Today in Politics, Bulletin 344. 4/7/26

… Trump threatened to wipe out the 7,000 year old Iranian/Persian civilization tonight after 8:00 PM if they don’t surrender to his demands. He vowed to commit the war crimes in a Truth Social post:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. 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? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

… Former Rep. Marge Greene: “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”

… Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI): I’m getting a lot of traffic about the 25th Amendment after Trump’s mad rants. The president is facing serious mental decline; I’m with you on that. But unfortunately, invoking the 25th is not realistic right now, given his oddball cabinet of sycophants and eccentrics, and Republican spines of foam. We’re going to have to buckle down and win this the old-fashioned way.”

… Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA): “This is pure evil. The President of the US’ genocidal threat to commit war crimes is illegal under federal and international law. The US military swears an oath to the Constitution, not the president. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is required to disobey any and all illegal orders. Speaker Johnson must immediately call Congress back to Washington and rein in this mad president.”

… Right-wing podcaster and long time Trump supporter Alex Jones: “WAR CRIME ALERT!! The definition of genocide is destroying an entire civilization/people! Trump literally sounds like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie. This IS NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR!!!”

… Fox host Bret Baier: “I just got off the phone with the president. He called. He said ‘8pm is happening. If we get to that point, there is going to be an attack like they have not seen.’ He’s sticking to that at this point.”

… NYT: “Iran has stopped negotiation efforts with the US, informing Pakistan that it would no longer engage in cease-fire talks.”

… Military.com: “Airstrikes pounded Tehran on Tues, and Iranian officials urged young people to form human chains to protect power plants, hours before the expiration of Trump’s latest deadline for the Islamic Republic to reopen the crucial Strait of Hormuz or face punishing strikes on its infrastructure. Iran called on ‘all young people, athletes, artists, students and university students and their professors’ to form human chains around power plants.”

… Alireza Rahimi, secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Youth and Adolescents: “Power plants are our national assets and capital.” Iranians have formed human chains in the past around nuclear sites at times of heightened tensions with the West.

… “President Masoud Pezeshkian posted on X that 14 million Iranians had answered state media and text message campaigns urging people to volunteer to fight. ‘I too have been, am, and will remain ready to give my life for Iran,’ Pezeshkian wrote. A Revolutionary Guard general also urged parents to send their children to man checkpoints, which have been repeatedly targeted in airstrikes.”

… Iran News 24: “The Iranian regime has dispatched its supporters to form human chains/shields outside key infrastructure facilities across Iran to prevent their bombardment, including outside the Kazerun Power Plant in Fars province, southern Iran. It’s not that they believe the US or Israel will spare them - Iranians know what Israel did to children in Gaza. They are standing there to show the world the true face of America.”

… Senior Iranian official to Reuters: “If Washington attacks Iran’s power plants, the entire region and Saudi Arabia will fall into complete darkness with Iran’s retaliatory strikes.”

… Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) on CNN: Q - “The president is threatening a whole civilization will die tonight. Lawler: I don’t think we’re talking about ending a civilization. Q - So you don’t believe the president’s threat? Lawler: It is their energy infrastructure and civilian infrastructure. Host: He says ‘never to be brought back again’.”

… Lawler: “He is not bluffing. People misunderestimate at their own peril.”

… Host: “Do you think Congress should have a vote if the US is going to make a whole civilization die? Lawler: You are parsing here. Host: I was quoting.”

… National security analyst Marc Polymeropoulos: “I just watched Lawler on CNN try to explain this away, the usual ‘Trump meant to say x, y, and z,’ and I actually felt sorry for him. For about a second. Then it was just pathetic. One cannot defend the indefensible.”

… Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX) on Fox: “Thank God we have a commander in chief that is not full of empty rhetoric, because we’ve delayed this inevitability for 50 years. Trump is a man with a bias for action. Thank God for President Trump and the courage and political will to do what he’s doing.”

… Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on CNN: “I am hoping and praying that this really is bluster. I do not want to see us start blowing up civilian infrastructure. I do not want to see that. We are not at war with the Iranian people. We are trying to liberate them.”

… Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL) on Fox: “I support what the president is doing. Iran is like a cancer. Sometimes the cure to cancer hurts, but the cancer has to be eliminated. And the cancer is Iran.”

