Trump Goes Full Genghis Khan

Donald Trump’s admiration for violent autocrats has long been on display. His preference for violence may first have come to view 35 years ago through his campaign to have the state of New York execute the Central Park Five, the Black teenagers wrongly convicted of assaulting and raping a white woman. (They were later exonerated and freed from prison when someone else confessed to the crime.) It was apparent during his 2016 presidential campaign, when he urged his supporters at campaign rallies to beat up the occasional heckler. From his selection of Jim Mattis as his first secretary of defense because his nickname was “Mad Dog” Mattis, to his love of military parades, to his renaming the DOD as the Department of War, to his view of statecraft as the exercise or threat of force, to his love of pro wrestling and MMA (the only sports he seems to care about), to his summoning of deranged thugs to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and his hours-long reluctance to tell them to stand down, not to mention his support for the brutality of ICE and the Border Patrol (until it became a political liability), Trump’s romance with and dependence on violence has been constantly and irrefutably clear for decades.

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And that has also meshed nicely with his belief that real leadership requires squelching opposition, that the only real leaders are autocrats. Thus his evident admiration of Putin, Xi, and even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and his contempt for leaders of democracies who opt to check their power by observing the constraints of law and social contracts.

But in the past few weeks, and the past few hours, Trump has found a way to sound even tougher, more belligerent, more violent, than such pantywaist autocrats as Putin and Xi. He’s threatened to destroy Iran’s oil resources, even though that will subject the planet and his own constituents to economic chaos, and sent our forces to bomb Kharg Island. He’s threatened to destroy Iran’s infrastructure. And earlier today, he wrote on Truth Social (his platform for antisocial lying) that unless Iran submits to his demands (in particular, abandoning its control of the Strait of Hormuz) by 8 p.m. Eastern time tonight, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Never mind that tens of millions of Iranians oppose the regime that has ruled them since 1979. Never mind that what Trump is threatening is banned by international laws and accords and every known code, de jure or de facto, of morality. Never mind the universal obloquy in which British air force Gen. Arthur “Bomber” Harris is held for subjecting every German city to indiscriminate bombardment for most of World War II, not to mention the obloquy in which his Nazi opponents are held for waging an even more ruthless war and mass murder of noncombatants. Never mind the liberal critiques of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, all of whom professed some subservience to an ideology other than simple violent autocratic rule—a subservience from which Trump is, to all appearances, free.

No, he’s found his model leader elsewhere. Threatening to destroy a civilization because its current leaders (however much their populace may oppose them) don’t submit to him is worthy of that greatest of exterminationist conquerors (subcategory free from all ideological beliefs), Genghis Khan.

Genghis, to be sure, didn’t really practice the Art of the Deal. Then or now, no one has ever detected in him a tendency to GACO: He sure as hell never chickened out from carrying out his threats. Trump, by contrast, has been demonstrating TACO tendencies for some time, but for all we know, he may think he’s boxed himself in by his Genghis-like threats. What’s clear as of now, as 8 p.m. Eastern clicks apocalyptically closer, is that at minimum, he wants the world to think of him as Genghis’s second coming. That that is the crowning ambition of the most powerful man on the planet is disaster enough, even if he doesn’t nuke Tehran.

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