“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump threatened.
President Donald Trump mimics firing a gun during a news conference in the White House briefing room about the war in Iran on April 6, 2026. TOM WILLIAMS / CQ-ROLL CALL, INC VIA GETTY IMAGES-
Somehow, in a war already bent on turning Iran into a failed state, Donald Trump’s threats against the country have become increasingly disturbing. For days now, Trump has threatened to bomb key civilian infrastructure in Iran, from bridges to power plants. On April 5, in a terrifying screed, he wrote: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped in one, in Iran.” He went on to say, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
He doubled down on that threat the next day, when a reporter asked how his threatened strikes would not amount to a war crime. “They’re animals and we have to stop them,” he said. He also attempted to justify himself by suggesting that he was calling for Iranian liberation. “They want to hear bombs because they want to be free.”
Finally, on the morning of April 7, he issued his most chilling threat yet: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
These statements, from a man who directs the incomprehensibly lethal power of the U.S. military, should make the world stop. For me, personally, it does feel like the world has stopped: What do you do in the hours between the moment the president of the United States threatens to annihilate your homeland and the time he has vowed to conduct the actual act? Trump is holding an entire nation hostage. But, somehow, the rest of the world continues on. The markets chug along. Congress continues to be in recess, with dissent confined largely to social media posts. It is hard not to feel like we have failed some critical test of the bounds of our own humanity.
Now, as the entire world waits to see what kind of fate a single man will inflict upon an entire nation, we have entered new territory. As I type these words, most people with common sense are speculating whether Trump will use one of the United States’ 3,700 nuclear weapons on Iran. Let us not forget that Israel — the only actually nuclear-armed state in the region, the one that’s spent nearly three years now committing genocide against Palestinians and is currently wiping out entire villages in Lebanon — also has an estimated 90 nuclear weapons.
The nuclear threat is animating for its sheer terror, and for good reason. Some military experts have cast doubt on the U.S.’s ability to use a nuclear weapon against Iran. Other political pundits, meanwhile, suggest that this is a perfect example of Trump making a maximalist threat in order to seek a better negotiating position.
But to pretend that this is the limitation of the threat — that, if a nuclear weapon is not deployed, we have somehow won something crucial — is to miss the point. The U.S. and Israel have already inflicted mass death upon Iran in the form of conventional missiles. In terms of specifically nuclear threats, Iran’s nuclear power plant at Bushehr has come under repeated attack during this aggression. Mainstream U.S. media outlets have largely moved past the fact that Israel bombed fuel depots in Iran, causing oil to rain down from the skies — a chemical attack if there ever was one.
Trump’s threats to bomb power plants and bridges and civilian infrastructure more broadly are already terrifying enough as it is. And Trump’s language alone is monstrous. It is genocidal and should be treated as such; threatening genocide, legal experts are pointing out, is itself a war crime.
I’ve spent my entire adult life attempting to make sense of and document the violence inherent to the U.S. war machine. I do not ever, in any way, want to downplay the mass death it has wrought all over the world and in this very country long before Trump was in office. I think beginning to truly grapple with that toll is an urgent task that everyone in the U.S. needs to face head on right now.
That said, we cannot simply turn the page on the president of the United States repeatedly threatening another country with explicit calls for genocide. If there are no serious repercussions for these threats, if Trump and his administration stay in office after this, it will not only be a stain on our collective conscience that can never be removed, but also a terrifying indication of where U.S. use of force is headed.
The genocide in Gaza is proof of what happens when these kinds of threats and language are waved off. Israel’s own leaders made similar calls after October 7, referring to Palestinians as “human animals.” That language was cited in the preliminary International Court of Justice decision that ruled it is plausible that Israel is conducting genocide.
We should all be terrified that Trump is echoing this language. It is incumbent on all of us to put an end to this war, to refuse to normalize this, to hold every single person who has played a role in setting us down this path accountable. And still, even if Trump is successfully ousted, or at the very least reined in, we cannot simply breathe a sigh of relief and pretend things are ok.
On the first day of the war, we learned that the earliest reported casualties of U.S.-Israeli aggression were kids going to school, and eventually found they were killed while huddled together in a prayer room, their bodies hit with a U.S.-made and delivered missile. I wrote then that “we in the U.S. need to reckon with the fact that so much of our state wealth, capacity, and technology goes toward burying children in rubble.” We still need to do that, desperately.
We also need to address the dehumanization that persists in every single aspect of American life — from politics to culture to media — that has sent us down the path in which Trump can threaten to annihilate a civilization and we find ourselves with few answers about how to stop it. By calling for the death of a civilization, Trump is making the goal explicit. But decades of sanctions paved the way for his words. Politicians on both sides of the aisle who have and continue to frame Iran as a particular threat, even as a “cancer,” have made this possible. The media outlets that uncritically platform those racist tirades bear responsibility, too. Sadly, Iranians in the diaspora who insisted that their fellow country people were desperate for bombs — some of whom continue to call for further violence against their people — played a role here as well.
As Trump’s threats grew louder and uglier over the past several days, Iranians in the diaspora, and those who could still access the internet inside Iran, shared the stakes. I saw stories all over my social media feed about people sharing their pride in Iran. Among them is Ali Ghamsari, a renowned tar player and composer who has traveled around Iran, highlighting the country’s history, heritage, and diversity.
On April 6, as Trump’s deadline approached, Ghamsari began a sit-in outside of the Damavand plant that powers much of Tehran. “I can’t say I wish you were here with me since this is the site that has been threatened with attack, which I hope won’t happen,” Ghamsari said in a video from the plant. “I hope the sound of my tar can have an impact on peace and help keep the lights in the homes from going out.” Since he began his protest, other musicians, artists, and the general population have joined, posting up at the railways Israel has threatened and surrounding bridges and other key infrastructure Trump has threatened to obliterate.
Our culture, our heritage, our pride in resisting the boot of imperialism and injustice — this is what I associate with Iranian civilization, along with the people who have and will continue to pass these traditions along to younger generations. That civilization will live on, regardless of what Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu do this week or what any U.S. or Israeli leader does in the future.
Trump might be able to threaten a civilization with mass death. But there is an entire apparatus that makes those threats credible — from the whole spectrum of the U.S. political establishment constantly voting to fuel the war machine, to the international organizations that shaped international law to favor the powerful, to the media that downplay and obfuscate the viciousness of U.S. empire. A civilization that allows these threats to repeat unabated should question whether, somewhere along the way, it was the one that actually died.
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