This week, Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iranian oil infrastructure and desalination plants — the facilities that keep civilian populations alive. When critics pointed out that deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure constitutes a war crime under international law, the White House waved them off. The President, his spokesmen assured us, was engaging in tough diplomacy.

But the man wasn’t bluffing. He’s got an almost obsessive attraction to the idea of maiming civilians. I know. I’ve personally heard him propose the most inhumane acts.

There’s a particular kind of horror that comes from watching a powerful man describe, in clinical detail, how he wants to hurt innocent people and realising that the only thing standing between his fantasy and its execution is a room full of aides, scrambling to remind him what is illegal and what is not. That’s the horror I experienced in late 2018 and early 2019, when I was helping to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Donald Trump.

Asked if there were any limits on his powers, he said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Yep, we’re fucked…

For instance, he sought to deploy soldiers to carry out shows of force along the border with heavy weaponry; he ordered us to paint the border wall black so it would get boiling hot in the sun and burn the hands of anyone who touched it; he demanded the we install flesh-piercing spikes at the top — so that those who attempted to climb would be visibly bloodied, sending a message to the others; and most ludicrously of all, Trump toyed with digging a 2,000-mile moat along the southern border and filling it with deadly snakes and reptiles to devour the arriving asylum seekers. (Inquiries were also made from the White House about heat-ray devices that could be pointed at the migrants to make them feel like their skin was on fire.)

This may all sound draconian — and it was — but the President seemed to settle on a simpler demand than elaborate booby traps and military spectacle to scare people away from the border: just shoot them. Trump proposed, on more than one occasion, having authorities fire upon the migrants. What better way to deter them than to kill some of them? When told that using deadly force against unarmed civilians was illegal, Trump bristled, as if we were weak-willed.

“Yeah, yeah yeah” was the tenor of his response. […] While I was on a flight to New York, I watched live on television as the President responded to footage of migrants throwing rocks at border authorities. Trump erupted. He publicly declared that if migrants threw rocks, the American soldiers he’d sent to join our border agents wouldn’t hesitate to respond. They’d open fire.

“They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” the President said. “We’ll consider — and I told them — consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say consider it a rifle.”

If this sounds familiar (beyond 2019-era politics that we experienced, but have been washed away by scrubbing our memories with insane new stories a few thousand times), it’s because this is how ICE has been treating protestors for the last year.

We have an administration that is entirely psychopathological. Empathy is a concept that Trump doesn’t understand or value, and at each level of the reporting structure, sycophancy reinforces that psychopathy. People like Hegseth, Noem and Bondi (and the reincarnated phantasms of Trump’s id currently doing the latter two’s jobs) repeat and revel in that psychopathy because it was currency to show their loyalty to an unprincipled madman.

The thing that is so demoralizing is that the only people that matter in this world are Trump, Trump’s power-hungry throne-sniffers, and billionaires. Regular citizens, much less valid asylum-seeking immigrants like above, are already the untouchables that don’t even rate as humans to these people.

My violent fantasy: Trump is laid down in his tighty-whities in a 6 in thick bed of molten tar so he can’t move. Then a steamroller rolls over him, starting from his feet to his head, one inch every couple of minutes so I can see his pain. When he passes out, we wake him before continuing on again.

But knowing my luck, after this happens, his supporters would just start wearing steamroller pendants and treating him like the next Jesus more than they already do.

Note: I said this is fantasy. A man can dream.

if he carries out war crimes with impunity, the West will have lost whatever moral authority remains in its grasp. The Geneva Conventions, the laws of armed conflict, and the architecture of rules designed to spare civilians from the worst of war are symbolic of all that we stand for in the West — of how democracy restrains our inner demons. But those principles are not self-enforcing. They’ve endured because Western nations, led by the United States, treated them as binding on themselves first. The moment America becomes the country that bombs desalination plants and calls it diplomacy, we have not merely broken a rule. We have announced the rules are dead. Every authoritarian watching in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang will take notice.

Looks like we announced the rules are dead then. Israel and the US killed them. :/

I honestly think he’s going to drop a nuke on Iran. Not an ICBM. Those are monitored and detectable. I think it’d be from a B2.

Things Trump is doing seems horrifying today because he is willing to do it to US itself. This was not a problem when it was happening elsewhere, when it was being done elsewhere.

What Trump is proposing has being done by the US since long. Read Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq. War crimes and atrocities are par for the course for any US government. Difference being there is not facade of righteousness this time around.

Israel is merely a colony of the west established only to carry out its inhuman practice elsewhere. Just like rich westerners went to Africa to hunt animals, they go to Israel to hunt humans.

Edit: Thank you for the downvotes.

It’s kind of comforting to know this is Trump’s plan because we know it will fail.

Fucking psychopath.

The best Trumps are dead Trumps.

If there’s one thing I know about what goes around it’s that it never comes around