Genocide Don: “A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight”
The psychology of Trump’s eliminationist threat to Iran
“They make a desert and call it peace” —Tacitus
Tuesday morning, Donald Trump promised that the oldest civilization on Earth, Persia aka Iran, “will die tonight”—an overt, unmistakable threat of genocide.
However, as I recently wrote, this is not really about Iran for Trump and his regime; this is a war on civilization itself.
Trump is exhibiting the deepest, most destructive phase of narcissistic collapse—rupture—where the subject desperately tries to repair his self-image by destroying the world around him. But Trump’s totalizing language is also a confession to war crimes, in advance—and a microcosm of the system of brainwashing that he has weaponized for over a decade.
Last year, I published a series about how Trump and his backers have created a process that entrains his followers into believing everything he says without even thinking about it.
At the core of this system is what I call “Five Steps to Online Brainwashing.”
Trump’s eliminationist post about Iran is this entire system of control in miniature, and it’s worth understanding how it works. He’s projecting how he wants this scenario to play out and how people should feel about it—step by step.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” is the epitome of “redpilling,” the introduction of traumatic, horrifying visions to trigger the brain’s amygdala, the fear center, into action. When you’re in fight-or-flight mode, you are not thinking with your whole brain; you are controlled by your emergency system.
“I don’t want that to happen but it probably will” is a way to dissociate from the violence, to make it seem like Iran’s destruction is both out of his hands, and totally in his control at the same time. It is deliberately ambiguous, leaving the reader traumatized, dissociated, and uncertain: “WHO KNOWS?”
The most chilling line is “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen” which recasts genocide as salvation. It is the language of purification used by nearly every malevolent empire in history to justify mass murder. It allows Trump to feel not only justified, but like a savior in the process.
Refreezing is locking in the cognitive changes produced by trauma and dissociation. It cools down the brain enough to let things sink in. For example: “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world.”
Mimetic synchrony is the final stage, where the subject has been entrained to take in everything Trump says as not necessarily the truth, but as a mirror of how they are supposed to feel regardless. This phenomenon makes his followers behave more like a school of fish, or a murmuration of starlings, than a political movement: “47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end.”
Trump’s post shows exactly what he wants his followers to feel, and walks them through the process of mirroring him. It is the cycle of abuse employed by every violent domestic abuser—and every dictator: shock them; confuse them; “save” them; lock them in; and weaponize them.
However, Trump appears to have crossed a rhetorical line that many of his followers are uncomfortable with. The fact that Trump is openly threatening civilians, and destroying the global economy at the same time, has made a number of former Trump loyalists call for his removal. These include propagandists Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, people who have been Trump’s most avid promoters for a decade.
Trump’s cognitive decline, and his addiction to increasingly violent displays of dominance to cover up for his own failures, is no longer in question. The only question left is whether anyone will stop him before he increases his kill count exponentially.
While I don’t expect Trump to use a nuclear weapon quite yet, his trajectory will inevitably lead him there. Iran will never capitulate. In fact, Trump has given them more leverage and more unity than they could have dreamt of before. All around Iran, at bridges and power plants, there are human chains. The Iranian people, some of whom may have sympathized with the idea of replacing the old regime, no longer see the United States as a potential savior. They see it as the Great Satan, once again.
The combination of an apocalyptic regime in Iran that now has the support of its own people, and a collapsing, demented narcissist commanding the U.S. Armed Forces, makes total war almost inevitable without intervention.
The only method to remove a president besides impeachment is the 25th Amendment. That has to include the Vice President and half the Cabinet. Unfortunately, JD Vance is busy—campaigning for fascist dictator Viktor Orbán in Hungary, where he is backing up Trump’s threats.
The Trump regime has disconnected itself from any responsibility to the people that elected it. Trump and his sycophants no longer care about public opinion, or political pressure. They are already operating in a post-political reality where elections are just performative window-dressing for dictatorship.
Extricating the world from this horrific mess is going to take some out-of-the-box thinking. American citizens must start preparing for how we have to sacrifice to send a message to the regime that we are not powerless in this equation.
Sustained mass protests. No Kings is a great show of positive energy, but we need much more. Protests need to be continuous; they need to be distributed widely; and they need to be angry.
General strike. One of the best ways to show the power of the people is to prove our economic power by denying elites the profits they so dearly crave. We must deprive them of their money.
Organized online influence campaigns aka psyops. We’ve allowed the opposition to keep the psychological battlefield to themselves for too long. Citizens need to get familiar with how information warfare works and get in the fight.
B2 bombers have been seen leaving bases in the U.S. for the Middle East, in time to meet Trump’s deadline—Americans soldiers on their way to commit war crimes for a madman.
No matter what happens, Trump will continue to make things worse. It is the mathematics of his pathologies. It is time for the rest of us to gaze into the abyss, see it gazing back, and fight the monsters anyway.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” —Nietzsche
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Probably the most directly impactful act of resistance/defiance is the mass withholding of federal tax payments, not mentioned in your list of tactics. If that takes hold there will not only be serious disruptive impact on the regime, there will also be safety in numbers for the participants. I am refusing personally and will have a column coming out this week on its value as a weapon.
The whole word is voicing outrage and the whole world SHOULD voice outrage. The result is however, Trump's narcissistic wound is so large now this is existential for him. When you are a narcissist and the whole world is turning against you the only option left is to destroy the world. It does not matter that you will be destroyed too. Trump needs to be physically restrained.