Heather Cox Richardson reviews Trump’s erratic behavior since he started a war against Iran. He repeatedly announces that he has won the war, that negotiations are going well, and then threatens Iran with obliteration. Is this incoherence “the art of the deal” or is something else going on?
Remember the days when foreign policy was debated by experienced diplomats of the National Security council behind closed doors? When policies were the result of deliberation, not announced at 3 am on social media by the President, acting alone to vent his grievances? Remember when negotiations were led by the Secretary of State, not the President’s son-in-law?
That’s the way it used to be done. That’s the way it’s done in other countries. In the U.S., today, in the Trump era, one man makes policy in the middle of the night, depending on his whim.
At 8:03 this morning, Easter Sunday, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “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*ckin’ Strait, you crazy b*stards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
There are many things that could be going on with this ultimatum, which actually doesn’t sound like Trump’s usual style, in the same way the post of yesterday morning didn’t.
The post appears to be threatening to commit war crimes by attacking civilian infrastructure, and it appears to suggest Trump is considering using tactical nuclear weapons. He emphasized the production of such weapons in his first administration. He seemed to encourage this interpretation in an interview with Rachel Scott of ABC News today. She said Trump “told me the conflict should be over in days, not weeks but if no deal is made he’s blowing up the whole country with ‘very little’ off the table. ‘If [it] happens, it happens. And if it doesn’t, we’re blowing up the whole country,’ he said. I asked if there’s anything off limits. ‘Very little,’ he said.”
In 2023 a book by New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt alleged that in 2017, when Trump was warning North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on social media that North Korea would be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” behind closed doors he was talking about launching a preemptive strike against North Korea and of using a nuclear weapon against the country and blaming someone else for the strike .
Schmidt reports that Trump’s White House chief of staff at the time, retired U.S. Marine Corps General John Kelly, brought military leaders to try to explain to Trump why that would be a bad idea and finally got him to move away from the plan by telling him he could prove he was the “greatest salesman in the world” by finding a diplomatic solution to his fight with the North Korean leader.
In his own book about that period, journalist Bob Woodward wrote: “The American people had little idea that July through September of 2017 had been so dangerous.”
But Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo told Woodward: “We never knew whether it was real or whether it was a bluff.”
And that is another way to look at the post from Trump’s social media account: that he is panicked that he has not been able to bully other countries into fixing the mess he created by attacking Iran and precipitating the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and is now simply trying to bully Iran. In The Guardian last Monday, Sidney Blumenthal noted that Trump “has declared ‘victory’ more than eight times,” says he has “won” more than ten times, and said Iranian forces have been “obliterated” or suffered “obliteration” more than six times. Blumenthal noted Trump is now threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power grid and has used the words “decimate” or “decimation” at least six times.
Trump’s crazy post does, after all, push back yet again the deadline for his threats to rain destruction on Iran, which he then extended again in another post at 12:38 P.M. saying: “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!”
This dynamic was not lost on Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, who noted: “It was March 23rd. Then March 27th. Then March 30th. Then he gave that weird address on April 1st. [N]ew deadline April 4th. Then April 6th at 7 AM. Then April 7th at 8 PM. And now another address tomorrow at 1 PM. The chaos is intentional.” She also noted that his deadlines and his abandonment of them often seem tied to the rhythms of the stock market.
In an interview with Barak Ravid of Axios today shortly after this morning’s post, Trump reiterated that “if they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there” but also said the U.S. is “in deep negotiations” with Iran and that he thinks a deal can be reached. Trump told Ravid that his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—not Secretary of State Marco Rubio—are talking with the Iranians. Sources told Ravid that mediators from Pakistan, Egypt, and Türkiye are facilitating the talks.
But Iranian officials are refusing to deal with Witkoff and Kushner after they apparently misunderstood earlier negotiations and instead told Trump the talks weren’t going well before he launched strikes. Neither Witkoff nor Kushner is a trained diplomat, and both have deep financial ties to the Middle East. Notably, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who urged Trump to start the Iran war, has invested at least $2 billion in Kushner’s private equity firm.
On March 13, Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell of the New York Times reported that Kushner is trying to raise $5 billion or more for his private equity firm from Middle East governments at the same time as he is also supposed to be negotiating peace in the region.
But Stephen Kalin, Eliot Brown, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has already cost the Saudis about $10 billion, and the grand plans of MBS were already falling short of money. Some of those plans were U.S. investments. The reporters note that even before the war, the Saudi’s sovereign-wealth fund, the same one that invested in Kushner’s private equity firm, had sold much of its U.S. stock portfolio. Last year, MBS promised to invest up to $1 trillion in the U.S. Those investments are now under review.
Regardless of the inspiration for Trump’s post, by itself it tells a very clear story. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi posted: “The American president has lost his mind.”
Journalist Steven Beschloss wrote: “This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “If I were in Trump’s Cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment. This is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.”
The 25th Amendment establishes a process through which a majority of the Cabinet and the Vice President, or another body Congress designates, can remove a president deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Murphy was not the only one thinking along those lines. Hollie Silverman of Newsweekreported that on the prediction market platform Kalshi, which allows traders to buy “yes” or “no” shares on the question “Will the 25th Amendment be used during Trump’s presidency?” “yes” has moved in recent days from 28.6% to 35.1%.
