The United States Is Now an Apocalyptic Terror State

Iwas living in New York City when Al Qaeda terrorists flew jet planes into the World Trade Center, and I will never forget the panic that I felt as the certainties of the architecture around me went up in flames.

I remember, too, that shortly afterward, anthrax attacks were launched against seemingly random targets. Suddenly, the air we breathed seemed suspect—our environments turned against us by faceless enemies, terrorists, intent on inflicting maximum physical and psychological damage.

Webster’s dictionary defines “terrorism” as “the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.” It defines “terrorist” as “an advocate or practitioner of terrorism as a means of coercion.”

“Terrorists” are reviled, because of their willingness to impose indiscriminate terror, fear, and violence on civilian populations to get their way politically or economically. If you want to gin up a populace against a particular group of people, label them “terrorists.” It’s shorthand for “despicable, bloodthirsty, murderous thugs, people with no moral limits.” Such was the contempt that the George W. Bush administration had for Al Qaeda terrorists that they secured legal opinions saying that Al Qaeda captives did not have to be accorded the respect that the Geneva Convention grants other prisoners of war. And then they waterboarded them and sent them to Guantánamo Bay. In 2015, candidate Trump said the only way to effectively fight terrorist groups such as ISIS was to kill the family members of known terrorists.

I mention this because over the past week Donald Trump, the senescent man whose word can unleash the most fearsome weapons known to humankind, revealed himself to be simply a common terrorist, albeit one with a potentially world-destroying arsenal backing him up. If the United States’ dwindling list of allies had any illusions about the man, they were surely cast to the winds this week.

First, after days of threatening massive attacks on Iran’s infrastructure and to bomb the Iranians “back to the stone age, where they belong,” Trump spewed out a profanity-filled Truth Social post on Easter Sunday that reveled in his ability to obliterate the infrastructure upon which Iranian civil society—and the lives of its 90 million residents—depend. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” Not wanting to be left out of the fun, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth also cryptically posted on X, “Back to the stone age.” (Although to be fair, in his case it wasn’t clear if this was a threat to Iran or simply a status update of Hegseth’s own all-too-visible reversion to primitive-man status.)

Two days after his tirade, Trump announced that at 8 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He added, almost as if he had no control over his own actions, “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” I have scoured my historical memory, and I cannot think of another major international figure since Hitler who has made such explicitly genocidal threats, so devoid of euphemism—and even Hitler and his henchmen generally couched their apocalyptic visions in just enough euphemism to give them the cover of plausible deniability. So much for Trump’s efforts to secure the Nobel Peace Prize next year.

Since even the US president does not possess magical powers by which he can wave a wand and magically disappear a 6,000-year-old civilization, the only plausible explanation behind the specificity of Trump’s words was that he was threatening to unleash a nuclear apocalypse on the Iranians—which would, indeed, destroy a civilization, killing tens of millions of people in the process.

What I am struggling to even begin to fathom is what it must have felt like to be an Iranian trapped in that bombed-out country in the hours between Trump’s pledge that at 8 pm their civilization would be erased and the announcement of a Pakistan-brokered ceasefire 90 minutes before Trump’s deadline. I can’t imagine how slowly time must have ticked by, each second bringing the country closer to destruction. For those 12 hours, 90 million Iranians must have felt like the condemned on death row as the time of their electrocution neared.

I can’t imagine what husbands and wives thought as they realized their partners might soon be atomized by Trump’s bombs. I can’t imagine what parents felt looking at their children and knowing that a few hours from now their bodies might be obliterated. I can’t imagine what children thought knowing their power to protect their aging mothers and fathers was gone—that they were all at the mercy of a madman’s diktats.

And I can’t even begin to fathom the rage that those millions of Iranians must have felt at the US soldiers and sailors and airmen blithely going about their business in loading up weapons and pretending that this was just another day at the office. Or, rather, I can, just ever so slightly, get a glimpse of that rage, that powerless fury, because in September 2001, that’s the rage, fear, and horror that I felt in New York when I realized that men I had never met, from places I had never been to, had tried to kill me and my fellow New Yorkers—and had done so in a way deliberately calculated to inflict maximum enduring trauma on those who survived the attacks.

Even if the US-Iran ceasefire holds, which as I write this seems by no means certain, tens of millions of Iranians will be left with that sense of panic, that stomach-churning, vertiginous sense of the fragility of… everything.

And here’s the thing: That act of terror was carried out in our name, by a man whom 80 million-plus Americans voted into office and whom the GOP-led Congress has repeatedly failed to rein in. Had he ordered the military to carry out what would surely constitute crimes against humanity, there’s precious little evidence the military would have balked (though there is some reporting that military lawyers were unwilling to sign off on Trump’s actions) or that the majority in Congress would have significantly pushed back against him. Unless I’m missing something, not a single general has resigned from the military in the past week in protest at Trump’s war crimes rhetoric. Not a single battalion has laid down its weapons. Not a single figure in the national security hierarchy, the State Department, or the Pentagon has called it quits and gone public with their opposition to Trump’s Hitlerian threats. Not a single cabinet member has quit in horror. Not a single GOP member of Congress has switched parties as a way to bring Trump under some form of congressional control.

Even after Pope Leo denounced Trump’s genocidal language, even as previous MAGA enthusiasts such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones mustered the moral clarity to condemn Trump, Americans in positions of power within the government and military chose to bury their heads in the sand rather than confront this evil. It is the starkest abnegation of moral authority in modern US history.

That could be because all the honorable officials have already been purged—either by DOGE or by more localized departmental purges initiated by Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and Tulsi Gabbard. It could also be because those who haven’t been purged have been cowed into silence. And it could be, quite simply, that, as a society, we have grown, unfortunately, used to following orders, no matter how mad those orders may be.

Whatever the reasons, I do know this: When the supposed “leader of the free world” embraces the methods and rhetoric of apocalyptic terrorism, the international order as we have long known it is no more. Trump launched this war without thinking through the consequences. With his bloodthirsty rhetoric, he has compounded the damage by showing the world that the United States is, under its current leadership, truly a rogue nation.