Trump’s threat means the world’s future may lie in the hands of career military officers.
I have no crystal ball, and I’m not a betting person. But my fear, with less than four hours ticking on Trump’s own doomsday clock, is that at a minimum, the US military will take out all bridges, power plants and desalination plants in Iran. We’ve already begun bombing today, as has Israel.
I see a man inextricably trapped, perhaps for the first time in his life.
Backed into a corner of his own making with no way out but “I’ll show them.”
Continuing to lie with abandon (“Complete and Total Regime Change”).
Invoking God as he promises hell on earth, directly contrary to the words of the Bible and the words of the military’s own conservative archbishop.
Who knew that “The Art of the Deal” was a myth, the story of a silk purse being made from a sow’s ear?
Trump’s entire identity is centered on WINNING. Hence his fixation on the 2020 election results. His ego is centered on never backing down unless the opponent creates a way out (think Greenland and Denmark). Iran is also backed into a corner, and its leadership is crazier than Trump. They think nothing of murdering their own people. They have called on civilians to circle power plants as though that would stop Trump from acting on his words.
Trump has repeatedly stated that he doesn’t want to or plan to use nuclear weapons. My deepest fear is that those words are hollow, because what else could achieve the goal of an entire civilization dying in a single night?
This cabinet, selected for their loyalty to Trump, will never invoke the 25th Amendment. Vice President Vance is stoking the flames today. Congress, which could have stopped this mess several times over, is not in session. Republican leaders? Crickets, except for MTG.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (“take no quarter”) has systematically purged top level leaders from various branches of the military, effectively nullifying pushback from military leaders. He just fired the Army Chief of Staff and replaced him with a Hegseth assistant. Hegseth also irreverently invoked Jesus in his comments about the pilot rescued on Sunday.
Hegseth’s actions throw water on the hope that there are senior officers who can slow walk or limit orders. As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic, who has far more experience in this field than I, writes:
Whether the president is saying this with full control of his faculties or has well and truly lost his mind is irrelevant: He is still the president, and so we must consider the meaning of this policy… Should Trump persist in his threatened course of action, then only a mass resignation of senior officers would stand between the president and a campaign of genocide. By this, I do not mean a mutiny or coup. The answer to Trump’s lawlessness is not more lawlessness. But American officers have a positive duty to refuse illegal orders, and the destruction of an entire civilization with nuclear weapons—which poses no similar threat to the United States—is as illegal as it gets.
Thus we pin our hopes on career military officers in the event that Trump goes through on his promise at 8 pm Eastern today, 07 April 2026. It’s a day that I hope does not live in infamy.
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