President Donald Trump threatened in a Truth Social post Tuesday that “a whole civilization will die tonight” as the deadline nears for an agreement on a ceasefire in the war with Iran.
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The message is his most extreme public rhetoric to date against the country and comes less than 12 hours before he says the United States will launch attacks on Iran’s infrastructure over Tehran’s continued disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump said in the post. “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?” Trump wrote, referring to the killings of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other leaders, although it’s unclear what the full impact of their deaths has been on Iran’s government.
“We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World,” Trump continued. “47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
In recent days, the president has made a series of escalatory threats against Tehran, threatening to bomb the country into the “the Stone Ages,” and calling the Iranian government “crazy bastards” while demanding it open up the key shipping route.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what the president meant by his latest threat, and whether “whole civilization” signified that the U.S. would target civilian areas.
After extending the deadline multiple times for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping route that about a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas usually passes through, the president announced 8 p.m. ET Tuesday as the final deadline for Iran to come to a deal.
In a post Sunday, Trump threatened Iran’s power plants and bridges Tuesday if Iran did not reopen the strait, using expletives and invoking Islam.
The president repeated threats against the country’s infrastructure during a Monday news conference, telling reporters that the U.S. has a plan “where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business — burning, exploding and never to be used again.”
International law experts and critics of the president have pointed to Trump’s threats against things like power stations as potential war crimes if carried out.
Trump is “openly threatening” to carry out a war crime by vowing to target a “whole civilization” if Iran does not agree to a ceasefire deal and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by his deadline, human rights expert Kenneth Roth said.
“Trump is openly threatening collective punishment, targeting not the Iranian military but the Iranian people,” Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, told NBC News, noting that collective punishment of civilians during armed conflict is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
“Attacking civilians is a war crime. So is making threats with the aim of terrorizing the civilian population,” he said, explaining that threatening to carry out a war crime is potentially a war crime itself under international humanitarian law.
Several Democratic senators quickly criticized Trump’s post on Tuesday as “completely unstable” and “unhinged.”
“This is an extremely sick person,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a post on X. “Each Republican who refuses to join us in voting against this wanton war of choice owns every consequence of whatever the hell this is.”
Other Democrats, including Sen. Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, of Michigan, called for the president’s impeachment or removal from office.
Across the aisle, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump ally-turned-critic, also called for Trump to be removed through the 25th Amendment.
“25TH AMENDMENT!!!” the Georgia Republican posted on X. “Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”
The 25th Amendment lays out the presidential succession plan, as well as a process for the president to be removed from office by the vice president and members of his Cabinet, potentially with the involvement of Congress, if the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
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