Today Donald Trump asked a seemingly rhetorical question to the UN General Assembly: Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic of Iran? Do I drive them into hell?
But if you’ve been watching Trump especially close lately, you should not categorize those as rhetorical.
Trump loves the word “hoax” — he used it multiple times in his long-winded UN speech — especially when something is true. There was the Russian “hoax” about the country’s interference in the 2016 election. It happened. He thinks climate change is a “hoax.” It’s not. The 2020 election results were a “hoax.” He lost fair and square.
And he has a word he reaches for when he's flailing or scaremongering: “obliterate.” He used it about attacks on Iran's nuclear sites last June, even as U.S. intelligence disputed the extent of the damage. In March, he used it to describe strikes on Iran's Kharg Island. And he has used the language of obliteration in response to reports that Iran had plans to assassinate him.
Bravado? Yes, but with Trump, who knows? Because he seems utterly incapable of understanding what is actually a hoax and comprehending the horror of obliteration.
Case in point. When researchers, and even company CEOs, have warned recently that AI technology represents a genuine existential risk to humanity, Trump’s impulsive answer should not have surprised anyone, particularly because AI titans have lathered him with love and loot.
He posted that the warning of omnicide was a “HOAX,” a “SICK conspiracy,” no more real than climate change, and declared that the only guardrail AI needs is “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” I guess he doesn’t see the irony that he is a hoax when it comes to a high-IQ president.
That's his obtuse response to people telling him the technology could end civilization: a shrug and an all-caps Truth Social post. He didn't say the risk was overstated, or that regulation was premature, or that innovation should take precedence, or anything that would have represented modulation.
It's wildly strange to watch someone treat the possible extinction of the species with less seriousness than when Politico writes a FAKE NEWS story about him.
Trump is almost inhuman in the fact that he doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand that serious problems require sustained attention because he has a severe lack of seriousness that equals his zero lack of attention.
He reaches for “hoax” and “fake” and “annihilation” and “obliterate” as ways to dismiss something he doesn’t want to deal with, would never deny, or doesn’t understand.
Which brings us to something that is not only serious, but requires undivided attention, and can’t be dismissed as a hoax because there is a real threat of annihilation.
Multiple intelligence assessments this month have raised alarms indicating that Vladimir Putin is preparing a major escalation in Ukraine in the coming months, betting that Western attention is scattered across Iran, the Red Sea, and his own domestic distractions. This threat, according to experts, will have global ramifications.
This is the proverbial canary in the coal mine for what Trump might do to Iran that makes his UN speech today less about bravado — and more about actually blowing the country to hell.
If that happens, Trump won't have the luxury of calling it a hoax. Ukraine is a war, not a hypothetical, and Putin escalating on a scale that hasn’t been seen will happen on Trump's watch. It’s not something he can simply wave off with a Truth Social post.
There are so many offshoots to what might happen if Putin, who has lost patience and support for the war, rains terror on Ukraine: Putin is not just another foreign leader to Trump. He is the man Trump has held up as his model of strength for a decade, or, as Trump stupidly puts it, “a very strong leader.”
Trump’s blanket thuggery, from the Kennedy Center to ICE agents to Jan. 6 insurrectionists, even prohibiting the press from the Oval Office, are all ways he measures his own toughness against Putin’s. Even if he doesn’t come out and say it.
I am hardly the first to point that out or to note that Trump yearns to govern like the thuggish Putin. The way Trump slobbered all over Putin in Alaska last year is the visual of his lust for Vladimir.
So what happens when the man you've spent years calling stronger than an American president (yes, Trump famously and stupidly said Putin was stronger than Obama) makes an enormously aggressive and destructive move?
Trump doesn't know how to calibrate a proportionate answer. He has never once, in any domain, responded to a challenge with something measured. He tore down the East Wing of the White House for a $400 million ballroom.
He's threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center over a naming dispute and has turned his planned 250-foot arch into what he's now calling a military installation stocked with drones and ammunition. He outright banned the media from the White House. To Trump, it’s just a matter of how extreme he reacts.
Now how will that extremism play with how he responds to Putin’s own extremism? The realistic range of Trump's response isn't “diplomatic pressure” or “targeted sanctions.” It's somewhere between complete disengagement and derangement.
So what should scare every American, and every human alive, is that he has every incentive, ego-wise, to match or top Putin rather than de-escalate the situation. And because Iran is now Trump’s version of Putin’s Ukraine, Trump may do the unthinkable, like Putin, because it’s the only way for him to disengage himself from an enormously unpopular war that has obliterated his support among voters.
Over the weekend, he told Fox News, again, that “wiping out” Iran is on the table. If Putin can wipe out Ukraine, why, he might think, can’t he wipe out Iran?
History shows that when a narcissistic, lunatical madman is cornered, and with no other way to escape, “obliteration” and “annihilation” and “wipe out” can become the only answers to save himself. And Trump would blow up the world to save himself.