Is Trump About To Nuke Iran?

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Is Donald Trump set to nuke Iran tomorrow night, Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET?

The chances at this moment are, at least, non-zero.

The simple fact that we can’t say “definitely no, absolutely not, for sure” is an astounding commentary on how unhinged and dangerous his presidency has become and how far off the rails the war with Iran has gone as Trump flails about with no plan, no strategy, no exit, and a global economy that day-by-day is reeling from the biggest geopolitical oil shock in history. It sets the next 36 or so hours up as one of the weirdest and scariest moments in geopolitics of our lifetimes.

Sunday morning, around 8 a.m. on Easter, the holiest of days in Christianity, the faith that Trump pretends to be for political convenience, the president posted on Truth Social, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. 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. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

It was a comment so startling that I double-checked it was real — and then checked a third term. For one thing, it didn’t really sound like him. For another, it was simply crazy. But it was true.

It was, by any measure, the most unhinged public comment by a president in US history. Later, he followed up with an ambiguous tweet that seemed to add a specific deadline: “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!”

Having caused such confusion and concern, Trump then settled back and celebrated Easter in the way that Christians traditionally do: With a day-long string of racist tweets about birthright citizenship.

More than one analyst online was left wondering whether Trump’s ultimatum and “promise” was a nuclear threat — and I think we have to take seriously the possibility that Trump does consider nuclear weapons as an answer to his own floundering in Iran. The chance, after all, is clearly more than zero — and at that point, the possibility that any president would use nuclear weapons in a conflict should be a terrifying and pressing public debate, just as it was in the opening stages of the Ukraine conflict when Vladimir Putin seemed to threaten such a use in 2022.

All sorts of media organizations failed the public, the country, and the world on Sunday in the wake of Trump’s unhinged explosion Sunday, downplaying or eliding the sheer insanity of Trump’s morning post. The Associated Press, which usually is better, initially wrote, “WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump promises strikes on Iran's power plants and bridges on Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz isn't reopened.” By the end of the day, as the media newsletter Status summarized, “The New York Times and other print outlets generally quoted the full expletive-tinged tirade. Broadcasters, held to a different standard and targeted by Trump’s FCC, didn’t.”

When you can’t quote a war-time commander-in-chief without violating the government’s own decency standards, you know something has gone terribly wrong.

And yet by this morning, less than 24 hours later, the front pages of all the nation’s major news outlets read as if it’s just another day in the war.

CNN’s top headline this morning says, “Trump and Iran trade threats over Strait of Hormuz.” The New York Times front-page headline reads, “As Trump’s New Ultimatum Looms, Tehran Vows to Step Up Attacks,” and the lede of that story says simply, “Iran said on Monday that it would retaliate forcefully if President Trump carries out his threat to strike Iranian power plants and bridges unless Tehran ends its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz.” The Washington Post doesn’t even mention Trump’s tirade anywhere above its proverbial fold this morning, giving over the top headlines to the daring and courageous rescue of that downed F-15 crewman over the weekend:

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reduces the power plant threat to a single bullet point — and presumably is featuring it at all because it actually managed to get an interview with Trump yesterday.

How can this be? Are we really this inured to unhinged comments that “Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell” doesn’t even warrant a full 24-hour news-cycle?

In a sentence that would have surprised the me of not that long ago, I’m going to let former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green eloquently explain why this should matter to us: “Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump's madness. I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.… Trump threatening to bomb power plants and bridges hurts the Iranian people, the very people Trump claimed he was freeing. … Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians. Christians in the administration should be pursuing peace. Urging the President to make peace. Not escalating war that is hurting people…. This is not making America great again, this is evil.”

At one level, Trump’s Easter morning tweet was consistent with two weeks of threats about attacking civilian infrastructure — he’s set, reset, moved, and repeatedly delayed a deadline for reopening the Strait of Hormuz “or else” he says the US will target civilian infrastructure like power plants in Iran, which would traditionally be a war crime. As Allison Gill traced yesterday, Trump’s initial deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait was March 23^rd , then he reset it to March 27^th , and then March 30^th . Then, after his directionless Oval Office address on April 1^st , the new deadline was April 4^th . Then today at 7 a.m. — on Saturday, he tweeted, “Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out - 48 hours before all Hell will reign [sic] down on them.” Then as of his Sunday tweet, the deadline is now Tuesday night at 8 p.m.

The constantly shifting deadlines and increasingly unhinged make clear that Trump is lost at sea. Today, evidently, he plans another “national address” at 1 pm (although the White House social media graphics say the address is at 1 pm “EST,” even though the US is currently on “EDT,” so who knows when it’ll actually be!)

As Edward Wong wrote in a smart analysis building off Trump’s unhinged weekend rants and deadlines, “No other recent American president has talked so openly about committing potential war crimes, legal experts, historians and former U.S. officials say. Wartime American presidents and their aides have usually insisted they were trying to follow international and U.S. military law, even if they violated it in some cases.”

