Mixed Messages Are Everywhere

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, April 10, 2026

 

I haven’t written about Donald Trump’s threat to kill Iranian civilization. I should say at the outset, I didn’t like it. Threatening to eradicate a civilization is gross (and gratuitous) for all the obvious reasons.

 

But I think there are other things to be said. Like, for starters, it was untrue. I mean this in terms of the text, context, and subtext.

 

On the text, it’s just not true that destroying a lot of Iranian bridges and power plants would kill Iranian civilization. It would do enormous economic and physical damage, to be sure. But it takes a real estate guy to think a civilization is no more than a collection of bridges and buildings. There are a lot of definitions of “civilization” out there. And maybe because I’m a writer, I think civilization has more to do with words and stories. A civilization is the story a people tell themselves about themselves. And there was no way Trump was going to erase that story, literally or figuratively. The worst he could do is write a tragic chapter in that story.

 

Which brings me to the context. I don’t think he was ever going to do what he threatened. It was a bluff. Reasonable people can debate how plausible it was, but I think he would have TACO’d on it no matter what, in part because I don’t think the Iranians were bluffing. They said they would respond in kind to the Gulf states, and they can’t afford to lose their desalination plants and refineries, and neither could the global economy.

 

But the most important reason I didn’t think it would happen was the subtext. Trump thinks it made him sound strong, but I think the Iranians heard desperation. Reporting from the Financial Times and elsewhere suggests that Trump was the one pleading for a ceasefire. We may not have known that in real time, but the Iranians knew it. So when they heard Trump constantly insist that the Iranians were “begging” for a ceasefire, they knew the truth. Likewise when they hear him say that the “new” regime—it’s not a new regime—is so much more reasonable, what they hear is “please be reasonable” and “let’s make a deal, please.”

 

One last point. Michael Brendan Dougherty and I don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of foreign policy stuff. His objections to the Iran war and my own do not line up perfectly. I am more sympathetic to the case for successful regime change than I think he is. But the other day, he made an important point I agree with entirely. “I don’t know about you,” he wrote earlier this week, “but I think that if one of our war aims is to literally erase a civilization from the face of planet Earth, it probably qualifies as a ‘war,’ and that Congress, which has already signaled its willingness to spend lots of money on this, should have the decency to call it such, and give that dignity to our soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The people dying in this are dying in a war.”

 

Again, I don’t think Trump was going to do it, but if erasing a civilization is on the menu and calling it just a “military operation” within the president’s unilateral authority, then the Constitution is simply a dead letter when it comes to Congress’ role in war, and the GOP’s current leaders have forfeited any claim to being constitutionalists.

 

This isn’t regime change.

 

Since I’m handing out attaboys to my old National Review colleagues, I also want to give a shout-out to my friend Andy McCarthy. Since the beginning of the Iran war (also, for the last two decades), he’s been utterly consistent that the Iranian threat isn’t its nuclear program, its ballistic missiles, or its network of terrorist proxies. It’s the regime. You can take away all of a serial killer’s guns and knives, but he’s still a serial killer. Left alone, he’ll find new guns and knives, or simply some other weapon.

 

Trump’s belief that the Iranian regime was fundamentally no different than the Venezuelan regime is the fons et origo of the mess we’re in. And now that Trump wants out of it, he’s doubling down on this error in judgment precisely because he needs to believe the more junior  jihadists he helped jump the line to the top are qualitatively different. So far, there’s zero public evidence this is the case. I don’t play with betting markets, but if I did, I’d bet a tidy sum that Trump (with the help of J.D. Vance’s negotiating acumen) will deliver us a souped-up version of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal by a different name. Sort of like how Trump basically kept NAFTA in his first term but gave it a new name, we might get the JCPOA but rebranded as the MIGA (Make Iran Great Again) deal. I hope I am wrong, and definitely could be. But that’s how it seems to me right now.

 

You get what you recruit.

 

Back in the 1990s, I had a friend who would make fun of K Street dudes in crazy, tricked-out hot rods they looked ridiculous in. When they would drive by begging to be noticed, she would yell, “I’m sorry about your penis!”

 

It was funny at the time.

 

I thought about that when a (different) friend sent me the link to the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment video, promoted with the tagline “ICE is HOT.” He joked, “ICE’s recruitment pitch here is really just … ‘If you’re a closeted gay man with rage issues, come work with us!’”

 

In fairness, I don’t think the appeal is exclusively for closeted gay men with rage issues, however much that might be part of the demographic. I mean, there are a lot of biceps in it. It’s also aimed at straight guys with masculinity and self-esteem issues. There’s a brief shot of an apparently fake romance novel called “I.C.E. Hot” with a MILF-y woman in a pro-choice T-shirt looking adoringly at an ICE agent. (I checked Amazon to see if it’s real. I couldn’t find it, but I did find something sufficiently troubling that I will only link to it here with a caution that you will never be the same if you read it. Have an emetic ready.)

 

The more disturbing thing about the ICE video is that for big stretches of it, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a recruitment ad for the Wagner Group.

 

Melania speaks.

 

The nice thing about phoning in today’s “news”letter as a blog, other than nostalgia, is that I can address some things I normally wouldn’t because they aren’t necessarily worthy of a whole “news”letter.

 

When I got back to my hotel room last night after dinner, I saw that several friends had texted me about Melania Trump’s press conference, which apparently “blindsided” her husband and the White House. Pretty much everyone who texted me had the same response as pretty much everyone who didn’t text me. What on earth does Melania think is coming down the pike that she thinks she has to get out in front of it?

 

Let me be clear: I have no idea. But if there is nothing coming down the pike, she violated one of the oldest rules of comms, and really of life. What I mean is, if I were to drop an “emergency podcast”—pretty much as close as I can get to an impromptu press conference—and declare “these lies about me and my backyard sheep have no merit and must stop immediately,” it would raise more questions about Mabel and Shirley—they’re decent, God-fearing sheep, damn it—than it would put to rest.

 

But I honestly have no idea why she made her appeal to hold hearings for Epstein survivors or why she—seemingly—preemptively addressed rumors about her and Epstein. Maybe she is much more online than we realized and was in some 4chan chatroom and had enough of QAnonStormTrooperTK41’s b.s. Or maybe a reporter asked Melania for comments about some story or rumor and freaked out. Or maybe she’s trying to make life more difficult for her husband. I truly have no idea.

 

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking, reading, or writing about Melania Trump. But I’ve always had a soft spot for her and not just because she’s so good-looking. I don’t base this on much more than Mar-a-Lago Kremlinology and various social media videos of her rolling her eyes when Trump talks or refusing to hold his hand. But I’ve long believed that she really doesn’t like her husband very much.

 

Obviously, I could be wrong. But she wouldn’t be the only first lady to have mixed emotions about her husband. People say that Michelle Obama resents Barack. I have no idea if that is true, but I suspect that if it is, it’s a resentment at a very high level of abstraction, similar to Hillary Clinton’s rejection of the idea that she should just make cookies and stand by her man like Tammy Wynette and all that. In other words, I think Michelle’s alleged hard feelings towards Barack (again, if true) stem from a certain amount of frustration with a “system” that consigns wives of politicians to roles some women just can’t get comfortable with. I think that’s perfectly understandable.

 

The thing is, I think Melania really wanted to be Jackie Kennedy, but Donald Trump can’t play the JFK role. Her anger feels like the kind of contempt that a middle-class, dues-paying Slovene arriviste would have for her rich gypsy husband.