Did Trump Just Threaten to Use Nuclear Weapons in Iran?
If such an order comes to pass, the military can and must refuse.
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The president of the United States is losing his head, and that means the rest of us must keep ours. At 8:06 a.m. eastern daylight time, Donald Trump posted this on his Truth Social site:
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!
The world, unfortunately, has gotten used to Trump’s overheated rhetoric, and to dismissing the commander in chief as something of a crank who (as the French president recently advised) should perhaps keep more of his thoughts to himself.
But the president’s statements are policy, and he has now made it the policy of the government of the United States that at 8 p.m. Washington, D.C., time (3:30 a.m. in Tehran), he will order the U.S. military to destroy Iran and its entire civilization—permanently—unless his terms are met. (He did not specify those terms, but on Easter Sunday, he posted a frenzied and obscenity-laden message on Truth Social demanding that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz.) Whether the president is saying this with full control of his faculties or has well and truly lost his mind is irrelevant: He is still the president, and so we must consider the meaning of this policy.