I wrote pretty extensively in the first-term about Trump and the Madman Theory — the geopolitical theory embraced by a very sane Richard Nixon at the height of the Vietnam War to try to scare the Soviets into forcing the North Vietnamese to negotiate peace. As Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said later, “He never [publicly] used the term ‘madman,’ but he wanted adversaries to have the feeling that you could never put your finger on what he might do next.” With no public knowledge, Nixon and Henry Kissinger ran a series of military exercises in October 1969 that surely to the Soviets would have looked like the US getting ready to nuke North Vietnam.

Trump seemingly used the same strategy — “you could never put your finger on what he might do next” — against North Korea in 2017 in the “fire and fury” era before he started his unlikely bromance with Kim Jong Un.

The war with Iran, though, feels different. This isn’t just “Madman Theory.” This is a madman. Trump’s “leadership” is indistinguishable from your crazy uncle yelling at the TV. He is clearly unwell. And increasingly desperate. He thought he could start a war and turn it off when he wanted, and now has delivered the US a perhaps generational strategic defeat in the Middle East.

In anti-Trump circles yesterday, his rant touched off another tiresome round of “25^th Amendment now!” commentary, but as multiple people pointed out online, that’s a far-fetched fever dream — and, besides, not what the 25^th Amendment was designed for. (As Jacob Levy wrote, “The 25th Amendment process isn't for ‘crazy.’ It's for ‘comatose.’ And it's not easier than impeachment. It's harder.”) Instead, this is the place where Congress is supposed to act: The remedy in the American system for a president you can’t trust to act as commander-in-chief is impeachment and removal. Bill Kristol argued yesterday enough is enough: Impeach him again.

At the very least, we should be talking about this more. As Vermont’s congresswoman Becca Balint said yesterday — in one of the few and too-rare strong statements of condemnation — “"If President Biden or President Obama had said anything remotely like this, it would be nonstop coverage on every single channel and everyone on the other side of the aisle would be howling about it and demanding that they step down.”

All of that leads to the final and distinct point I want to make about the presidency and nuclear weapons: I just finished reading Alex Wellerstein’s excellent and thought-provoking new book, “The Most Awful Responsibility,” about Harry Truman’s struggle over atomic weapons at the dawn of the nuclear age.

He seized and insisted upon the president as the sole arbiter of the use of nuclear weapons in part because, as Wellerstein so fascinatingly documents, he felt surprised by how the military had used the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s not clear, in fact, that Truman understood the Hiroshima bomb was targeting a “city” rather than a “military base near a city” and it’s not clear that he knew the Nagasaki bomb was ready to be used at all.

After the war, Truman took nuclear weapons away from the military and made them the purview of the Atomic Energy Commission and over time, the country adopted the tradition — which to most people’s surprise remains more “tradition” than actual stated power or law — that the president has sole authority over the launch and use of nuclear weapons.

Here’s what we need to reckon with: For 80 years, that policy of presidential authorization served as a check on the use of nuclear weapons — for years, the military tried to more routinely deploy and use nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam, among other conflicts. The president was always the one who said no — he was the check and balance in the system. In fact, there was a widespread expectation in the nuclear system that a president would never order the use of a nuclear weapon.

Today, though, for the first time, it’s the president who represents and unstable and reckless part of the nuclear equation. Trump, after all, is someone who thinks we could even use a nuclear weapon to defeat a hurricane. We have no idea how the coming weeks of the Iran war will unfold, but does anyone think Donald Trump’s going to be less unhinged and more stable and more thoughtful as the US strategy continues to flounder? We seemed poised — perhaps even this week — to launch ground missions against Iran. And Iran is actually wealthier and more powerful geopolitically today than it was at the start of the war.

Is the chance that tomorrow at 8 pm ET Donald Trump launches nuclear weapons against Iran zero? Definitely not — and, regardless of whether that’s a one-tenth-of-one-percent chance or two percent or eight percent, anything more than zero is too high. I’d personally put the chance that Donald Trump uses a nuclear weapon against Iran at some point in the three percent range — which is a stunningly high number, given the history of nuclear weapons and the presidency. (I’ve written in the past about how much of the physical, emotional, and mental toll of Trump’s presidency comes in this tiny shift in society from “zero” to “non-zero.”)

I was shocked and disappointed that Congress didn’t seize on the opportunity post-Trump during Biden’s presidency to make more structural reforms to the presidency, as it did after Watergate. But most of all, I was disappointed that Congress made no progress on the question of removing and limiting presidential authority over nuclear launches. Rep. Ted Lieu has been a lonely voice in recent years pushing legislation to establish that the president and the US won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict; Sen. Ed Markey has a similar bill in the Senate.

If we do nothing else, we must take away the president’s ability for “first use” of nuclear weapons.

GMG

P.S. As you may have read, I wrote last Thursday about the dangerous “mythology” Pete Hegseth has built up around the modern military. Then, in the hours after my column, he seemed to spend the rest of Thursday just doing things to underscore how unfit he is for office and how little he understands what makes a modern military successful. Here’s a partial list of Hegseth’s eyebrow-raising actions on Thursday alone:

1) Fired the chief of staff of the Army;

2) Changed rules to allow military personnel to carry personal weapons on bases;

3) Fired the head of the Chaplain Corps, who just happens to be Black;

4) NBC reports he blocked promotions of a dozen Black or female officers

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