On Easter morning, the President of the United States posted to Truth Social: 'Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. Open the F-kin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell. Praise be to Allah.'
He followed up by promising that 'a whole civilization will die tonight' if Iran did not make a deal.
“Trump, Easter Sunday on Truth Social: 'Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. Open the F-kin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell.'
I want to stay with those words. A whole civilization. Ninety million people. Families who draw water from taps connected to pumping stations that run on electricity from those power plants. Hospitals where patients lie on ventilators powered by the same grid. Dialysis machines. Incubators in neonatal wards. Refrigeration for insulin. Traffic signals on bridges that people cross to get to work, to school, to the pharmacy, to each other.
Iran's population: over 90 million people. Trump described destroying their entire electrical grid in four hours.
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When Trump told reporters at the White House that 'very little is off limits,' he described what that destruction would look like: 'Where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12:00 tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again. Complete demolition by 12:00. And it'll happen over a period of four hours, if we want it to.'
Who
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that deliberate attacks on civilians amount to war crimes.
Four hours. That is the timeline he gave for ending the electrical grid of a nation with more people than Germany.
Pentagon prepared targeting options blending military and civilian sites to circumvent war crime definitions, per reports.
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The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights responded on Tuesday with language that left no room for interpretation: deliberate attacks on civilians amount to war crimes. Pope Leo called the threats against Iranian civilians 'truly unacceptable.' The Pentagon, according to reports, prepared options for Iranian targets that are both military and civilian to get around the 'war crime' definition.
“Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ), the only Iranian American in Congress: 'The President of the United States is a deranged lunatic, and a national security threat to our country and the rest of the world.'
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Create Free AccountRead that sentence again. The Pentagon prepared targeting options designed to blur the legal line between military and civilian objects. That is not strategy. That is lawyers helping generals find the thinnest possible excuse.
Republican lawmakers defended the threats. Democrats condemned them as 'unhinged.' Arizona Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari, the only Iranian American in Congress, called Trump 'a deranged lunatic, and a national security threat to our country and the rest of the world.' Rashida Tlaib of Michigan wrote: 'After bombing a school and massacring young girls, the war criminal in the White House is threatening genocide.'
The partisan frame misses the point. The point is not whether Democrats or Republicans are correct about the president's mental state. The point is that a specific human being stood at a podium and described, in operational detail, the destruction of infrastructure that 90 million civilians depend on to survive.
Five weeks of US and Israeli strikes have killed thousands of people in Iran and Lebanon. The war has blocked global shipping routes. The Strait of Hormuz, through which one fifth of the world's oil passes, sat closed to maritime traffic. And the president's response to that crisis was to threaten to make it worse by orders of magnitude.
A ceasefire arrived Tuesday evening, brokered by Pakistan. Oil prices dropped. Markets celebrated. Washington exhaled. But the ceasefire does not erase what was said. The threat to destroy civilian infrastructure was not hypothetical. The Pentagon prepared the targeting packages. The president described the timeline. The only thing that intervened was a diplomatic channel opened by a third country.
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Learn moreThe UK prime minister faced pressure for allowing US use of British bases as Trump made these threats. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, said the threat 'cannot be excused away.' Former Trump allies Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Candace Owens described the threats as a betrayal of the America First promise to end forever wars. Alex Jones asked, 'How do we 25th amendment his ass?'
None of those responses address the 90 million people. The people whose power plants were minutes from burning. The people whose bridges were hours from rubble. The people who do not get to vote in American elections, do not appear on American cable news, do not have lobbyists in Washington.
I keep returning to the four-hour timeline. Four hours to destroy a nation's electrical grid. A grid powers water treatment, sewage processing, food storage, medical equipment, communication networks. Without electricity, a modern society does not function. People die. Not soldiers. Patients. Children. The elderly. The vulnerable.
Those who advocate force rarely bear its consequences. The president who described 'complete demolition' will sleep in the White House tonight. The generals who prepared the targeting packages will drive home to Virginia suburbs. The cable news anchors who debated the legality will order dinner.
Who bears the cost? A mother in Isfahan whose child needs a ventilator. A doctor in Shiraz whose operating room goes dark. A family in Tehran whose insulin spoils when the refrigerator stops.
That is who lives in the buildings he wants to blow up. Can Washington name them before the next deadline arrives?
