By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, April 07, 2026
Today is “Infrastructure Day,” as the president has reportedly taken to calling it.
Infrastructure Day has nothing to do with building
bridges and power plants in the United States, as some “America First”
nationalists may have imagined when they voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Almost
the opposite: If what’s left of Iran’s government hasn’t agreed to a peace deal
by the president’s deadline of 8 p.m. ET, he plans to systematically destroy
the bridges and power plants in that country.
And maybe not just that.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be
brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote this morning, sounding more like the Joker than
usual. Unless the regime agrees to America’s demands (whatever those might
currently be), “47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end.
God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
God bless the people whom we’re about to immiserate!
Measured by naked genocidal intent, today’s threat
surpassed even his message on Easter Sunday, surely the most obnoxious
foreign policy statement in U.S. history: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and
Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!
Open the F—in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST
WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” The profanity was not redacted in his post.
Possible outcomes this evening range from another
humiliating deadline extension to avert a stock-market crash, a surprise
agreement between the two sides (unlikely, given what Iran is asking), and … a nuclear strike, maybe? Who
knows? “The president is the most bloodthirsty, like a mad dog,” a U.S.
official told Axios, rebutting speculation that Trump is reluctant
to escalate but under pressure to do so by bellicose deputies. Only a fool
would try to predict what’s about to happen. As of yesterday, the president
himself seemed not to know.
So instead of predicting what might happen, let’s focus
on what has happened.
First: We’ve reached the brink of total war, humanitarian
disaster, and economic calamity without any action whatsoever from Congress.
One man is claiming the power to lay
waste to a foreign population—whose liberation he promoted to justify
starting this conflict, remember—and our nominal representatives refuse
to intervene in any way. America’s civilization is dying, too, whether you
want to accept that or not.
Second: A self-described master of “the art of the deal,”
Trump spent the past several weeks negotiating against himself in public before maneuvering
himself into a corner with his idiotic deal deadline. Barring an unexpected
last-second capitulation by Iran, his choices now are to lose credibility by
TACOing out or to lose a different kind of credibility by functionally
destroying Iranian civilization. That doesn’t feel like artistry. In fact, it’s
not clear to me what “Infrastructure Day” is meant to accomplish strategically:
If Iran declines to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to avert tonight’s attack, why
would it reopen the strait afterward?
Third: The U.S. military is on the cusp of being
instructed to commit war crimes en masse by targeting Iran’s civilian
infrastructure. If it refuses, we’ll have a crisis of command; if it complies,
we’ll have a considerably worse sort of crisis. Trump apologists insisted last
fall that the six Democrats who warned
service members not to obey unlawful orders were encouraging
insubordination, as no such orders had been or would be given. Now here we are.
Fourth: For the first time, influential postliberals have
begun to criticize the president in terms traditionally forbidden by the norms
of modern Republican politics. When complaining about Trump, right-wingers are
expected to avoid blaming him directly and eschew
any sort of moral reproach, as morals are now lib-coded. Only
instrumentalist arguments are permitted. “Trump’s neocon advisers are harming
the GOP’s midterm chances by convincing him to prolong this stupid war” is an
acceptable critique. “Trump is an unhinged moral degenerate for threatening to
end Iranian civilization” is not.
Yet “Trump is an unhinged moral degenerate” is the gist
of the commentary this week from several influential postliberal loons who
spent the last 10 years slobbering over the president’s degeneracy. Which seems
significant, no?
Tucker, Alex, and Marge.
On Monday Tucker Carlson described the president as evil. That in itself isn’t unusual for prominent
righties, including Tucker: As far back as 2021, he was referring to Trump in
texts as a “demonic force.”
But such things are typically said privately, in
whispers. Carlson’s latest broadside came in a new episode of his podcast,
released globally on X.
“How dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the
country?” he complained indignantly of Trump’s “open the f—in’ strait”
message. Bad enough that the president would threaten war crimes against Iran,
Carlson went on to say, but the gratuitous taunt at Islam in his post was
abhorrent and revealing. “No decent person mocks other people’s religions,” he
insisted. “You may have a problem with the theology—presumably you do if it’s
not your religion—and you can explain what that is. But to mock other people’s
faith is to mock the idea of faith itself.”
Could it be? Is Donald Trump’s respect for religion
insincere?
Carlson’s attack on the president had unexpected
competition for eyeballs on social media from another cancer of the right-wing
infotainment ecosystem, Alex Jones. Jones was Tucker before Tucker was Tucker,
a conspiratorial online media powerhouse who catered to postliberal grievances.
