Ruins of an apartment building in Beirut after a barrage of Israeli airstrikes, backed by the US in early April. Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0
“Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”
– 1 Samuel 15:3
“’Remember what Amalek did to you’ (Deuteronomy 25:17). We remember and we fight.”
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
– Donald J. Trump
On his 80th birthday, as if it were a present to himself to compensate for his thunderously failed, storm-drenched UFC circus, Donald Trump announced that he (or Vice President Vance?) had reached an peace deal with Iran to be signed on Friday that he claims would end what he has variously described as an “excursion,” “combat operation,” and “war.” Had the announcement come from anyone else, it might be credible. Trump has also promised that he would not use nuclear weapons against Iran, but at that time he also claimed he had “decimated” its military. However, coming from our petulant Pinocchio, such assurances invite cautious skepticism. To say that Trump has lied to us before would be a massive understatement, as anyone who has viewed the present state of the U.S. economy or the wreckage of what was once the White House East Wing – which he assured us would be left “untouched” during construction of his $200 million $400 million $1.4 billion ballroom-bunker – can attest.
It is far too early to plan a victory parade. A lot can happen between now and Friday. And even if the agreement is signed and the blockade ends, reopening the Strait of Hormuz will be no easy task, with mines still scattered throughout its waters. The issue of Iran’s enriched uranium remains unresolved. Israel continues to be the wild card, and America’s unwillingness or inability to restrain it only adds to the uncertainty. Reportedly, one of the terms of the agreement is that Israel cease its attacks on Lebanon, a condition that Israel will likely not honor, and that will almost certainly derail the agreement even as the ink dries. More importantly, can Iran trust a president who pulled the U.S. out of the first agreement and who openly supports Israeli terrorism under the guise of self-defense?
So don’t be surprised if, in the end, Trump the self-anointed “peace maker” opts to nuke Iran, for the same reason he opted to go to war with it in the first place: there is nothing to prevent him. There are no functioning mechanisms to stop him, though they do exist: impeachment, the 25th Amendment, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. However, instead of invoking them, odds are we will let him and debate, after the fact, whether he should have. The writing is already on the wall: Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and despite the urging of six congressional Democrats, the military and intelligence community have shown they will obey unlawful orders, openly committing war crimes in theCaribbean and Iran at the behest of a felonious, predatory narcissist. (It speaks volumes about our republic when protecting the rule of law becomes a strictly partisan exercise.)
Indeed, Trump’s narcissism may also motivate his decision. His approval ratings are tanking, even among Republican and erstwhile MAGA loyalists; his power has been questioned through a number of humiliating defeats: the tarp-hidden removal of his name from the Kennedy Center (days later, the tarp still remains), his court-challenged Jan. 6 $1.8 billion slush fund, his canceled Freedom Idiocracy 250 Concert. However, if Trump does nuke Iran, it will not be because he hopes to regain his fleeting popularity; it will be out of spite and a sheer, vindictive assertion of power. What better way to display that power, to assert one’s God-like superiority, than to drop what Trump has termed the “other N-word,” slyly dog-whistling an actual slur he has been accused of using in private, as if to suggest that the real danger rests in uttering the term rather than deploying the weapon itself.
Should Trump decide to nuke Iran, it will not be carried out covertly. Who needs Pentagon Papers-style leaks or Wikileaks when his illegal constitutional violations and outright crimes are committed openly, broadcast in real time, and defended by state-sanctioned right-wing media outlets, with little public or congressional pushback. This alone shows how low America has sunk, lower than the fishing boats it has illegally bombed into oblivion.
