Opinion | The Moral Cost of Trump’s War

At 8:03 a.m. on Easter Sunday, Trump posted this to Truth Social: “Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day all wrapped up in one in Iran. There’ll be nothing like it. Open the [expletive] strait, you crazy bastards. You’ll be living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to allah. President Donald J. Trump.” That is even crazier when you read it aloud. But Trump followed it up with another post on Tuesday that began: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” It didn’t happen. Trump backed down, agreeing to a two-week cease-fire with Iran. Then on Wednesday, he wrote: “The United States will work closely with Iran, which we have determined has gone through what will be a very productive regime change.” Trump has oscillated in the course of days, even hours, from threatening an apparent genocide to then excitedly musing about partnering with Iran to charge tolls to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz and giving them relief from sanctions and tariffs. This is not the art of the deal. This is behavior that should trigger a wellness check. And, look, maybe you’d expect a liberal like me to say that. But listen to some of the Trumpier voices, or at least traditionally Trumpier voices, on the right. Here’s Tucker Carlson: “It is vile on every level. It begins with a promise to use the U.S. military, our military, to destroy civilian infrastructure in another country, which is to say, to commit a war crime, a moral crime, against the people of the country. Whose welfare, by the way, was one of the reasons we supposedly went into this war in the first place.” Look, I don’t agree with Carlson on all that much. I do appreciate the register he found there. Because he’s right about what that was: a moral crime. To even conceive of erasing Iranian civilization, much less threaten it in public, it is a horrific act on its own. Just imagine being an Iranian parent that night, unsure if you could protect your child. Imagine being an Iranian living here, worried about your family back home. What Carlson correctly centered is something Trump forgot or didn’t care about as soon as it was convenient. Iranians are human beings. To annihilate them to salvage a war you started is a crime against humanity. It is the act of a war criminal. It is the act of a monster. And I know there are those who say this is all just a negotiation. This was Trump pressuring Iran to fold. There are two problems with that. The first is that Iran didn’t fold. We did. Trump appears ready to accept a level of Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz that would have been unimaginable two months ago. You have now JD Vance saying that Iran might not even give up its right to nuclear enrichment. This is what it looks like when you lose a war, not when you win one. The second is that this is an immoral way and a dangerous way even to negotiate because what it does is it commits you to war crimes if your bid is rejected. Megyn Kelly said this well. “This is completely irresponsible and disgusting. This is wrong. It’s wrong. He should not be doing it. I don’t care that it’s a negotiation. His negotiation tactic is to kill an entire country full of civilians, men, women and children? An American president? So that the Strait of Hormuz will be opened? It’s just wrong.” A list of the Trumpy or formerly Trumpy figures who just seem appalled here could go on. You had Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for the 25th Amendment and Trump’s removal from office. She said what Trump was doing was “evil and madness.” You had Alex Jones agreeing with her. “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” You had Candace Owens calling Trump a “genocidal lunatic.” I am glad and relieved that Tuesday night brought a cease-fire rather than a war crime. The Iranian people have suffered plenty. They do not deserve to be buried in rubble to salvage Trump’s pride. But I am not sure that what Trump said was wrong, exactly. I am worried a civilization died that night, or at least is dying. But it’s our civilization. It is very hard to see Donald Trump. Listen to him. Watch him and not think that this grand experiment in self-governance is falling into ruin, in just the way the founders feared. We’ve entrusted tremendous power to a self-dealing narcissist and demagogue who’s becoming more dangerous and erratic as he ages and as his presidency fails. What we saw over the last week was how dangerous Trump becomes when he feels himself losing, when he feels the control is slipping from his grasp. Donald Trump is a 79-year-old man in uncertain health in the final years of his presidency. He is hideously unpopular even now. His party is very likely going to lose midterm elections, and then he and his family and associates will face a raft of investigations. How much Gulf money has made its way into Trump family pockets? Who has bought all that crypto from them? What kind of deals got made with the Trump family before countries saw their tariffs knocked down? The next few years will for him carry the potential of terrible loss. And so I don’t think this is the last time Trump is going to endanger a country in a desperate gamble to avoid the consequences of his own failures. But that country oftentimes is going to be our own.