Trump Dramatically Escalates Iran Threat as He Says God Backs Him

President Trump ramped up a threat to commit massive war crimes in Iran on Monday, and claimed that God supports him in doing so.

“We’re giving them ’til tomorrow. Eight o’clock, Eastern Time. And after that they’re gonna have no bridges, they’re gonna have no power plants. Stone Ages, yeah,” Trump said when asked about his weekend threat that he would launch a decimating attack if Iran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump was then asked about what the Christian God would think of his war on Iran.

“You said, ‘Glory be to God in this conflict.’ Do you believe that God supports the United States’s actions in this war?”

“I do because God is good. And God wants to see people taken care of,” Trump said, speaking for God. “God doesn’t like what’s happening. I don’t like what’s happening.... I’ve ended eight wars.”

“You said that very little is off-limits in Iran as far as the targeting,” Politico’s Dasha Burns then asked. “Are there certain kinds of civilian targets, though, I’m thinking schools, hospitals, that you—”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Trump replied. “We have a plan—because of the power of our military—where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night. Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again. I mean complete demolition by 12 o’clock. And it’ll happen over a period of four hours, if we want it to. We don’t want that to happen. We may even get involved with helping them rebuild their nation.”

This violent ultimatum doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s constant rhetoric suggesting that the war is all but won, and that the Iranian government is on its last legs. Trump’s war has already killed over 1,600 Iranian civilians. His threats would destroy vital routes and plunge thousands more into darkness, resulting in even more death and suffering.

President Donald Trump called former President Joe Biden “mentally retarded” twice.

Speaking at a press conference Monday, Trump repeatedly threw around the slur while bragging about his relationship with Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s reclusive authoritarian leader.

“Do you notice, he said very nice things about me. He used to call Joe Biden a mentally retarded person, OK? So, don’t tell me about your stuff,” the president said. “[Of] Joe Biden, he said, ‘He’s a mentally retarded person.’ He was so nasty to Joe Biden, it was terrible. But to me—he likes Trump.”

It doesn’t appear that Kim Jong Un ever referred to Biden as “mentally retarded.”

In 2019, North Korean state media labeled Biden an “imbecile” and a “fool of low IQ” after the former president criticized Kim as a “tyrant.”

But Trump has not been immune to North Korea’s name-calling, either: He was previously labeled a “dotard,” meaning someone who is slow and old. His supposedly cozy relationship with Kim has only become more strained since he reentered office.

Trump’s comments came amid a winding rant complaining that other countries had not helped to reopen the Strait of Hormuz (which only closed because of Trump’s decision to attack Iran).

Trump’s inability to stay on topic, or recall specific details, speaks to his increasingly apparent cognitive decline. The president’s retreat to childish attacks against his former political rival mirrors his ongoing temper tantrum meant to threaten Iran into allowing trade to resume through the region.

At a press conference Monday afternoon, President Trump nearly spilled state secrets as he rambled about how the U.S. rescued an Air Force officer after his plane was shot down in Iran.

Trump described the location as if it was from a movie, saying “you could call it central casting if you were doing a movie for location” and calling it “probably the toughest area of Iran.”

Later, Trump’s account of the late-night mission was barely coherent, as he mentioned how a rescue plane was on a “farm without a runaway” with “wet sand.”

“And it eats planes alive, and we’re waiting, and we’re saying, ‘I hope that one can land and take off.’ And they came in like magic, boom, boom, boom, one after another, it was like genius, so impressed by that,” Trump said.

“They came in so fast and so hard, and these guys knew exactly what to do. ‘Let’s go, come on, get in, let’s go,’ bwah,” Trump raved, miming a plane taking off. “They came one after another, not at the same time. They don’t want to come at the same time. They had to come right after each other. They didn’t have any room. There was barely any room to land. Tiny little patch of very wet earth and sand.”

Trump appeared so desperate to sell the rescue mission as a movie that he nearly spilled state secrets in the process.

“How many men did you send together, approximately, to the operation?” Trump asked Gen. Dan Caine in the middle of one of his rants.

“Uhhh, I’d love to keep that a secret,” Caine replied.

“It was hundreds,” Trump replied, laughing. “He’s pretty good. Is he central casting?”

