“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday morning. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
The president’s threat against Iran, issued on social media, hit like a rhetorical bomb, as his 8 p.m. EDT deadline was looming for a deal with the Iranian regime to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Trump appeared to back up his words with an overnight attack against Iran’s key oil hub, Kharg Island, as well as bridges across the country.
By 6:32 p.m. Tuesday, Mr. Trump had changed course, announcing a two-week suspension of attacks on Iran, negotiated with the help of Pakistan. Iran agreed to “safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz” for two weeks, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a statement. The United States and Iran are expected to hold peace talks Friday in Pakistan.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump has long regarded his reputation for unpredictability as an asset in negotiations. His threat to destroy Iran’s civilization marked a new level of intimidation, and ultimately a two-week pause in hostilities and the temporary opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Recent days have brought a level of brinkmanship unusual even for Mr. Trump. But the pattern is familiar: Threaten dramatic action, gaining leverage over the other side as leader of the most powerful country in the world, and then announce a deal or enough progress toward one to merit a delay. Mr. Trump used a similar playbook in the trade war he launched a year ago. But the stakes had never been higher than they were on Tuesday.
There had been questions about whether Mr. Trump’s strategy might be losing its effectiveness – or could escalate out of his control. With tariffs, he earned a reputation for ultimately backing off on his most severe threats, generating the “TACO” meme: “Trump Always Chickens Out.” The mockery had reportedly gotten under his skin and could have provided further impetus for the president to carry out his threat and act in dramatic fashion against Iran. But once again, he backed off.
At the least, the president had upped the rhetorical ante in a way that caused critics and even some supporters to react with genuine alarm.
“Wake up: he is calling for A NUCLEAR STRIKE,” wrote Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump critic who served briefly as communications director during the president’s first term, on X. “Seek his removal immediately.” Other noteworthy conservative Trump critics, including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, also suggested invoking the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove Mr. Trump from office.
Or, it could all have been a big bluff. Mr. Trump has long regarded his reputation for unpredictability as an asset in diplomacy. He might have even been encouraging speculation that he’s losing his mind, leaning into the “madman theory” of negotiation. That term was coined during President Richard Nixon’s tenure to describe his reported approach to the North Vietnamese as he sought their surrender during the Vietnam War. The concept: Convince your adversary that you’re irrational and could do anything, even go nuclear, in order to gain concessions.
Last year, amid the tariff wars, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it somewhat differently, saying that Mr. Trump likes to project “strategic ambiguity” in his words and actions. “Nobody’s better at creating this leverage,” Mr. Bessent said.
The Trump White House has been sending signals that Vice President JD Vance – a known skeptic of U.S. involvement in foreign wars – is available to jump in and help with the Iran negotiations.
“I hope they make the right response,” the vice president said on Tuesday, speaking of Iran. He was addressing an event in Budapest in support of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is facing a tough reelection fight.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has veered between regular claims that the United States has already “won” in Iran and that “productive” talks are underway, and dire threats of escalation. The contradictory pronouncements caused early swings in the markets; data show the oil market has settled into a substantially higher price than before the Feb. 28 start of the war.
Some presidential historians see Mr. Trump’s approach as less strategic than reactive. They also say the madman theory has never produced positive results.
“Trump really is a person who lives in the moment, who reacts to what he perceives as the opportunities or threats involved in the moment,” says Glenn Altschuler, an emeritus professor of American Studies at Cornell University. “That’s why you get a lot of inconsistencies.”
Under President Nixon, the madman theory in dealing with Vietnam didn’t bring an end to the war.
Today, it has even less potential to work than it did during the Cold War for three reasons, according to Andrew Latham, a political scientist at Macalester College. First, information flows more freely. Second, the U.S. faces a less stable adversary than the Soviet Union. And third, Mr. Trump, unlike Mr. Nixon, has not established an otherwise orderly American system that would make his threats credible.
“The madman pose only works if it is exceptional,” writes Professor Latham in The Conversation. Mr. Trump’s constant public statements, and the fierce public discussion they generate, can “devolve into noise,” he adds.
Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts suggested on Tuesday that the nation needs to “take a step back and recognize how dangerously desensitized we have become to Trump.”
“The President of the United States is casually threatening the death of an entire civilization on social media between promoting vanity projects,” Representative Moulton wrote on X. “This is not ‘tough talk’ or ‘the art of the deal.’ This is the rhetoric of a madman.”
Mr. Trump’s use of profanity in a social media post on Easter Sunday morning highlighted his ability to shock, underscoring his threat to Iran that it must open the Strait of Hormuz, or else. But it might have been counterproductive at home, generating an unusual amount of criticism from his Christian conservative base.
In a social media post on Monday, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said he was praying for the president and urged his followers to do the same.
“While his Sunday Truth Social post on Iran may be designed to transmit bravado toward the Iranian regime to bring the conflict to an end, the continuing decline in language and decorum of our leaders is very troubling and should not be acceptable,” wrote Mr. Perkins, a Trump supporter.
Editor’s note: This article was updated April 7, the date of initial publication, to reflect the news of a ceasefire.