WASHINGTON -- “My question is if and when do I blow the entire nation up? They had better behave.”
These are not the words of a fictional villain in a Hollywood script. They are the words of the President of the United States, spoken to Fox News on Sunday, directed at a nation of ninety million people.
The threat was delivered casually, almost as an aside, while Trump described the “options on the table” regarding Iran: “wiping Iran out,” letting it “rot economically,” or making a deal. 
The world’s supposedly most powerful man, commanding supposedly the world’s most lethal military arsenal, was publicly weighing whether to annihilate an entire civilization — and the international community responded with a deafening silence.
This is not an aberration. It is a pattern. It is the culmination of six months of escalating rhetoric from a psychopath president who has repeatedly threatened to commit what legal scholars describe as war crimes, and who faces no consequences for doing so.
On April 7, as he oscillated between ceasefire and escalation, Trump posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” The statement prompted condemnation from the UN Secretary-General and the Pope. Human rights experts argued it may have constituted a threat to commit genocide under the UN Genocide Convention.
Days earlier, in a primetime White House address, Trump threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” He claimed the U.S. had a plan to destroy every bridge and power plant in the country, leaving that infrastructure “burning, exploding, and never to be used again”. 
Targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime under international law. Trump announced his intention to commit one on live television.
On March 21, he declared that if Iran did not open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, the U.S. would “hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST”. He extended the deadline. Then extended it again. Then dropped it. On April 5, with his self-imposed deadline expiring, Trump unleashed a profanity-laden post: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”  
On June 11, he announced: “The United States will be hitting Iran… VERY HARD TONIGHT” and promised to seize Kharg Island and other oil infrastructure. Five hours later, he cancelled the strikes.
The United States presents itself to the world as the guardian of human rights, the arbiter of international law, the beacon of civilization. Its president threatens to obliterate a nation — and the world shrugs.
This is the same nation whose foundational act was the extermination of indigenous peoples, whose economy was built on the enslavement of Africans, whose military has invaded or bombed dozens of countries since World War II. 
It is a nation that has assassinated foreign leaders with impunity — including, according to the Pentagon’s own testimony, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, martyred in a U.S. strike carried out with close Israeli intelligence cooperation.
The current president is the most terrorist leader in American history — a man who openly boasts of ordering the assassination of a sovereign nation’s head of state, who threatens to wipe out entire civilizations on social media, who treats the world as his personal fealty to be seized, invaded, or destroyed at will.
Where is the international outcry? Where is the UN Security Council resolution condemning a head of state for threatening genocide? Where are the sanctions, the travel bans, the universal jurisdiction prosecutions?
The answer is simple: there are none. The United States has taken the entire world for its whims. It has normalized the threat of mass violence against a nation of ninety million people. 
Western leaders, who rush to condemn Russia or Iran for far less, have said nothing. The international criminal justice system, which indicted Sudanese and Libyan leaders for far less explicit threats, has remained silent.
As the Guardian noted, Trump’s repeated vows to obliterate Iran are “usually written off by other Western leaders and the news media as typical of Trump’s bravado and unpredictability, but they have real-world consequences”. 
By treating his rhetoric as normal, the world is “becoming more desensitized to the idea of large-scale violence — including the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure — as a legitimate kind of warfare”.
Trump has been allowed to threaten a nation with annihilation — repeatedly, explicitly, publicly — and face no consequences. He has been allowed to treat the world as his possession, to invade any country under whatever pretext he concocts, to assassinate any leader he chooses, to destroy any infrastructure he fancies.
This is not strength. This is not leadership. This is the behavior of a rogue state, a terrorist nation masquerading as a democracy, whose leader threatens to erase a civilization from the face of the earth — and the world, complicit in its silence, lets him.