Trump’s words and actions in recent years have led many, including medical professionals, to believe that he is experiencing cognitive decline, and this wasn’t even the first such instance of the day. In the morning, alongside someone in an Easter Bunny costume, he told a crowd of children at the White House for the annual Easter Egg Roll that “we have the greatest military, the most powerful military in any place in the world. You saw what happened with Venezuela.”

As the president seems to get worse and worse, will anyone of consequence—Republicans in Congress, the president’s Cabinet, or members of his family—try to rein him in for the good of the country?

Donald Trump announced his plans to arrest and detain the individual who first reported the missing airman in Iran—as soon as he figures out who it is.

In the midst of a sprawling, nonsensical speech at the White House Monday, the president claimed that the government was going to hunt down the identity of the government employee who first revealed there was a second airman lost in Iran.

“But these two extraordinary rescues—because there were two, and as you probably know we didn’t talk about the first one for an hour. Then somebody leaked something—which, we’ll hopefully find that leaker. We’re looking very hard to find that leaker,” Trump said.

“They basically said, ‘We have one, and there’s somebody missing.’ Well they didn’t know there was somebody missing until this leaker gave the information,” Trump continued.

Trump’s plan, however, apparently depends on expecting the countless news outlets that reported on the search and rescue mission to give up their sources.

“We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security, give it up or go to jail.’ And we know who and you know who we’re talking about. There’s some things you can’t do,” Trump said.

An F-15 fighter jet was downed by Iranian fire early Friday. It was immediately understood when the plane went down that there were two crew members aboard. Each F-15 jet is manned by two crew: a pilot and a weapon systems officer.

The pilot of the two-seater aircraft was rescued later that day, but the search and rescue operation for the injured weapon system officer stretched until Sunday, when they were miraculously rescued from a crevice in the Iranian mountains. Iranian forces were also rushing to locate the fallen U.S. soldier, even placing a bounty on the crew member’s head.

Trump further suggested Monday that Iran’s bounty was the fault of the American media, who he claimed should not have revealed any information about the missing crew member.

The president did not share any names as to the leaker, the journalists, or the media outlets that he believed had publicized the story. But after his comments, some members of the press pointed toward Fox News and The Washington Post for being among the first to land the scoop.

Yet those media companies were not the only ones to report that one member of the military had been unaccounted for after the initial rescue on Friday: Reuters also reported at the time that just one of the aircrew had been rescued. Hours later, the outlet reported that a search and rescue was underway.

Other journalists jumped to claim the scoop, even after Trump’s threat. Amit Segal—an Israeli journalist with ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—said on his Telegram chat later Monday that he was the first to report the story.

“As you may recall, this was first published here,” Segal wrote.

Segal has previously claimed that Netanyahu offered him a ministerial position in 2022. It is not clear what impact Segal’s potential arrest would have on U.S.-Israeli relations.

Yet when asked directly about it, Segal wavered. Speaking with the New York Post’s Caitlin Doornbos, he backpedaled his initial bravado, specifying that he’s “not sure” if he was the first to report the story.

“And anyway—I will protect my sources,” Segal said.

This story has been updated.

A boisterous Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth compared one of the rescued fighter pilots downed in Iran to Jesus Christ resurrecting from the dead and emerging from his tomb on Easter Sunday.

Hegseth made an appearance at President Trump’s briefing Monday regarding the two U.S. fighter pilots who were extracted from Iran after being shot down on Friday.

“One downed airman evaded capture for more than a day, scaling rugged ridges while hunted by the enemy. When he was finally able to activate his emergency transponder, his first message was simple, and it was powerful. He sent a message: ‘God is good,’” Hegseth said. “In that moment of isolation and danger his faith and fighting spirit shown through.”

“You see, shot down on a Friday, Good Friday. Hidden in a cave. A crevice, all of Saturday. And rescued on Sunday, flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday. A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing. God is good,” Hegseth continued, laying it on incredibly thick as if writing the script to his dream Taylor Sheridan movie.

The frequency in which Hegseth injects his rabid, militant brand of Christianity into any public event is exhausting. The pilot who went down was not like Jesus Christ. He was sent to the Middle East to either surveil or bomb infrastructure and civilians alike. And it’s hard to understand why the very first message he sent out while trapped in a crevice while being hunted by Iranians was “God is good,” and not “HELP ME!!!” immediately followed by coordinates.