U.S. President Donald Trump arrives for a press briefing at the White House, following the Supreme Court's ruling that Trump had exceeded his authority when he imposed tariffs, in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 20, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump may have called a ceasefire with Iran but he has still “gravely damaged the US,” according to the senior editor of a conservative publication.
“What does seem clear amid the fog of war, however, is that Trump’s maximalist, annihilationist rhetoric — talk of destroying Iranian ‘civilization,’ ‘never to be brought back again,’ taking out ‘the entire country,’ bombing it ‘into the stone age,’ targeting critical civilian infrastructure like power plants — has already gravely damaged the United States,” wrote John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist. “Why? Because America should only wage just wars, and waging a just war means being subject to certain restraints. Just war precludes immoral means — like the mass killing of civilians — to achieve victory.”
Perhaps anticipating MAGA defenders saying that Trump merely issued a threat, Davidson argued that even making the threat to commit genocide damages a nation’s moral standing.
“Simply put, threatening to do something intrinsically immoral, even if you don’t actually do it, is wrong,” Davidson argued. “This is especially true in times of war, when a certain level of deception is licit and sometimes necessary. Trump’s defenders will retreat to this point, saying he is simply employing maximalist rhetoric as a negotiating tactic, acting crazy to intimidate the Iranians, tossing out empty threats. But if these are such transparently empty threats, the Iranians probably know that too.”
He concluded by quoting conservative scholar Oren Cass on X, who wrote that “we are not living in some quantum thought experiment where he simultaneously is and is not serious. We cannot expect the Iranians, but only the Iranians, will believe him.”
Davidson was specifically referring to a Tuesday post by Trump on his Truth Social platform in which he said, 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!"
Timothy Snyder, a historian who specializes in authoritarian civilizations like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, wrote about Trump’s words that “these are not the words of Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or Assad, or Putin. These are the words of the president of the United States.”
He added that they are more than just words.
“The reason we have a notion of genocide, and a convention on genocide,” he wrote, “is to define certain actions as always and definitively wrong.”