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Whatever Trump does tonight is an unmitigated disaster for the GOP
We surely can’t diminish the clear threat of nuclear destruction that Trump has made, posting this morning that a “whole civilization will be wiped out tonight” if Iran doesn’t accept his “deal.” This followed his deranged 1.5 hour press conference yesterday that showed how much of a lunatic he’s become, ending with “We want Greenland.”
Trump is threatening to kill millions of civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, engaging in blatant, pre-announced war crimes. And J.D. Vance backed up on a trip to Hungary this morning, stumping for the authoritarian Victor Orbán, who is embattled, facing a tough election next week (and is getting both Vladimir Putin’s and Trump’s endorsements, which tells you everything you need to know).
“We’ve got tools in our tool kit we haven’t used,” Vance said, demanding the Iranians bow to Trump’s wishes or else.
Iran’s response, according to Reuters, was to close all diplomatic and indirect channels of communication with the U.S.
If that’s true, Trump’s threat clearly didn’t have the desired effect.
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Upgrade to paidAs you read this, he is either planning to actually engage in a scorched-earth military operation that could end in mass death. Or he’s bluffing again—it would be the third time—and will soon announce some sort of “breakthrough” in the supposed negotiations and say he is giving Iran more time.
But, even as we can’t rule out that Trump will engage in unspeakable war crimes and perhaps even use nuclear weapons—and we surely don’t want to see anything like that happening—whatever Trump does is an unmitigated disaster for him and the GOP.
Surely if Trump follows through with his threat, the entire world would be enveloped, the entire region of the Middle East catastrophically so. There aren’t enough conventional weapons on hand for Trump to “wipe out” an entire civilization within hours. But even if there were, Iran has threatened to destroy bridges, desalination plants, and infrastructure all through the Gulf states. And if Trump used nuclear weapons, well, it goes without saying that the Gulf allies would face horrific ramifications as well.
The blowback politically would be astounding for the GOP. The wiping out of entire cities, peoples, and countries—all for oil—and the escalation of war that MAGA voters are already opposed to. Gas prices would surge out of control, too—to prices we’ve probably never seen before.
If Trump backs down, however, and claims a big “win” with a “deal” (however real it is) it will likely be one that keeps Iran’s regime in tact and brings things back to the status quo, with the Strait of Hormuz open, but still threatened by Iran at any time. The entire operation will be seen as having thrown the economy into chaos for nothing. Gas prices will only continue to go up as the fallout continues. Moody’s Analytics predicts gas prices will not ever recover, certainly not this year, or next, and will stay at the current prices or rise, into next year and beyond. The price of everything else will go up too.
Trump has caused a disaster for himself and Republicans, and he keeps looking for a way he can “win”—to the point now of threatening civilizational destruction. We can only hope that he sees that this would be an even bigger loss for him—he doesn’t care about the people killed, so hoping on that one is useless—and accepts the smaller loss, even though it’s still a bleak picture for him and the GOP.
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Trump's new blunder just plunged US into decades of war
“A whole civilization will die tonight.” Is this something Jesus would have said?
At a White House Easter event last week, Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White-Cain, compared him to Jesus Christ, invoking betrayal, false accusations and even a kind of political “resurrection.” The remarks were blasphemous. So was Trump’s own doomsday threat to bomb Iran back to the “Stone Age.”
Trump is openly contemplating devastation so complete it would erase the basic infrastructure of an entire nation — its power, its bridges, its ability to function. His threat would cause immeasurable suffering and death, amounting to the destruction of a civilization.
This is where we are now. We are threatening civilizational collapse as if annihilation were just another Truth Social post from the “Jesus-in-Chief.” While Trump exalts in destruction, many conservative Christians remain conspicuously silent, seeking instead to view the war as a “holy” one.
For decades, the United States has defined itself in opposition to regimes like Iran’s, governments where religion and power are fused, where clerics hold ultimate authority, where divine law justifies repression.
Since 1979, Iran has operated under a system in which the Supreme Leader is both political authority and religious figure, claiming legitimacy that flows from God as much as from the state. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has built an identity around martyrdom and sacred duty.
Fighters are taught that death in service to the Republic is not just honorable, but holy — sound familiar? A gateway to eternal reward. Dissenters are cast as enemies of God. Protest becomes heresy. Opposition becomes sin.
This is what we in the United States have long called fanaticism. It is what we have historically opposed.
And yet, as this war escalates, the language coming out of Washington is beginning to echo it.
Start with the effort to cast political leadership in explicitly religious terms. Influential figures within Trump’s orbit have compared his struggles to the suffering of Jesus Christ, not as a metaphor, but as a narrative of persecution and vindication.
I guess they forget that Trump was born in wealth, never suffered for anything, has a history of not sharing that wealth, for example the defunct Trump Foundation, and using that wealth to discriminate against Black people.
Then there is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has described military operations in overtly biblical terms, turning real-world events into spiritual analogies. A downed American airman becomes “reborn,” his ordeal wrapped around Easter Sunday, his rescue framed as a miracle.
Hegseth invokes Jesus while speaking in the language of lethality, creating a dangerous fusion of faith and militarism. It’s an un-Godly version of Christianity that promotes power rather than humility — something Hegseth has none of.
Further, U.S. service members have alleged that commanders are casting the war with Iran as a divine “end-times” mission, presenting the conflict as part of a biblical prophecy and even suggesting Trump is “anointed” to carry it out.
In Hegseth’s official briefings about the war, he routinely invokes “divine help.” Calls for “overwhelming violence” are delivered in the name of Jesus Christ. Telling listeners to get down on “bended knee.”
For years, American officials pointed to this exact mindset within Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as evidence of extremism, and the belief that war is divinely ordained, that enemies are theological, that death carries sacred meaning.
That used to be called radicalization. Now the United States sounds like a religious fundamentalist government.
This is no longer a conflict between a secular democracy and a religious theocracy. It is more volatile, two sides invoking God, each claiming righteousness, each convinced that heaven is on their side.
To bottom-line it, it’s Jesus versus Allah. Victory for the righteous or annihilation for the heathens.
Which brings us back to Trump’s threat and the destruction of a “whole civilization.” Not a military target or a regime palace, but a civilization.
International leaders have warned that targeting civilian infrastructure on that scale would be a war crime. But in a conflict all about religious certainty, such warnings are dismissed as atheist.
History shows religious wars do not end well, if they end. They harden and expand. They become generational. From the Crusades to modern sectarian conflicts, once God is invoked to justify violence, the conflict becomes unbounded.
And once people are convinced God is on their side, it becomes nearly impossible to stop.
If we continue down this path, fusing military action in religious language, elevating leaders into instruments of divine purpose, framing war as sacred, then the line between “us” and “them” will disappear.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo XIV continued to speak out against the war. He tore apart the dangerous attempt to frame the war in Iran as a holy crusade of "Jesus vs. Allah," reminding the world that the Divine cannot be used to justify killing an “entire civilization.”
By declaring that "no one can use Jesus to justify war," the Pope stripped the conflict of its religiosity, exposing it instead as a failure of human diplomacy.
His chilling warning that God simply "does not listen to the prayers" of those whose hands are stained with the blood of combat, serves as a firm warning about weaponization of faith.
If we continue to invoke the name of Christ to justify the destruction of our adversaries, he said, we risk not only a global "irreparable abyss" but a profound spiritual bankruptcy where our prayers fall on deaf ears.
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