Naturally, he welcomed the president’s political ascension in 2016. Now he’s
posing questions like this to his guests: “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?”
That wasn’t a one-off either. Jones told his audience
last week that it’s time to “cut bait” on Trump and called for some sort of
“intervention” by the Cabinet. “We’re not the Democrats 10 times worse, and we
are not him, and we’re morally against this and blowing up Iranian water
supplies, he’s talking about,” he warned of the president. “War crime, any way you cut it.”
Then there was Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose break with
Trump predates
the Iran war but whose criticism of him has grown more pointed lately.
“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on
their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshiping the President and
intervene in Trump’s madness,” she wrote
on Sunday of his Easter message. “I know all of you and him and he has gone
insane, and all of you are complicit.”
All of this is outrageous heresy by MAGA cult standards.
Trump is insane, Trump is evil, Trump needs to be removed: Postliberals have never
talked like this publicly.
And because they haven’t, I feel embarrassed for taking
them even a little bit seriously.
None of them gives a rip about war crimes in the
abstract, after all, especially not the guy who went to Moscow to play pattycake
with Vladimir Putin. Trump isn’t threatening to do anything to Iran that
Russia hasn’t done or tried to do to Ukraine, yet you’ll search in vain for
meaningful moral outrage about Russia’s war over the past four years from any
big-name postliberal.
On the contrary. No one has discouraged the modern right
from sympathizing with Ukraine’s cause as doggedly as Carlson has, up to and
including endorsing a U.S.-Russia alliance. Apologists can try to
square that circle if they like on nationalist grounds (“as an American, Tucker
naturally takes special umbrage at what his own country is doing in his name”),
but the whole point of this week’s condemnations of Trump is that morals aren’t
circumstantial. Wrong is wrong. The president doesn’t get a pass just
because we voted for him, Carlson, Jones, and Greene are suggesting. Why
does Putin get a pass from them just because they’re not Russian citizens?
Also, where do these people get off pretending that the
president’s posts about Iran over the last 72 hours are some horrifying
aberration for him? “This was how Trump talked the entire 2016 campaign,” Vox’s
Benjy
Sarlin accurately observed of his threat to destroy Iran’s civilization.
“There are people who support this and then there are a lot of easy marks who
convinced themselves it would not lead to where we are now if you kept rolling
the dice long enough.”
Is that what we’re seeing this week—the rude awakening of
a bunch of pitiful postliberal marks who convinced themselves they could have
fascism at home without the inevitable militarism and interventions abroad? We
all know what it’s like to regret voting for a candidate, but it’s one thing to
be disappointed by their tax policy, say, and another to find yourself warning
the military to keep the nuclear codes away from them.
What should we make of this postliberal buyer’s remorse?
Saving postliberalism.
You can spitball the political calculations as easily as
I can.
If there’s a fight brewing in 2028 for ideological
control of the post-Trump GOP, as I and many others surmise,
then there’s no time like the present for postliberal influencers to start
trying to shape grassroots opinion in their favor. Carlson, Jones, and Greene
are gambling by harshly denouncing a war supported by 79 percent of Republicans, but it’s a calculated and
defensible bet. As the costs of the conflict come home to roost and
right-wingers grow less emotionally attached to Trump with his retirement
approaching, the party’s base might plausibly come to embrace war skeptics for
their foresight.
Ask Barack Obama, who was on the wrong side of public
opinion when he opposed the Iraq war in 2002. Or Donald Trump, who dared to
defy GOP orthodoxy by second-guessing the war during the 2016 presidential
primary.
Granted, it’s hard to imagine the right’s cultish dynamic
changing so much in three years that harsh moral condemnations of the leader
will not only lose their taboo but become evidence of virtue. But antiwar
postliberals are placing a high-risk, high-reward bet. They’re offering the
MAGA rank-and-file absolution on the cheap if the war goes sideways: All the
average red-hat-wearer will have to say in 2028 is “I was with Tucker, Alex,
and Marjorie all along!”
Another cynical possibility is that we’re seeing audience
capture here, not much different from what happens routinely across right-wing
media. The first and last rule of serving a modern populist audience is to
always tell them what they want to hear, but that’s more complicated for
Carlson, Jones, and Greene than it is for, say, Sean Hannity. Hannity’s
audience wants to hear that Trump is right, full stop; the postliberal audience
wants to hear that Trump is right unless he’s squarely betraying “America First”
principles.
