We don’t know what Trump will do to Iran tonight. But we do know this | Opinion
As of this writing — the morning of April 7, 2026 — we do not know what Donald Trump will do tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern Time.
That is when “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he posted earlier today on his Truth Social platform. It’s an overt and unmistakable threat: The president of the United States says our military will commit genocide on the people of Iran if its leaders do not reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
This is where we are, barely a year after Trump made his way back into the White House on waves of billionaire cash. The man who proclaimed in his second victory speech, “I’m not going to start wars — I’m going to stop wars,” is now vowing to obliterate another sovereign nation. It would be a war crime, obviously.
We do not know what Trump will do tonight. He is bad at fulfilling his promises: Lower gas prices. Reversed inflation. Health care for all. More jobs for working Americans. He hates his Wall Street nickname TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out. Maybe this time he’ll follow through to show those traders how wrong they were.
His family has made billions since he resumed office. His sons invest in war drones. The president himself serves as “chief crypto advocate” for World Liberty Financial, a new cryptocurrency firm with opaque structure and funding.
The “peace president.” “Draining the swamp.” We know he hasn’t done any of that.
We do, on the other hand, know the Republicans Missouri and Kansas have sent to Washington, D.C., are not likely do a thing about the president threatening genocide. After all, they have supported him as he’s destroyed their farmer constituents’ international markets with his tariffs. They’ve stood behind him as he’s gutted food and medicine aid for their poorest rural voters.
Missouri’s own Josh Hawley was the first to take to the Senate floor just hours after fleeing from the mobs invading the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, putting on a doomed and illegal dog and pony show supposedly trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election that Trump lost.
That was shameful and shameless in equal measures. Missouri Republican elder statesman Jack Danforth once saw Hawley as the brave, honest avatar of his party’s future. Danforth now knows how wrong he was. And it’s emblematic of what the GOP has become.
George Washington famously hated political parties. He knew that codified partisanship “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”
Prophetic words. We’re leagues past feminists twisting themselves to back Bill Clinton in the name of bodily autonomy. This is not libertarians holding their noses at George W. Bush’s vast expansion of the federal government in trade for cuts to the highest tax brackets.
This is simply the latest line in the sand it appears the Republicans who hold all the power in Washington are prepared to let Trump demolish. Again.
We do not know what Trump is going to do tonight. We know what the calm, rational adults in his party — the ones who’ve told us for a decade to take him seriously, but not literally — are going to do about a president of the United States who won less than half the popular vote all three times he ran vowing genocide on a nation he waged war on without the approval of Congress.
We know. Nothing.
If you are a person who prays, now is the time.
This story was originally published April 7, 2026 at 12:01 PM.