During his remarks in Budapest, Vice President J.D. Vance, who is trying prop up Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as he runs for reelection, appeared to think the unthinkable. Vance, who has been a hero for MAGA anti-interventionists, went all-in on attacking Iran. He indicated that America might resort to “tools” in its arsenal that “we so far haven’t decided to use.” Now the White House is denying that it plans to deploy nuclear weapons against Iran, after frenzied social media speculation that it might. Negotiations with Tehran are ongoing – and Trump told Fox’s Bret Baier that “if negotiations move forward today, and there is something concrete” that tonight’s 8 p.m. deadline “could change.”
As Iran’s refusal to capitulate has exerted a maddening effect upon President Trump, speculation is mounting that he might profit from visiting what P.G. Wodehouse called the loony doctor. Trump’s brisk message this morning that he wouldn’t hesitate to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” raised more than a few eyebrows among MAGA elites. Once upon a time Trump referred to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man.” Now he seemed intent on claiming the title for himself.
The blowback has been instantaneous. “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Alex Jones inquired in talking with Robert Barnes. “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness,” former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X. Tucker Carlson, fresh from decrying Trump as the Antichrist, weighed in today to suggest that American officials should resist Trump’s orders to launch mass attacks upon Iranian civilians.
The apprehension that Trump might literally go nuclear is becoming increasingly widespread. In the American Conservative, for example, Andrew Day concluded that Trump might welcome the opportunity to become the first president since Harry Truman to drop the big one: “Trump appears to be trapped, and I fear he thinks a mushroom cloud would offer him enough cover to get out.”
Senator Ron Johnson stated, “I am hoping and praying that President Trump is, that this really is bluster… We are not at war with the Iranian people. We are trying to liberate them.”
Apart from the sheer immorality of mooting the possibility of wiping out an entire civilization – genocide, in other words – Trump’s remarks are eroding the barrier for America’s adversaries to resort to nuclear brinkmanship. Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously flirted with the nuclear threat against Ukraine, but was warned by President Joe Biden in September 2022 that he would face unpalatable consequences should the Kremlin deploy a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield. Putin retreated. And now?
Both China and North Korea have their own reasons to brandish nuclear weapons as a negotiating tool. The rush will be on in Japan and South Korea to procure nukes for themselves. The notion, floated in the past by some so-called foreign policy realists, that the more nukes the merrier – supposedly nuclear deterrence would be enhanced between nations – does not hold water. At some point the temptation to use them would become well-nigh irresistible.
Trump himself has always made it clear that he regards the nuclear taboo as something of a fetish. “Three times he asked at one point, if we had them, why can’t we use them,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough reported in 2016. Here’s hoping that Trump’s musings about destroying Iran remain just that.
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