“American carnage,” “Fire and fury,” “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters” — Donald Trump’s most memorable lines linger because of the novelty of their unadornment. They declare, in the starkest of terms, the gleeful embrace of violence that lies beneath his usual bluster. The message Trump posted to Truth Social on April 7, weeks into the US’s new war with Iran, was an ominous addition to the canon:
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!
The message announces violence at the broadest possible scale (“A whole civilization will die”) even as it half-heartedly disclaims responsibility (“I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”), as if Trump had not declared the war himself. It gestures to “the long and complex history of the World” and transparently evinces zero understanding thereof. It invokes Iranian popular will only to make clear its profound indifference to popular will of any kind, since what interest would “the Great People of Iran” have in bringing their whole civilization to an end? The post captures succinctly Trump’s tendency to cavalierly misread the very world order he seeks to dominate. If there were any justice to public art, the text would be inscribed in its entirety on the largest piece of marble and placed on the National Mall.
Throughout both of his terms, Trump has governed in line with Republican presidential politics, outré at the edges but not, fundamentally, at odds with the party’s cardinal priorities: climate change denialism, tax breaks for oligarchs, the shredding of an already weak welfare state. Even Trump’s much touted opposition to foreign wars was mostly rhetorical cover: It took less than two years for him to oversee more drone strikes than Obama did in eight full years in office.
But where Trump breaks the mold is in the way he has dispensed with the pieties of the American political-rhetorical tradition. War crimes and assassinations, once obscured or at least subsurface, are now advertised with flagrant pride. Threats of infernal retribution are interspersed with unpersuasive pep talks about how great the war is going. Every raving post is an attempt to alter the outcome of the conflict or the movements of the oil market. Trump seems to adhere to a speech-act theory of fascism: Although he has worked over the course of two terms to devalue language and hollow out meaning, he still believes in the power of statements to shape the world. It is precisely this belief in language as force — its wielding as a crude instrument — that guarantees the hollowing.
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