In lockstep with past administrations, Trump has aligned the country with Israel, which is now engaged in a U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, delivering with conventional weapons levels of explosive yield that exceed those used inDresden and even the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Both America and Israel have undermined the postwar paradigm that was meant to curtail the excesses of modern warfare, including the use of weapons – conventional and nuclear – capable of annihilating entire cities. As “democracies,” they are theoretically more reflective of the will of their citizens than the repressive governments of the countries they seek to obliterate. If collective punishment is to be meted out, it raises the uncomfortable question of whether these actions represent those of an aberrant leadership or the will of the people themselves. It is a question that critically undermines the moral superiority these same nations claim to hold over their adversaries.
For many Americans, the fear of nuclear weapons derives more from fiction than fact, shaped by the belief that they will be the target, not the wielder, of these weapons of mass destruction, unless foolishly provoked by their enemies. Yet, with the exception of the “nuclear guinea pigs” of the Cold War – soldiers and civilian populations purposelyexposed to radiation during U.S. nuclear tests – the only fallout Americans have experienced since dropping the first atomic bombs in 1945 has been cultural: a slew of post-apocalyptic sci-fi B-movies and TV shows, video games, tasteless pin-ups of mushroom-cloud-shrouded blonde “bombshells,” and streaming entertainments whose ads treat nuclear annihilation as a “blast.”
Even in his defense of a disproportionate response, a category into which the use of nuclear weapons most certainly falls, Trump cites The West Wing’s Josiah Bartlet, a fictional TV President who, notably, rejects the policy by the episode’s end (perhaps Trump nodded off during the denouement). But what did you expect from a deluded authoritarian who inhabits an imaginary world populated by the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter and whose very real but inauthentic “Secretary of War” theatrically recites Biblical passages lifted straight from Pulp Fiction.
Americans have been shielded from horrific images of the real-world consequences of nuclear weapons. Long before Donald Trump’s efforts to whitewash American history, “patriotic” cancel culture had reared its censorious head – and won. In 1995, the Smithsonian’s plan to display the human devastation of the bombs on the Japanese people was canceled after veterans’ groups protested. Ultimately, a sanitized version focusing on the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 that dropped the first A-bomb on Hiroshima, effectively erased any acknowledgment of the suffering that postwar international frameworks such as the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the UN Charter were created to prevent.
Instead, the exhibition was turned into a celebration of the bomber and, in the words of an American Legion resolution, “the heroic men who flew her,” discarding any questions about “the moral and political wisdom involved in the dropping of the atomic bomb” almost as cavalierly as they dropped their nuclear ordnance, since to include them, in its view, “infers [sic] that America was somehow wrong and her loyal airmen somehow criminal in carrying out this act of war which, in fact, hastened the war’s end and preserved the lives of countless American and Japanese.”
As if, in the end, Americans truly gave a damn about the Japanese civilian lives they incinerated and vaporized.
Whether it is the canceled 1995 Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit or in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer – which prefers to treat its audience to a sex scene in which Oppenheimer’s famous Bhagavad-Gita-quoting lament-cum-boast “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” serves as a backdrop for coitus – mainstream narratives refuse to show a single frame of the bomb’s real consequences. Its horrors continue to be systematically erased, sanitized from public discourse. The American public is rarely confronted with the charred bodies, radiation-scarred survivors, or generational trauma inflicted on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Such indifference to human suffering is not a relic of some less enlightened past. As evidenced by the destruction of Gaza and its people, then as now, our institutions show us only the shattered ruins of cities – your tax dollars and “superior” military-industrial complex at work; never the bleeding carcasses or the maimed, disfigured human beings left in the ruins.
The present echoes the past and haunts our future.
Apparently, the cliché of the mad president with access to nuclear codes ready to obliterate America’s enemies – and the world with it – is no longer taken seriously, if it ever was. Indeed, how could anyone seriously consider such a possibility? It would be like, well, imagining a fascist America, a Mango Mussolini. Surely it can’t happen here!
When Trump intimates that he might nuke Iran, he is not taken literally. As with his boast about grabbing pussies, it is treated as just more locker-room talk. It is assumed that the provocateur-in-chief, a former reality-television host who built his public image on spectacle and braggadocio, is bluffing or indulging his branded hyperbolic bravado. We are encouraged not to take him at his word.