—
Notes:
X:
ChrisMurphyCT/status/2040776740465758422
Bluesky:
momcjl.bsky.social/post/3mis5h2vqf22j
atrupar.com/post/3mircanvivc27
brandonfriedman.bsky.social/post/3mirrdrhshc2e
muellershewrote.com/post/3mirt6ivxbs2j
muellershewrote.com/post/3mirrzjeacc2j
markey.senate.gov/post/3mirmazhmfs2j
rrkennison.bsky.social/post/3mirnrdmn2k2p
frankfigliuzzi.bsky.social/post/3miqtagxuhs2o
stevenbeschloss.bsky.social/post/3miqrghkdds2n
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© 2026 Heather Cox Richardson
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
“There are many things that could be going on with this ultimatum, which actually doesn’t sound like Trump’s usual style….
In what way doesn’t it? Isn’t that what’s been wrong with Trump all along? His threatening/bloviating/erratic behavior? How is this any different? In fact, Richardson herself goes on to say that this has happened before. Trump is certainly unhinged, but not in any new way that suggests he has recently “lost his mind”.
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GOD, HELP US.
FRONTOTEMPORAL DEMENTIA is what clinical psychiatrists have diagnosed Trump as having, based on his erratic behavior.
ANGRY, CURSE-WORD-FILLED outbursts are one of the characteristic behaviors of someone who has frontotemporal dementia. Trump’s outbursts even include public use of the F-word in speeches which is an embarrassment to America and something that no President has ever done in public in front of the entire world.
DELUSIONS are another behavior someone with frontotemporal dementia shows, such as Trump’s delusional insistence that Iran was building nuclear weapons, while at the same time he was saying that, Trump’s own White House officials were telling Congress under oath that Iran was not building nuclear weapons and was no threat to the United States.
IS TRUMP SIGNALLING TO US THAT HE WILL DIE SOON? People are wondering why Trump has been making remarks about if he will get into heaven. “I don’t think that there’s anything going to get me into heaven…I really don’t,” he said during a TV interview on Fox News with Fox’s Peter Doocy.
Psychiatrists tell us that people begin to think about their chances of getting into heaven when they know that their death is near. In psychiatry, it’s known as “DEATH ANXIETY”.
People with Death Anxiety can’t sleep at night (Trump texts throughout most nights) so they are drowsy during the day (Trump falls asleep even in high level cabinet meetings), they become mentally confused when giving talks (Trump wanders off-topic constantly), and they frequently rage at others the way that Trump again and again rages at reporters and even at the leaders of our allied nations.
HEART FAILURE: Trump’s swollen legs and ankles are a classic indication of congestive heart failure, a diagnosis supported by the constant bruises in the backs of his hands which are typical of frequent IVs to drain excessive fluids from his body to delay inevitable heart failure as long as possible. That could be at any minute.
WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL OF US if during one of Trump’s 3 a.m. rants on social media, Trump is struck with the delusional dementia belief that China is about to launch missiles at us and so Trump orders a pre-emptive nuclear missile strike? There is no place for us to hide from China’s missile response to that delusion. Nuclear missiles will fly in both directions, the atmosphere of the entire planet will become toxic, and we all die…Earth dies.
God, help us.
On Mon, Apr 6, 2026 at 8:00 AM Diane Ravitch’s blog < comment-reply@wordpress.com> wrote:
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That we can have a POTUS so unhinged and have zero pushback from the majority party in the senate and house is definitive proof that our constitutional structure is fatally flawed.
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I think you are correct. The flaw in the constitution exists where the founding fathers thought there would be honest but power hungry men leading the government. The majority of the powerful people would disagree about what they needed to do, but there would be honesty. Provisions for dealing with dishonesty were in the constitution, but were dependent on different interests holding competing interests in check.
This is hardly the case now. We live in an era characterized by such corruption that one thinks of medieval kings and powerful barons jockeying for position and power. In those days, government was pretty much like a crime family.
The more things change
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Yeah, they didn’t anticipate the circumstance where a president would have complete control over one of only two political parties.
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The Founding Fathers never dreamed of a situation where those closest to the President got inside information, which they used to place winning bets in the stock market and make millions. They never imagined a President who sold pardons. They never imagined a Congress who ignored the Emoluments Clause. They never imagined a President whose family invested in foreign properties while negotiating on behalf of the government because conflicts of interest don’t exist anymore. One could go on and on with Congress’ indifference to Trump’s corruption and his turning the Justice Department into an instrument of his power.
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Correction: “In THESE days, government IS A crime family.
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We are in deep dodo
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Well or not, it’s possible no action will be taken before 1/21/27. Why? The billionaire tech bros’ handpicked VP can only run for one term of his own if he becomes president before that date, and it seems likely that his backers want him eligible for two.
My theory has always been that interested parties will “Weekend At Bernie’s” or “Dave” the demented dude if they have to…until that 22nd amendment eligibility date is reached. Might be worth a small bet on Polymarket.
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