The battle against Trump is a battle against genocide

He must be stopped. That is the task of all right-thinking people.

Photo by Pau Casals on Unsplash

This is what it’s like to live under the whims of an evil old man. I just want it written down somewhere before we move on to the next thing. I want it recorded before our memories fail us, before this vicious manufactured crisis is replaced by the next vicious manufactured crisis.

There is a little girl in an apartment building in Tehran. This week she was told that she would die, that her family and her civilisation would die, that everything she knew would end, pointlessly and without reason. There is a seafarer on a tanker anchored off the coast of the UAE. He has been there six weeks now, under threat of attack, staring at the damaged shell of the Kuwaiti oil tanker set ablaze by Iran, separated from his family, talked about like he was a pawn in a game played by others. There is a mum in the East Midlands, whose mortgage has just shot up, eating up the money she had left to spend. There is a worker in Bangladesh who is not being paid because the fertiliser company shut down production due to a lack of natural gas from Qatar.

Everyone is just a plaything to this man. We are all non-playable characters. We’re not even faces seen out a car window. We’re nothing. And our hopes and dreams - to live, to work, to buy a home, to earn enough to buy your kids a treat on Friday night - they are all subject to his whims. We are all the hostages of this shrivelled malicious brain.

So I want to write down now, so I do not forget, so we do not forget. It cannot be allowed to slip in the memory. It cannot be treated like every other week. It has to mean something, or else we encourage it to happen again.

It’s April 2nd, 5:37pm. Trump posts his first threat of the week. It involves a video of a bridge being destroyed. Presumably people die. “Much more to follow!” he writes. “IT IS TIME FOR IRAN TO MAKE A DEAL BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE, AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT”. He combines sociopathy with desperation. In nearly every message, he will gleefully revel in the death he has inflicted. There is no part of him that acknowledges Iranians as human. But simultaneously, he will plead for a deal. Seemingly without recognising how pitiful it makes his country look, he will beg for the Iranian regime to come to the negotiating table.

A few hours later, at 2:21 in the morning, he writes: “Is Bruce Springsteen going to sue his plastic surgeon?” Then, one hour and twenty minutes later, at 4:41 in the morning, he once again threatens to kill. “Bridges next,” he writes, “then Electric Power Plants!”

It is a war crime to intimidate a civilian population or try to terrorise them through the threat of violence. It is a war crime to threaten indiscriminate attacks. No-one cares anymore. Even in the British centre-right there is a growing frustration with any reference to legality in warfare. Each time he speaks he corrodes the principles which took decades to establish, which protect us from barbarism. And he does this because he is, ultimately and patently, barbaric - in his temperament, in his heart, in his mind, in his core, in his DNA. He is a primitive form of humanity, subject to all the rudimentary emotional and egotistical instincts which you would expect of such a life form. His contact with the world does not improve him, but it does corrode the world.

At 3:05pm on April 4th, he announces that his imaginary deadline is approaching. “Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” he writes. At this point, his messages become increasingly erratic and unpredictable. It is perfectly obvious that he suffers from severe mental illness and is in the advanced stages of cognitive decline. “Time is running out - 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!”

The biblical references, which will continue throughout the week, are perhaps the most disturbing. On a purely spiritual or theological basis they are obviously gibberish, but psychologically they are very revealing. They suggest that he has taken on a role of mythic proportions in his mind, that he sees himself as some sort of hazily defined Old Testament character, delivering God’s wrath. King David perhaps, or Solomon.

A day later, at 1:03pm, as families are sitting down for their meal on Easter Sunday, he writes: “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.” He is visibly unhinged. He is desperate. He has slipped into dark millennialist fantasies. He has his finger on the nuclear trigger.

On April 5th, at 5:38pm, he simply posts: “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!” This seems the most innocuous of his messages, but it is in fact arguably the most appalling. He is treating the war like a reality TV show. In fact, no, that’s not right at all. He is treating the promise of war crimes like a reality TV show. That, after all, is the clearly and repeatedly stated threat: an indiscriminate attack on civilian infrastructure. And yet he cannot even present it with solemnity. Instead, he turns it into a countdown, with his fake-white smile glistening under the camera, pumping up the audience ratings. At this moment he has become a uniquely American nightmare, a specific combination of religion and shit TV, suddenly turned into flesh and blood and loosened upon the world.

At 8:01 PM on April 6th he is temporarily distracted by videos on the internet. He posts a colour video of New York from the early 20th Century and writes: “New York City, 1929!” Not long afterwards, at 1:06pm on April 7th, he threatens genocide.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” The shock of that first line prevented most of us from taking in the rest of the message, which is extremely confused. Even as he threatens Iran, he begs them to help him, celebrating that the US has achieved “Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail”. Obviously this is untrue. There has been no regime change. But by this stage, people barely see that the majority of the president’s statements are lies, or perhaps merely a figment of his shattered mind. “Maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen,” he writes. “WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”

He is right about this. It is one of the most important moments. If ever there was any doubt, it is gone now. The old world lies in rubble. The president of the United States is threatening genocide. Nothing will ever be the same as it was before, no matter how much people try to pretend otherwise.

