The president marked Easter with more deranged threats against the country and people of Iran:
The US president gave Iran until 8pm eastern time on Tuesday to reopen the crucial shipping lane after earlier threatening to unleash “hell” in an expletive-laden social media post.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
The president is making explicit threats to commit massive war crimes against the civilian population. He means to inflict collective punishment on tens of millions of people because their government will not yield to his unhinged demands. He is treating the Iranian people as hostages, and he is threatening to shoot the hostages if he doesn’t get what he wants. The message the president has sent amounts to telling the Iranian people, “Trump, or I burn the country.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that the president is threatening genocidal violence against the people of Iran. Trump has referred to Iranians as “animals” in a chilling echo of Israeli officials’ statements at the start of the genocidal war in Gaza. He said this morning that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back” if Iran does not capitulate. This is eliminationist language directed at a country of more than ninety million people. These are the words of a madman, and coming from the head of a nuclear weapons state they are terrifying.
It should be clear by now that this is a war on the Iranian people, and it was never going to be anything else. The aggressors want to wreck Iran and leave it in ruins. That should have been obvious from the start after what the Israeli government did to Gaza and is currently doing to Lebanon with Washington’s full support, but now it is undeniable.
Trump’s Iran policy has always been defined by collective punishment. His “maximum pressure” sanctions have impoverished the Iranian people and strangled their economy for the last eight years. Attacks on civilian infrastructure in his criminal war threaten the entire population with even greater deprivation and hardship. As ever, the destruction is the point. The president is not really trying to achieve anything. He simply wishes to punish and harm those that will not submit to him.