… Tucker Carlson: “If you work in the WH or in the US military, now is the time to say no. Absolutely not. Using weapons of mass destruction against civilian targets? Those people in direct contact with the president need to say no, I will resign. I will do whatever I can do to stop this because this is insane, and if given the order I’m not carrying it out.”

… Trump was asked about Tucker’s comments by the NY Post: “Tucker’s a low IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on. He calls me all the time; I don’t respond to his calls. I don’t deal with him. I like dealing with smart people, not fools.”

… NYT: “Netanyahu arrived at the WH on Feb. 11. The Israeli leader, who had been pressing for months for the US to agree to a major assault on Iran, was whisked inside with little ceremony, out of view of reporters, primed for one of the most high-stakes moments in his long career. Netanyahu headed downstairs for the main event: a highly classified presentation on Iran for Trump and his team in the Situation Room, which was rarely used for in-person meetings with foreign leaders.”

… “The presentation that Netanyahu would make over the next hour would be pivotal in setting the US and Israel on the path toward a major armed conflict in the middle of one of the world’s most volatile regions. The reporting underscores how closely Trump’s hawkish thinking aligned with Netanyahu’s over many months, more so than even some of the president’s key advisers recognized.

… “Their close association has been an enduring feature across two admin, and that dynamic has fueled intense criticism and suspicion on both the left and the right of American politics. Even the more skeptical members of Trump’s war cabinet - with the stark exception of Vance, the figure inside the WH most opposed to a full-scale war - deferred to the president’s instincts, including his abundant confidence that the war would be quick and decisive.”

… WSJ: “Crowning a year of disputes with the Trump admin over trade tariffs, support for Ukraine and the future of Greenland, the Iran war has placed America’s friends in Europe, Asia and the Middle East in front of an uneasy dilemma. Their most important ally is acting in ways that they see as erratic and that have already caused hardship and uncertainty. The war has sapped their economies and even bigger shocks loom if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, deepening the worldwide energy crisis.”

… “Many - on both sides of the Atlantic - wonder if they are even allies anymore. Angered by the refusal of European nations to join the war alongside the US and Israel, Trump has called European countries cowards, and threatened to withdraw from NATO.

… Roderich Kiesewetter, a lawmaker from Germany’s ruling party, echoing a widespread sentiment in Europe: “The US is unpredictable. It’s not a reliable partner anymore for the Western world.”

… Italian Senator Carlo Calenda: “Nobody can understand what America actually is today. It seems governed by some kind of mad emperor who keeps saying whatever comes to his mind, something we haven’t witnessed since Caligula or Nero. The one thing the Europeans have understood is that we are dealing with a bully. You can give him everything he wants, you can pretend you don’t hear his insults, but he will keep trying to bully us, and so at a certain point we must stop him.”

… WSJ’s Yaroslav Trofimov: “Trump’s claim on Greenland - reiterated Monday - means that the transatlantic relationship will never be the same again, something we already see with the European refusal to get involved in the war on Iran.”

… Retired French Lt. Gen. Michel Yakovleff: “This will never be forgotten. Psychologically, Trump talking about taking Greenland was the equivalent of a father talking, jokingly, of raping one of his daughters. Obviously, it’s a new world in the family after that.”

Reminder there is no Bulletin tomorrow because I do my weekly podcast Uncovered. We will either be talking about another appearance by TACO Trump or War Crimes Trump. Along with many other things.

Also we just bought a house today that was built in 1785 and beautifully restored, so things to do on the closing. Not many people live in a house that is older than the country it is in, and we are pretty excited to continue to preserve it for many years as well as the previous owners did.

If you missed yesterday’s Bulletin, you can find it here. Thank you to everyone who reads, shares and subscribes to my work as well as the other contributors at Meidas.

… JD Vance was in Budapest today campaigning for Viktor Orban just 5 days before his big election against Peter Magyar:

• “I want to thank the President of the US who of course is a dear friend of PM Orban and a very strident supporter of Orban, because together the president and PM have been able to do amazing things. And we’re here to celebrate them.”

• “I’m here because of the moral cooperation between our countries. Because what the US and Hungary together represent under Viktor’s leadership and under Trump’s leadership is the defense of western civilization.”

… Garry Kasparov: “Here he’s not wrong. Orban and the Trump admin are united and cooperating in profound moral, political and criminal corruption, with Putin as their