The world is run by a genocidal madman. That is the firm, uncontestable reality of it.

We do not see or hear from the Iranians, of course. It is a blackout - partly technological, partly circumstantial, partly a result of the regime. But we know enough of their filmmaking and their poetry and their culture and their protest movements to imagine how they will feel. We know the elegance with which they express their thoughts, the wave-like lyricism by which they process the world around them. We know them as one of the world’s oldest continuous civilisations, stretching back seven thousand years. To think that this man even has a right to disparage them, let alone threaten their destruction, is an affront to the accomplishments of all mankind.

We do not know how many people felt death approach that night. We don’t know how people slept in Tehran, or Mashhad, or Isfahan. Did they imagine that this was their final night? Did they assume it could never happen? Did the children ask their parents if they were going to die? Did young lovers find ways to secretly meet each other before the bombs fell? Did friends arrange to spend their final hours together? Can we even begin to imagine the scale of the trauma that was inflicted upon them? And for what? For nothing.

This was not the result of a broken deterrence system, like the one which precipitated the First World War - a system which was at least the result of individually rational actions gone horribly wrong. It was not the battle against fascism of the Second World War. It was not even the ideological paranoia of the Cold War or the misguided brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was nothing. It was the result of dribbling half-conceived incentives gurgling through a madman’s brain, a toxic soup of racism and power and preening self-regard, a series of actions did not make sense on their own terms, which lacked any strategic or tactical underpinning, and which were completely devoid of ideological or political meaning.

Even outside of Iran, we all felt politics get closer. Uncomfortably close. It was as if someone had come over and thrown more logs on the fire, doused it in petrol, and suddenly the flames could be felt very easily on our face, a painful tingle on our skin.

We are used to politics happening far away. The horror, the destruction, the desperation - that is something which happens elsewhere. We are used to a politics which does not really impinge on our lives. But suddenly it felt intimate. Almost as one, we could imagine it: The bombing that would take place in Iran, the desperate counter-attack on regional neighbours which the regime would launch the next day, spasming out, creating unforeseeable responses in a growing regional conflagration, the acute economic pain, a kind of strangling political Jujutsu, sparking global desperation and unpredictable political side effects.

And through it all, that terrible foreboding that comes with seeing the news as if it were a page in a history book. An awful sense that events were playing out like the textbooks you read as a GCSE student - the Versailles treaty, hyperinflation, the Great Depression. A series of dominos falling towards a terrible outcome. A true sense of the chaos of the world. Of what it is to try and survive on a planet which is run by an evil old man.

None of this troubled Trump, of course. Genocide and annihilation barely affects him. Between 9:13 pm and 9:27pm on April 7th he spends his time sending out messages endorsing local candidates. He posts dozens of these messages, often accompanying them with infographics in which he demonstrates how much less support they would have if he had not endorsed them.

Then, at 11:32pm, he announces a “double sided CEASEFIRE”. The terms of this ceasefire are clearly not negotiated by diplomats. Indeed, Trump’s repeated breaking off of negotiations with Iran to bomb them means there is no trust in what he says, so it was left to Pakistan to act as a go-between - the sort of role the US used to occupy when it was a respected country. The announcement is later made on social media sites, through hastily posted statements. The message on X.com from Pakistan prime minister Shehbaz Sharif starts: “*Draft - Pakistan’s PM Message on X*”.

Trump posts Iran’s statement on peace talks, even though it explicitly makes clear that the US had been the side to plead for talks and that safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz would only take place “via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces”. He is tacitly accepting Iranian control of the Strait, although it is unclear if he even realises this.

By 5:01am he has returned to his default mode of a used-car salesman on a local TV channel. “Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just “hangin’ around” in order to make sure that everything goes well.”

Over the course of the next day, the world tries to work out what has been agreed, but it isn’t initially possible. Trump’s own messages have stopped making sense. Israel, as if to demonstrate how little respect it has for the United States under Trump, launches the deadliest airstrikes in Lebanon since the start of the war, leaving 303 dead and over 1,000 injured. They attack in Beirut, well away from the southern areas they had encouraged people to leave. They kill countless innocent people, the kind of routine savagery which is now typical of how Israel conducts itself. Under Benjamin Netanyahu, the government has become murderous, bloodthirsty, vindictive, cynical. Sociopathic.

By the time evening comes, JD Vance is desperately trying to keep some kind of peace process together. “I think this comes from a legitimate misunderstanding,” he says, desperately. “I think the Iranians thought the ceasefire included Lebanon, and it just didn’t. We never made that promise, we never indicated that was gonna be the case.” It is, of course, unimaginable that ceasefire talks concerning a war which involves four actors would lack clarity about whether two of them were included.

By 10:08am on April 9th, even Trump seems baffled by what he has supposedly agreed to. The issue of free passage in the Strait is obviously central to any ceasefire but he seems to have no clarity on it, either in reality, or as a negotiating objective, or in his own mind. “There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait,” he writes. “They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now!”

