CLOSE READ: Trump's genocidal intent

Analyzing one of the worst sentences an American president has ever spoken

This morning, President Trump published one of the worst sentences ever verbalized by an American head of state. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he posted. And from there the statement continued:

Even by Trump’s basement standards, it is an appalling, lawless, barbaric statement — launched by that chilling first sentence. But it is also a profoundly revealing text.

Start at the beginning. Trump has chosen the word “civilization.” Not regime, not government, not reign, not even country. A civilization. And not just “a civilization” but “a whole civilization,” every last shred of it. It is almost as if Trump heard critics of the Israeli and American-backed assault on Gaza, heard the charges of genocide, and decided to lean into that idea with Iran. It is as if he is striving to become what his critics have accused him of being.

The United Nations, in its account of the law of genocide, notes that it is a crime that is famously hard to prove. The missing element is very often intent. This, it says,

is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique.

But here Trump has eliminated the issue. In the future, intent will not be hard to prove — it will not even be as demanding as it was in Gaza — because Trump just posted it online, with the world as witness.

The second half of the sentence is important, too. We are told this civilization, to be buried by Trump, will never rise again. “Again,” we should note, is one of the most important words in the Trump dictionary (available online for $19.99 if you act now!). Trump’s entire politics is that of Again-ism. What was great can be restored. What was lost can be reclaimed. What was ours and now is shared can be made ours again. So to insist not only that a civilization will be genocided and removed from the living, but also that it will have no “agains,” is to transcend the longstanding and bipartisan hostility to this specific regime in Iran and to suggest that the problem is not simply this government, these ayatollahs, but all the blood of all these people in this place, that there is nothing in this civilization that is worthy of restoration, that there is no germ of value beneath the regime. In this story, Iran is no longer a great old civilization of the world hijacked by a bad regime. It is a culture rotten to the core. This is a dramatic departure in U.S. policy.

Now, in the second sentence, Trump pivots. First he is the genocidaire, proudly so. Now he is the abusive ex-husband at the door. He doesn’t want to hurt you, he really doesn’t, it’s really you who is bringing this upon yourself, he is not acting, he’s just reacting to you, you are the one doing this. He isn’t hurting Iran; Iran is hurting Iran.

From there he moves into total delusion. Having failed at his goal of regime change, by replacing an old ayatollah who was close to death’s door with his considerably younger son, Trump claims to have achieved “Complete and Total Regime Change.” So first he was the cold-blooded whole-people killer. Then he was the abusive ex insisting that Iran is bringing this on itself. And now he is the gaslighter-in-chief, telling us he has done the opposite of what he has done. In fact, he replaced one ayatollah with another who may have decades ahead to pursue a bottomless grudge.

Then: “We will find out tonight.” What he is doing — what he is actively committing — becomes passive. We’re going to find out! Let’s see. The president seems determined to make the United States true to an anti-imperialist shitposter’s most reductive idea of it: a republic founded on genocide threatening genocide unless you free up oil. However much truth may have lurked in phrases like the above, American presidents past have tried to disprove or conceal it. Trump is making this vision of America his foreign policy legacy: oil, or else genocide.

And there is the reality-TV element. The deadline is even in prime time. The man still knows how to make a show. It’s all he knows.

There is something potent in the closing swipe at 47 years of “extortion, corruption, and death,” because while he means the Iranian regime, he is of course the 47th president, and it won’t be lost on many that extortion, corruption, and death have been some of the hallmarks of this wannabe American ayatollah, among whose ambitions have been enabling the spread of religious nationalism, sending women back in time to an age of second-class status, and consolidating absolute control.

There is a ring of truth in there somewhere. Forty-seven will finally end. It will. It is hard to see now, but there is life on the other side of this. Life on the other side of this barbarism, this abuse, this delusion and manipulation, this awful reality show, this corruption and mendacity and selfishness.

Whatever bombs are dropped, Iran’s magnificent civilization will not die. The present uncivilized incarnation of the government of the United States of America will.

---