Postliberal influencers serve two masters, in other
words: the diffuse right-wing base and the ardently ideological subset that
hungers to be told everything that’s happened in the West since 1960 or so has
been bad. Forced to choose, it’s not illogical for Carlson et al. to prioritize
the latter’s needs since they’re the ones whose subscription fees and political
donations pay most of the bills. They’re also the ones who look to Tucker,
Jones, and Greene for ideological leadership, unlike the average Team Red
partisan who might stumble across soundbites from them when surfing around
while waiting for Hannity to come on.
The postliberal audience wants to know that its idols
still believe wars are bad (American wars, not Russian ones) even if Trump
doesn’t. So that’s what postliberal influencers are telling them.
Still, and at the risk of imputing sincerity to any of
these people, there’s probably an earnest ideological impulse underlying the
recent buyer’s remorse as well. Maybe Carlson, Jones, and Greene see a biblical
disaster for global postliberalism shaping up and feel obliged to try to
hastily separate their movement from Trump before he discredits it completely.
Who can blame them? Trump’s approval among independents
is already the worst of any modern second-term president, including
Richard Nixon’s during Watergate. European far-right parties have begun to distance themselves from him and Viktor Orbán, a spiritual
leader and bankroller of the effort to Putinize the West, is on
the brink of losing power in Hungary. There’s a growing chance that this
presidency will end with the sort of comprehensive failure not seen in America
since George W. Bush’s second term. And because Trump represents a new type of
right-wing politics, it won’t just be the Republican Party that’s punished and
repudiated by voters for that failure. Postliberalism itself might not recover.
Go figure that Carlson, Jones, and Greene would feel the
need to urgently make the point that this isn’t postliberalism, even at
the risk of pitting themselves against a vindictive president. And in one
sense, they’re right: Pulverizing Iran pointlessly from the air while Lindsey
Graham drools ecstatically was not the foreseeable endpoint of Orbánism. Even
Never Trumpers like me didn’t
predict the “John Bolton on steroids” foreign policy of the past 15 months.
But in another sense, this was entirely predictable.
The disrupter.
Postliberals loved Trump not just because he was
anti-immigrant, antiwar, and culturally reactionary but because he was a
“disrupter.” It wasn’t enough to have the right ideas. A system as corrupt as
ours needed radical change, and only someone radically unbound by traditional
political norms (a demonic force, let’s call him) could muster the ruthlessness
required to achieve it.
They wanted a “disrupter” as president, and they got one.
Suddenly, they’re mortified to discover that you need to take the bitter with
the sweet when you empower an elderly sociopath who relishes ruthlessly
dominating adversaries and is willing to disrupt any institution to serve his
own interests. Sometimes he’ll own the libs here at home, other times he might
end Iranian civilization via a massive war-crimes campaign.
Carlson, Jones, Greene, and their ilk assumed that Trump
would disrupt only the things they wanted to disrupt, and they gambled the
stability of the United States on their being right.
It makes sense to me that his Easter message might have
finally driven home to them how wrong they were. The right has spent years
being conditioned to see no evil in the president’s “mean tweets,” just as it
was conditioned to treat his excited campaign chatter about brutality in 2016
as a performance by a celebrity showman. (Take him seriously, not literally, remember?) The “open the
f—in’ strait” post hit different: He sounds drunk on military power, paranoid about lacking a way to
exit the war without losing face, and seemingly capable of anything
after bombing thousands of targets over five weeks in a conflict postliberals
never imagined he’d start. To all appearances, his impulse to bomb Iran back to
the Stone Age is driven by nothing more strategic than the urge to punish an
enemy for refusing to be cowed into submission by him.
He’s legitimately unbalanced, enough so to have ranted
about Iran for the cameras yesterday with
the Easter bunny standing next to him, and I think Carlson, Jones, and
Greene can no longer deny it. They entrusted their movement to a crazy person
and are realizing that, with 33 months to go, he’s surely going to take the
movement in other insane, destabilizing, discrediting directions even if the
Iran war concludes without further major incident.
They made a deal with the devil, and he’s come to
collect.
Whatever Never Trumpers might have missed in failing to
foresee the president’s militaristic turn, we understood that much at least.
Trump was always grossly unfit for power, destined to corrupt his party and
country if given the chance to lead, and certain to damage American interests
in ways that could never be undone. (“Psychologically, Trump talking about
taking Greenland was the equivalent of a father talking, jokingly, of raping
one of his daughters,” a retired French general memorably told the Wall Street Journal. “Obviously, it’s a new world in
the family after that.”) If it took you until this moment to realize it, you
should get out of politics and find a hobby less destructive to the United
States.
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