 10-point plan, which includes the end of sanctions against Iran, the removal of all U.S. combat forces from bases in the region, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. If these terms are correct, they leave the United States significantly worse off than it was before the war and leave Iran significantly stronger.
Trump called Rios’s story a fraud, and immediately sought to reassert his strength. He posted, “Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement,” and said that “CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible ‘reporting.’”
Political commentator Ben Rhodes summed up the situation: “In the best case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with [Iran] demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents—including hundreds of children—dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.”
And then, a minute after midnight, Trump posted:
“A big day for World Peace! Iran wants it to happen, they’ve had enough! Likewise, so has everyone else! The United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just ‘hangin’ around’ in order to make sure that everything goes well. I feel confident that it will. Just like we are experiencing in the U.S., this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice wrote: “Trump went from making insane genocidal threats this morning to hyping the ‘golden age’ of Iran hours later, and he received no concessions in between. He’s an absolute basket case who needs to be removed from power before he follows through on one of his mass murder fantasies.”
The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.
Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” was not just a reference to Iran. If he had destroyed Iran in our names, unhampered by the Republican Congress members who have vowed to defend the U.S. Constitution, it would also have been an epitaph for the United States of America.
After a few days of making genocidal threats of the kind the world has scarcely seen since the 1930s, finally, Trump surrendered.
“A civilization will die tonight.” A civilization did begin dying tonight. Ours. But I’ll come to that.
Why did Trump surrender? For the obvious reason. America was losing this war, and losing it badly. Incredibly badly. Not a single one of Trump’s objectives were accomplished. In fact, the precise opposite happened.
Instead of regime change, Iran’s regime survived and hardened. Worse, Iran has emerged now as a new global power. It withstood the might of both America and Israel’s militaries, and choked off the world’s oil supply, causing chaos around the globe, sending markets plummeting.
For Iran, this war signals its emergence as a major global player. It has shown it can withstand war to the point of mass war crimes, and not just emerge intact, but exert punishing, catastrophic cost of its own. And for all these reasons, Trump finally surrendered.
Now we are at a fragile ceasefire. You might thank an unlikely country, Pakistan, without whose efforts at diplomacy we would be soon standing on the brink of world war. That is where we will be, anyways, for some time to come now. This fragile ceasefire isn’t likely to hold. A man who can threaten the kinds of…let me pause here.
What are we to call it, a proclamation, a threat like “a civilization will die tonight”? Even war crime isn’t quite an adequate term. Perhaps even "crime against humanity” is a concept that fails us now, because if such a threat were to be carried out, it would be something new. The the Middle East would have been in ruins, from electricity to drinking water, millions upon millions at risk, and the world’s oil supply would have been dust.
Perhaps just as new concepts were necessary for what happened during the 1930s, they are now too. Maybe all this can only be called a crime against civilization.
A man who can threaten such crimes is unlikely to be capable of hewing to any principles or norms of decency, and we should already know that about Trump. And so this ceasefire is likely to be tenuous at best. How, precisely, is the Strait of Hormuz to be managed? Will Iran and America split the “toll”? Go ahead and chuckle.
Now let me come to the point, which isn’t why Trump surrendered, but what it means.
Let me begin with us as a civilization, which I’ve already done a little, and come to the financial and economic realities before us now.
As a civilization, we lost our dignity. Few stood to Trump’s threats, which, we should all understand, are at or beyond the level of the 1930s. To threaten to take a nation of a hundred million people back to the “Stone Age” is a crime so vast that it has little precedent in human history. And that we as a world stood cowering before such threats robbed us of our dignity.
Dignity isn’t a mere abstraction. It has a very real price.
Who will pay for the energy crisis, financial crises, or stock market crashes that Trump has imposed on the world? If you were the finance minister of any country on the planet, you should be looking at all your major financial markets right now, stocks, bonds, currencies, and thinking to yourself: America cost me this many billions or trillions, and the rational response is to protect myself, by divesting exactly that amount from a dangerous, implosive America that can loose this chaos upon the world.
Eventually, America will pay this price. The great trend of the world running away from investing in America will gather pace and force now, at least if the world is anywhere close to some semblance of rational.
It will want its dignity back. What shred of it is left after the shocking cowardice shown by leader after leader who remained silent in the face of Trump’s insane ultraviolece.
The world has been playing nice with America. Far too nice. Europe took a soft line with Trump, and where did it end? With a war on Iran, that choked Europe itself off from the energy it so vitally needs. If you were Europe, where would you put your money? How long would you suffer this kind of humiliation?
History is made of cowardice. And yet the world changes, too, when courage is mustered. There are a few foolish nations left in the world who will follow Trump into the abyss. Middle Eastern money has flowed into America over the last decade, a cycle of oil becoming money becoming oil, becoming instability, dictatorship, and war. But will the rest of the world want to join in this fatal bargain?
Trump’s humiliation will prove to the world that he is wearing the feathers of a hawk, but on the body of a chicken. He is a man who talks loudly, but accomplishes less than nothing in the end. Violence is his forte, true, but in the way of a petty gangster, who will always back down from a bigger threat.
Let me summarize all that now. America has lost control of itself and power over the world. It’s risk premium has risen massively now, and alongside it, it has the lost the power to force investment in it or cooperation with it. To put yourself beside America now is to be one of history’s greater fools. Meanwhile, we will never quite know when Trump rattles his limp saber again.
Every time that he does, the world will see it more and more as an empty threat. He is a nuisance and a menace, and the only way to contain the costs he imposed is to finish the job of making America a pariah state.
That is a very dangerous place for a world to be. Divesting from its major power. It will be ugly, and at every step, Trump will try to stop it. This alone will bring us to the brink of more wars.
And this too is in Trump’s psychology. After Iran, who will he go after next? Whose oil, minerals, land, will he covet and scream over? Greenland? Canada? South America? This is hardly the end. Trump wants to be dictator of the world. He has not succeeded this time, and only humiliated America, the world, and civilization itself, showing us all what true cowardice, in the form of the deafening silence of leaders, really is.
But he won’t stop here.
Where does all that leave us? With a new level of risk baked into the system. We have a would-be world dictator. Willing to commit crimes against civilization to steal a world’s resources. This is civilizational risk, and what we all just experienced was a civilizational crisis. I’ll talk more about that. You are already paying the costs. The question now is: who will be left to pay the price for the disasters such figures leave behind them?