What this perspective fails to recognize, however, is that Trump does carry out many of his promises, he simply obfuscates the price and who ultimately pays it. Trump did build his wall. He did, both ideologically and physically, reshape the White House by tearing down a third of it and building an Eyesore Tower on its South Lawn. He did impose his sweeping global baseline tariffs. He has deployed the military for mass deportations. All paid for by American taxpayers. With few exceptions, he has largely succeeded in dismantling American institutions and American belief in them, proving himself more of a danger to the republic than the phantasmic, nuclear-armed Iran he fears, a bogeyman whose perceived threat his own policies quite literally enriched.
Nor is it reassuring that resistance to Trump’s excesses has come only after he has already done the deed. His name has been removed from the Kennedy Center, his Jan. 6 slush fund is potentially terminated, and his ballroom temporarily nixed, but only after the damage has been inflicted. How will he respond to this string of humiliations, as each day his power erodes? Will a panicked Trump lash out at Iran as the American people continue to reject him and his policies?
A sane person wouldn’t make genocidal threats. Yet Trump, like his second BFF Benjamin Netanyahu, casually invokes the language of genocide. The difference is that Trump has so far refrained from carrying out such threats against Iran.
This may change.
Trump has never shown any concern for the consequences of his actions unless they are self-enriching. COVID-19, his beloved inflation, the erosion of global alliances – none of these have given him pause. Why, then, would the use of nuclear weapons concern him? He already has a precedent for justifying their use: they will end an interminable on-again-off-again “excursion/combat operation/war” and save American lives, finally achieving, despite his copious and contradictory lies, the obliteration of the Iranian military.
Civilian casualties? Trump has already intimated they are of no concern to him. How does one destroy a “whole civilization” without killing civilians? And if such statements were not enough to convince us, he has already killed 175 Iranians, mostly schoolgirls, with conventional weapons, without breaking a sweat. Meanwhile, the more cynically savvy Netanyahu conceals his genocidal intentions by claiming only Hamas is the target.
Given what Trump has already done and gotten away with – the damage to America’s global image, the alienation of its allies, his active support of the ethnic cleansing at home and abroad – why should we assume that “wiping out an entire civilization” would be met with anything other than rhetorical pushback? Russia and China would benefit and would not need to launch a counterattack and risk World War III simply because Trump, having stripped America of any trace of moral authority, would have given them, as America has already done for Israel, justification to engage in their own expansionist territorial ambitions.
And so, should Trump, to borrow a vile euphemism used by Israeli officials to trivialize the systematic slaughter of Palestinians, “mow the grass” in Iran, the world would be left to grapple with the irreversible consequences of a leader whose threats were dismissed until the moment he carried them out.
He may also be motivated to act out of fear that his grip on power is waning, that he is being perceived as a paper tiger – all bluff and bluster, but ultimately weak, living up to the derisive “TACO” sobriquet that has defined his presidency. And what better way, in his mind, to demonstrate his potency than by reaching for the most powerful tool in America’s arsenal and securing a place in history, regardless of the cost.
Knowing Trump, and his penchant for hijacking anniversaries, he might even choose August 6, the 81st anniversary of Hiroshima, as the date for his exercise in nuclear brinkmanship, not only out of sheer petty vindictiveness, but to show that he sees himself as existing above the law and the restraints of human decency.
The question is who will rise up to prove him wrong.
The post The Other “N-Word”: Trump, America, the Politics of Erasure, and the Sanitization of Atrocity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John G. Russell.
John G. Russell | Radio Free (2026-06-19T05:52:01+00:00) The Other “N-Word”: Trump, America, the Politics of Erasure, and the Sanitization of Atrocity. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2026/06/19/the-other-n-word-trump-america-the-politics-of-erasure-and-the-sanitization-of-atrocity/
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