A Note on Trump’s Threats

His plan to attack civilian infrastructure is a repulsive echo of horrors in America's past.

Many of us at Third Act got our introduction to politics protesting the war in Vietnam, and so we know an atrocity when we see one. What Donald Trump is threatening to do tomorrow in Iran—“reign hell” on civilian infrastructure—is as repulsive as it is illiterate. Let’s be clear: he is promising an industrial-scale My Lai massacre, one whose initial victims would be numbered in the thousands, and that would kill and impoverish far more as the implications of that destruction deepened. It will produce the same kind of stain on America’s reputation, and with good reason. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth started this war for no logical end, and they have fought it dishonorably, including with mocking references to Iran’s Islamic faith. It’s a dishonor they threaten to double down on tomorrow. We have no practical way to stop them, save calling on other groups and leaders to describe their plan in the starkest possible terms.