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It’s not uncommon in the Trump era to hear someone say that it feels as if we’re living in a twisted simulation, or a video game, or a dystopian novel that hits readers over the head with a cautionary plot. The mind instinctively reaches for examples of fictionalized worlds because the reality of our circumstances has now extended well beyond the limits of what we reasonably thought could transpire.
I was overwhelmed by that sensation on Tuesday morning, upon reading a Truth Social post the president issued around 8. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote of Iran. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
In the vacuum created by last month’s assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei and other top Iranian officials, Trump continued, “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight.”
It is not a surprise to see this particular president gleefully taunting Iranians with the untold death and destruction he is about to inflict on them. He has never betrayed the slightest hint of a conscience, nor has he ever suggested that he might approach the job of commander in chief with any degree of solemnity, diligence, or moral duty. But the post still summons an air of surreality. Americans who came of age before 2015 are accustomed to seeing our presidents cloak their bellicose ambitions in meticulous (if absurd) legal arguments and grave, measured tones. Now we are witnessing a president so sure of his impunity and so delirious on the fumes of his own power that he would not only openly admit to his genocidal aims but also post them to a social media platform for maximum hype.
Americans are now left to swallow the fact that our national security, the country’s basic functions, and much of the fate of the rest of the world are clutched in this man’s fist like a wad of Silly Putty. Trying to internalize that reality feels so eerie that it cannot be described in terms of relative presidential competence or incompetence. Trump is not simply the most dangerous president America has elected in the nuclear era, if not ever. He is something terrifyingly new.
So, yet again, the brain resorts to analogies to explain our bizarre situation. Trump is speaking the language of an abuser preemptively absolving himself of the harm he is about to perpetrate: “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” He is a game show host teasing the results of an upcoming episode: “WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight.” The ultimate decisionmaker with the power to leave our nuclear weapons snug in their missile silos or take them out for a joyride, Trump is denying responsibility for his actions with a wink and a shrug. By making a mockery of human carnage, he is also eroding the capacity for outrage among all of us who witness it. Whether we can sense it yet or not, Trump is expanding the boundaries of what we expect from presidential leadership.
Wiping out a “whole civilization” constitutes genocide. Bombing civilian targets like bridges and electric power plants, as Trump threatened to do in a Truth Social post on Sunday, is a war crime. Telling Iranians to “open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell”—yet another weekend missive from our social media–addicted president—reaches a level of deranged cruelty nearly unparalleled among heads of state in modern history. As Slate’s Fred Kaplan wrote yesterday, “Few if any of even Kim Jong-un’s looniest tirades match these posts for their wild-eyed savagery.”
What words can we use to help us grasp what is happening here? Trump and his acolytes, in the words of Canadian writer Stephen Marche, have “taken the logic of rape as a primary modus operandi,” forcing devastation upon the world—against the will of most Americans—to prove the magnitude of their power and the futility of resistance or reason in the face of it. Trump is a “mad king,” a psychopath, a poor man’s Nero or Caligula. He is Attila the Hun, a schoolyard bully, a nihilist holding a video game controller. Unfortunately for all of us, he is also the U.S. president.
