The 25th Amendment Exists for This Exact Moment

At 8:06 AM Eastern time on April 7th, 2026, the President of the United States posted this to "Truth" Social: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

Day 39. And this is where we are.

Trump has set and extended his Strait of Hormuz deadline four separate times since March 22nd, each time escalating both the rhetoric and the military action in the intervening days, and each time backing down when the consequences materialized. The rhetoric has now arrived at threatening to exterminate a 7,000-year-old civilization of 90 million people.

I refuse to mince words any longer. Donald Trump is a convicted felon on 34 counts, been found liable for sexual abuse. His name appears thousands of times throughout the FBI files released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act in connection with allegations of child sexual assault the Bureau investigated dating back to the 1990s.

March 22: The first ultimatum

On March 22nd, Trump posted to "Truth" Social at 11:44 PM GMT demanding that Iran "FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS," and threatening that "the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST." Brent crude climbed to approximately $114 per barrel and US crude hit $100.29. Iran's Col. Ebrahim Zolfaqari warned that if Iran's energy infrastructure is attacked, "fuel, energy, information technology systems and desalination infrastructure used by America and the regime in the region will be struck." Trump claimed the US was "weeks ahead of schedule" and denied seeking negotiations.

March 23: The first retreat

Twelve hours before his own deadline, Trump took to "Truth" Social to announce that both countries had "productive conversations" and instructed "THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD." Iran denied any talks were occurring. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf called Trump's claims "fake news used to manipulate financial and oil markets." Iran's Armed Forces spokesman asked: "Has the level of your inner struggle reached the stage of you negotiating with yourself?" The five-day postponement coincided with $580 million in oil futures purchased in a single minute at 6:49 AM on March 23rd, fifteen minutes before Trump posted about "very good and productive conversations," and $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures purchased five minutes before the post went live, trades that added $1.7 trillion to US stock values and pushed oil down $17 in minutes. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called it treason.

March 26: The second retreat

Five days later, with no deal, no reopened strait, and no consequence for the countless and enumerable lies, Trump extended the deadline by 10 more days, to April 6th at 8 PM Eastern, posting that "Talks are ongoing and, despite erroneous statements to the contrary by the Fake News Media, and others, they are going very well." At a cabinet meeting that same day, he revised his war timeline upward from the original "four to five weeks" projection to "four to six weeks" while still claiming to be "extremely ahead of schedule" and insisting that "the Iranian regime is now admitting to itself that they have been decisively defeated." Iran had made no such admission. The strait remained closed. The war had expanded to include Lebanon ground operations, Houthi entry from Yemen, and strikes across the Gulf states.

March 30: The desalination plants

Four days before his own April 6th deadline, Trump posted on "Truth" Social celebrating "great progress" in talks while simultaneously expanding his target list to include Iran's desalination plants, the water supply for a country already approaching what Foreign Policy described as "water bankruptcy." "We will conclude our lovely 'stay' in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!)," he wrote.

Amnesty International stated that Trump's threats to attack Iran's power plants constituted "a threat to commit war crimes."

April 4: "All Hell will reign down"

On April 4th, with his own April 6th deadline approaching and no deal materializing, Trump posted a new 48-hour ultimatum: "48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them."

Iran's central military command responded by calling the threat "a helpless, nervous, unbalanced and stupid action." That same day, US-Israeli strikes hit the Mahshahr petrochemical complex in Khuzestan province, directly striking five plants and wounding at least five people.

April 5: Easter Sunday

On the holiest day in the Christian calendar, while the Secretary of Defense with a Crusader's Cross tattooed across his chest oversaw a war that commanders on military bases had described to their troops as ordained by Jesus to cause Armageddon, Donald Trump posted to "Truth" Social at 8:03 AM: "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." The post ended with "Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP." He skipped church. He told ABC News' Rachel Scott that if there was no deal in the next 48 hours, "We're blowing up the whole country." Snopes and Lead Stories both had to publish fact checks confirming the post was real because people didn't believe the President of the United States actually wrote it.

April 6: "The entire country can be taken out in one night"

At a White House press conference on April 6th, ostensibly celebrating the rescue of a downed F-15E pilot, Trump extended his deadline one more time, from April 6th to 8 PM Tuesday, April 7th, the fourth extension of a deadline that was first set for March 24th. Asked whether the war was winding down or escalating, he said "I don't know. It depends what they do." He then laid out what ABC News reported as a four-hour plan for "complete demolition": "Every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o'clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again. I mean, complete demolition by 12 o'clock. And it will happen over a period of four hours if we want it to." Asked if bombing civilian infrastructure constituted a war crime, he said he was "not at all" concerned. Asked how destroying power plants would help the Iranian people, he said: "The Iranian people, when they don't hear bombs go off, they're upset. They want to hear bombs, because they want to be free." He claimed to have "numerous intercepts" of Iranians saying "Please keep bombing." No evidence was provided. Oil jumped from $112 to $114 per barrel during the remarks. On Israeli Channel 13, the evening newscast displayed a large digital clock counting down the hours and minutes to Tuesday's deadline.

April 7: "A whole civilization will die tonight"

And so we arrive at today. Twelve hours before a deadline he has set and broken four times, the President posted what Piers Morgan called "a brazen pre-admission of genocide," what Alex Jones called "a war crime," what Iran's permanent representative to the United Nations called "incitement to war crimes and potentially genocide," what France's Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said violates "the rules of war, international law," and what the UN Secretary-General warned constitutes threats against civilian infrastructure that are "banned under international law."

