President Donald Trump had an opportunity on Tuesday morning to dial back his apocalyptic threat to wipe out a “whole civilization” if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz — but instead, he doubled down.
“8 p.m. is happening,” Trump told Fox News anchor Bret Baier, who recounted his conversation with the president. Baier said negotiations could change the course, but otherwise Iran will endure an attack like it’s never before seen.
Even after a decade of Trump’s incendiary rhetoric — and just two days after he warned Iran to “Open the F–kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell” — his Truth Social post Tuesday was striking in its bleak yet perfunctory tone: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Alongside the potentially catastrophic nature of the threat is a countdown clock that turns a global crisis into appointment viewing, the latest example of the president’s reality TV approach to leadership — taken to a grim extreme. Trump followed up his Sunday threat to bomb bridges and power plants — attacks on civilian infrastructure that could be considered war crimes— with a separate post announcing, “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!”
As Bulwark managing editor Sam Stein noted, “When you’re getting [a] breaking news alert that the president is threatening to end a civilization tonight (tune in, tonight to see if he follows through!) you’re really through the looking glass.”
Trump’s grave warning to a country of more than 90 million quickly raised alarms on social media and cable news, as Democratic lawmakers and a wide array of political commentators, including former allies like Marjorie Taylor Greene, condemned the threat, with some calling for Trump to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment. Host Piers Morgan said Trump’s threat was “madness” and a “pre-admission of genocide.”
The ultimatum made for strange political bedfellows: Figures on the right like Alex Jones said Trump “sounds like an unhinged super villain,” while “Pod Save America” co-host and former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau framed the threat as “genocidal language from a deranged person who should be removed from office.” Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries called on Congress to return from its break to “end this reckless war of choice in Iran before Donald Trump plunges us into World War III.”
Trump has pushed global crises to extremes, only to extend deadlines or pull back. (He’s been mocked before with the acronym TACO, or “Trump always chickens out,” which happened so consistently the term evolved out of a Wall Street trading strategy). Some commentators on Tuesday suggested the threat was characteristically Trumpian bluster, a hardball negotiating tactic to push Iran toward a deal. Still, news outlets can’t ignore a president making an unprecedented threat, and journalists and anchors framed the threat in stark terms.
On MS NOW, “Morning Joe” co-host Jonathan Lemire said Trump may be bluffing, “but even just issuing that threat from the Oval Office is a remarkable escalation, and something we have never before seen from any president of the United States.”
“This is the rhetoric we associate with people like Vladimir Putin, with people like Kim Jong Un, with the monsters of history, and yet we have heard it now from the sitting president,” Lemire said. The New York Times’s Peter Baker said Trump was “using the language of war crimes in a way that no other American president, certainly in our lifetime, ever has.”
The administration’s messaging throughout the five-plus-week war has been anything but conventional, starting with Trump announcing in late February the U.S. and Israeli strikes in a Truth Social video from Mar-a-Lago at 2:30 a.m. ET.
Trump has spoken by phone to dozens of journalists, at times offering differing rationales for the military operation, while on Monday he threatened to jail a journalist over an alleged leak (without specifying who or what media company). Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken opportunity to bash the media at news briefings, though the Pentagon also went for a stretch of more than 10 days without holding one.
But on Tuesday, the line of questioning on cable news reached uncharted territory. While debates over military conflict have played out for decades on television, CNN anchor John Berman’s question to Republican Congressman Mike Lawler was without precedent: “If there is no deal by eight o’clock tonight, do you support making a whole civilization die?” Lawler said he didn’t, while broadly expressing support for the administration’s war in Iran.
Another CNN veteran, Christiane Amanpour, wrote on X that “never in all my years” of reporting on “America at war have I heard anything like this: an American president threatens to destroy a ‘whole civilization’ and says it’ll take 100 years to rebuild.”
“The fate of tens of millions of humans, right now on a knife’s edge, because if nothing changes in the next four hours, and Donald Trump follows through on the things he said out loud, his public threat, we may all soon be witness to a military assault so generationally and intentionally brutal that war crimes are not just possible, but they become U.S. policy,” MS Now host Nicolle Wallace said at the start of her 4 p.m. ET program.
“But that is only if you take Donald Trump at his word,” she said. “It’s risky.”
Some pundits dismissed the coverage as overheated, insisting that Trump is playing hardball with Iran.
“Donald Trump has been a national politician for a decade. Anyone still reacting to the guy’s negotiating tactics and hyperbole with this sort of hysteria ten years in should be disqualified from political commentary,” wrote Jeremy Boreing, a conservative host and co-founder of The Daily Wire. “If he nukes Tehran at 8pm, I’ll admit I’m the crazy one.”
Let’s hope Boreing is right. And a deal or delay could still come. But for now, the world will left be tuning in at 8 p.m. ET to see whether the threat becomes reality — or if the president once again ignites a media frenzy, only to pull back from the brink.
