Top historian: Trump's obscene war messaging breaks all presidential norms

President Donald Trump’s profane public statements about the Iran war are unprecedented, according to a top presidential historian.

“Trump’s Easter Sunday blast at the Iranians thus offered a stark contrast with even his most profane predecessors,” wrote top presidential historian Barbara A. Perry in The Atlantic on Monday. Perry specifically denounced Trump’s Easter post on his social media platform, Truth Social, in which he wrote that “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—— Strait, you crazy b------, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Perry pointed out that, while previous presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were notoriously profane in private, they tried to avoid blue language in public. By contrast, Trump is not only being obscene, he is doing so about that most delicate and sensitive of subjects — war and peace.

“All previous presidents have wanted to appear serious, dignified, and statesmanlike when speaking to their fellow Americans and the world about war,” Perry wrote. “Not every commander in chief can rival Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg—or even Franklin D. Roosevelt describing Japan’s ‘unprovoked and dastardly attack on Sunday, December 7, 1941’ as a ‘day that will live in infamy’—but the others have all tried.”

For example, Perry pointed to President John F. Kennedy’s speech during the Cuban missile crisis and Johnson’s graceful response to Pope Paul VI’s call for peace in Vietnam.

“It’s hard to imagine Trump responding as graciously to the American-born Pope Leo XIV’s Easter declaration: ‘Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have power to unleash wars choose peace,’” Perry wrote. She added that President Jimmy Carter never engaged in angry outbursts during the Iranian hostage crisis, nor did President Ronald Reagan after a suicide bomber in Lebanon killed 241 U.S. Marine in their Beirut barracks.

“After the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush’s Oval Office address to a terrified nation borrowed Reagan’s term, despicable, to describe the use of civilian aircraft as missiles to kill more than 3,000 people,” Perry wrote. “A born-again Christian, Bush also classified the act of terrorism as ‘evil’ and declared that the nation’s ‘quiet, unyielding anger’ would forge the ‘steel of American resolve.’ Yet in a Trumpian preview, he learned from his May 2003 ‘Mission Accomplished’ performance, about what would become an endless war of choice in Iraq, that boasting can be counterproductive.”

For all of their faults, however, Perry observed that these presidents still showed respect for the solemnity and gravity of war. Trump lacks this entirely.

He is also disrupting the chain of command with his calls for war crimes like destroying Iranian infrastructure and shooting surrendered soldiers. Reporting for The Guardian on Monday, senior international correspondent Julian Borger argued Trump has created an “urgent matter for chain of command" for military officers grapple as he orders them to “commit war crimes.’

As the report noted, "A military aide who is always close to the president would open the 'nuclear football,' a briefcase containing nuclear strike options as well as the codes to confirm his presidential authority. The only way to stop the order would be for those in the chain of command to deem it illegal."

Borger also wrote that “in recent days, Trump has amplified his threats, telling an ABC reporter that if Iran does not meet his demands ‘we’re blowing up the whole country.’ Asked if anything was off limits, he replied: ‘Very little.’ The extremity of Trump’s threats, coupled with his growing desperation to find a way out of the conflict, has increased fears that a volatile president could try to use a nuclear weapon.”

Also on Monday The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last wrote that “the walls are closing in” on Trump, with Americans who are not part of his hard core base turning on him in droves. For this reason, the Iranian government can hurt Trump’s war effort by raising gas prices and thereby harming him politically.

“This isn’t just about dunking on Trump,” Last explained. “It’s about understanding just how weak America’s position is right now. The walls are closing in not just on Trump, but on the old global order.”

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