The US military struck more than 50 military targets on Kharg Island, Iran's main oil export hub, for the second time since the war began. Israeli warplanes struck bridges in Tehran, Karaj, Tabriz, Kashan, and Qom, hit a petrochemical site in Shiraz, and destroyed half of the Khorrasaniha Synagogue and nearby residential buildings in Tehran. Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the vote falling 11-2 with two abstentions, hours before the deadline. Iran severed all remaining diplomatic channels with the United States. The State Department ordered all Americans in Bahrain to shelter in place.

FBI files released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act contained severe allegations of ties between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein involving minors, allegations the Bureau investigated over decades, and the Department of Justice came under fire for withholding files related to accusations of child sexual assault. In 2016, a woman using the pseudonym "Katie Johnson" filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Trump and Epstein forcibly raped her when she was 13 years old at Epstein's Manhattan residence in 1994. The case was dropped before trial, reportedly due to death threats.

The human chains

Hours before the deadline, Alireza Rahimi, secretary of Iran's Supreme Council of Youth and Adolescents, issued a video message calling on "all young people, athletes, artists, students and university students and their professors" to form human chains around power plants. Because the President of the United States threatened to bomb every last one of them by midnight. Images of Iranians surrounding power plants began circulating on local media. President Masoud Pezeshkian posted on X that 14 million Iranians had answered state media and text message campaigns urging people to volunteer to fight, and wrote: "I too have been, am, and will remain ready to give my life for Iran." A Revolutionary Guard general urged parents to send their children to man checkpoints that have been repeatedly targeted in airstrikes. The Guard warned that Iran would "deprive the US and its allies of the region's oil and gas for years" and expand attacks across the Gulf region if Trump carries out his threat.

In Tehran, a young teacher told the Associated Press that many opponents of Iran's Islamic system had initially hoped Trump's attacks would quickly topple it, and that as the war drags on she fears strikes will spread chaos and take everything: "If we don't have the internet, and if we don't have electricity, water, and gas, we're really going back to the Stone Age, as Trump said." She spoke on condition of anonymity for her safety.

Everyone knows

The backlash to "a whole civilization will die tonight" crossed every line in a way that hasn't happened since the war began. Former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once among Trump's most fervent loyalists before their public falling out, called for his removal from office via the 25th Amendment. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Trump an "extremely sick person." House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called for Congress to "immediately end this reckless war of choice in Iran before Donald Trump plunges us into World War III." Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, told NBC News that Trump was "openly threatening collective punishment, targeting not the Iranian military but the Iranian people," and noted that "attacking civilians is a war crime" and "so is making threats with the aim of terrorizing the civilian population," meaning that threatening to carry out a war crime is itself potentially a war crime under international humanitarian law. The Intercept ran a piece headlined "With Trump Threatening a Genocide, Military Must Disobey His Orders," citing former Pentagon officials. Alex Jones called it "a war crime."

When Alex Jones is calling your actions a war crime, you have left the gravitational field of any recognizable political discourse.

Piers Morgan called it "a brazen pre-admission of genocide." Iran's permanent UN representative Amir-Saeid Iravani said the threats "constitute incitement to war crimes and potentially genocide." France's Foreign Minister stated that attacks targeting civilian and energy infrastructure "are barred by the rules of war, international law" and warned they would "trigger a new phase of escalation, of reprisals, that would drag the region and the world economy into a vicious circle." UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk deplored "the rhetoric being used over the last two weeks by all parties, including the latest threats to annihilate a whole civilization and to target civilian infrastructure." Trump said he was "not at all" concerned about committing war crimes.

The 25th Amendment exists for this exact moment

Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that when the Vice President and a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President immediately assumes those powers as Acting President. The section has never been invoked.

It was written for a moment exactly like this one.

This is a president who on March 2nd projected the war would take "four to five weeks" and claimed to be "ahead of schedule," who on March 9th called it "very complete, pretty much" and then "a little excursion," who on March 12th said there was "practically nothing left to target" while his own Defense Secretary announced strikes were ramping up to the highest volume yet, who on March 19th posted about "winding down" while deploying 4,000 more troops and refusing a ceasefire, who on March 24th declared "we've won this" while the Strait of Hormuz remained closed, who on April 6th was asked point-blank whether the war was winding down or escalating and answered "I don't know." Three current US officials told NBC News that the Pentagon prepares a daily briefing for Trump consisting of approximately two minutes of footage showing the most visually impressive strikes, described by one official as clips of "stuff blowing up," and that Trump wasn't initially briefed about five US Air Force refueling planes hit at Prince Sultan Air Base, learning of it from media reports instead. He then used the curated videos to question why media coverage didn't match the success he was seeing on screen.

Tonight, Donald Trump is threatening to destroy every bridge, every power plant, and every piece of critical infrastructure in a country of 90 million people, while Iranian students form human chains around the buildings he promised to bomb.

The Vice President and the Cabinet have the constitutional authority to act right now, today, before 8 PM. Every hour they don't is an hour they choose to let this person hold the fate of 90 million people in his hands. The 25th Amendment was not written as a theoretical exercise. It was written because the framers understood that a day like today would come, and that the only thing standing between a president this dangerous and the catastrophe he is openly promising would be the willingness of the people around him to say, finally, enough.

It is 5 PM Eastern. The deadline is three hours away. Invoke it.

— dingo__dog