He spends much of the rest of the day writing all-caps statements about how much he hates Nato. Then he writes a message berating Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and others as “Low IQ… NUT JOBS”. Then he promotes a campaign message celebrating Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. Then he posts a snuff video of a woman being beaten to death with a hammer. No thought is given to her human dignity. No thought is given to societal standards. No objections are raised to the racial hatred he is trying to encourage.

The most important message came earlier, at 4:46am. This is the moment in which he speaks about the future. “Our great Military is Loading Up and Resting,” he writes, “looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!”

This is the crucial thing to recognise. He hasn’t learned anything. The pain has not changed him. The consequences of future actions will not be weighed any more meaningfully in his mind by the disaster he has just undergone. No sense of causal effect will impinge upon him. He is simply too stupid and deranged to be affected by reason.

He has found a new role. He once promised peace but no longer desires it. Now he wishes for the glory of war and the triumph of imperial victory. He is labouring under dreams that small men have had since the dawn of civilisation. He is lost in a vision which only ever ends in death or tyranny. He is the retreat of the human condition back into the fire of history.

He simply will not stop unless we stop him. That duty lies with Americans - with the judiciary, with the political class, with demonstrators, with journalists. The events this week ably satisfied the conditions for removal from office. But the country is lost. The right is now a leadership death cult. The left lacks all conviction. It is therefore up to other countries to try and erect a firewall against his actions and limit them wherever possible.

He has himself conceded the best way to do this. At 9:40pm on April 9th, he wrote: “None of these people, including our own, very disappointing, NATO, understood anything unless they have pressure placed upon them!!!”

This is the most important lesson in all this. It is the closest thing to tactical proof in the question of how to limit Trump. When you give in to him, he considers his bullying approach to have been vindicated. It simply encourages him. But when you stand up to him, you at least have a fighting chance of holding him back.

No sending out the king for a ceremonial visit. No jetting over to Washington to try to save a defensive alliance. No holding your tongue for fear of precipitating a crisis. Every single political action must be based on providing obstacles to his behaviour, limiting his room to maneuver and thwarting his ambitions.

We felt the fire upon our face this week. We felt history touch us, then drift back, if only for a moment. Next time, we might not be so lucky. That could be in two weeks during a resurgence of hostilities in Iran, or in two months in an attack on Cuba, or in a year in an invasion of Greenland. Next time, his witless intervention could spread without any limit, with obscene consequences, with history’s dominos tumbling upon the earth.

He must be stopped. That is the task of all right-thinking people, from the lowliest campaigner to the highest world leader. If we can’t recognise the urgency of this now, it will be too late.

Odds and Sods

This week’s newsletter is available as a podcast, which you listen to at the top of this page. If you like it, tell your friends about it. You can follow me on Instagram here and on TikTok here and on BlueSky here.

My i paper column this week was on - you know - Trump and genocide and whether the people who once proclaimed Never Again ever truly meant it. You can read it here.

A new Origin Story came out this week, on the General Strike. It began at one minute to midnight on May 3rd, exactly one hundred years ago. The following nine days were intense and unprecedented, by far the most serious industrial dispute in British history. The cast of characters is a kind of Origin Story all-stars, including prime minister Stanley Baldwin, chancellor and propagandist Winston Churchill, Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, trade union heavyweight Ernest Bevin, BBC chief John Reith and Liberal peace-maker Herbert Samuel. You can listen on Spotify here or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s not been easy this week to enjoy many films or books or indeed to focus on anything that wasn’t the news. But my life was temporarily improved when I picked up a random unread comic I’d bought at the Thought Bubble festival last autumn. It’s called The Settler, by Conor Fenner-Toora.

I pick up a lot of comics at conventions. You’re surrounded by people who have given up everything to make it - their social life, their free time, their posture, their finances. Then they pay to self-publish and take it to a convention and they sit there alone talking about it to strangers. Imagine the drive you have to have to do something like that, imagine the commitment. I can’t think of a better way to spend my money than to give it to them.

Usually, though, they’re not ready for prime time. You can tell instantly - the grasp of the form just isn’t there. But occasionally you stumble across a real talent.

Fenner-Toora isn’t quite there yet. Some of the dialogue needs work, some of the art is a little sketchy. But he has a masterful sense of pace which you would expect to find from someone at the end of their comics career rather than at the start of it. He knows how to let a scene breath, how to take his time. Everything feels conscious, purposeful, rhythmic. He knows just how much information to withhold from the reader in order to get his hooks into them, particularly on what makes a character tick. He has a sense of place and time, and one of beauty too. It’s not perfect by any means - it’s very much a first work. But it is a first work by someone I expect to see great things from.

I’ve looked online and I don’t think you can buy it anywhere yet - but perhaps if you email him at his website he’ll sell you a copy personally. The contact details are at the bottom of his About page here.

This weekend it’s the Hungarian election. The outcome will have historic consequences for Europe and the global far-right. Keep those fucking fingers crossed people. See you on the other side of it.