President Donald Trump threatened to wipe out “a whole civilization” if Iran’s leaders don’t agree to his terms to open the Strait of Hormuz tonight, prompting Iran to call off talks and his political opponents to question his fitness and call for his removal from office.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote Tuesday morning, 12 hours before his 8 p.m. deadline for Iran to open up the Strait of Hormuz. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
The White House clarified Trump was not considering the use of nuclear weapons. “Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday the United States expected Iran to respond to Trump’s demands before the end of the day.
“They’ve got to know we’ve got tools in our tool kit that we so far haven’t decided to use,” he said in Budapest, where he is pushing for the reelection of right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. “The president of the United States can decide to use them, and he will decide to use them if the Iranians don’t change their course of conduct,” Vance said.
A Democratic social media account run by alumni of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign said Vance had implied Trump might use nuclear weapons. The White House responded that he did not.
Democratic lawmakers said Congress should stop the war from escalating. Former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the NAACP called for Trump’s removal through the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
“This is evil and madness,” Greene said on X.
House Democratic leadership, in a statement, said Trump was “completely unhinged” and called for the House to “come back into session immediately” and vote on an end to the war.
Iran has so far shown no signs of willingness to surrender to Trump’s threats, saying U.S. attacks would be met with a strong response.
“Deadlines shouldn’t cause us to have the slightest doubt in defending our country,” Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said Monday. Kazem Gharibabadi, a deputy foreign minister, said the previous day that Iran would retaliate with a “regret-inducing” response.
Trump’s post came on the heels of overnight U.S. strikes on Kharg Island, the core of Iran’s oil economy.
The strikes, which began about 2 a.m. Eastern time, hit military targets including runways and bunkers but not the island’s oil infrastructure, two officials told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide details not yet made public. No ground forces were involved, they said. One of the officials said the targets struck included areas the U.S. had hit earlier in the military operations.
One of the U.S. officials also confirmed that on Sunday the U.S. used several of its bunker-buster bombs to hit Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership in a deep underground bunker. The official would not provide an assessment of what IRGC leadership had been hit, saying the information was classified.
The GBU-57 MOP is a 30,000-pound bomb that can strike hundreds of feet underground. It was first used in combat last year against Iranian nuclear targets and is carried by the B-2 stealth bomber. It is one of the largest nonnuclear bombs in the U.S. arsenal.
Trump has claimed to have accomplished “regime change” in Iran, but regional and Western officials say that the country’s hard-line government remains largely intact and is prepared to drive a hard bargain in negotiations to end the war, including a demand for full control over the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passageway that is vital to global oil shipments.
“More than 14 million proud Iranians have so far registered to sacrifice their lives to defend Iran. I too have been, am, and will remain devoted to giving my life for Iran,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote on X on Tuesday.
Iranian official and semiofficial news agencies published images and video of what they said showed Iranians forming human chains around power plants on Tuesday. Groups of Iranians, including young people, gathered in lines outside plants holding flags and signs, the photos showed. The Post could not independently verify the photographs.
Trump has made threats at times seeming to aim for negotiating advantage. But the warning against the entire nation of Iran, with a population of 93 million, was remarkable for a world leader, particularly one who has laid claims to being a peacemaker.
Trump called Tuesday night “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World,” in his post. “47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end,” he wrote.
Vance said he was “confident” that the United States will get a response — “whether it’s positive or negative” — from Iran by 8 p.m. Tuesday.
“I hope they make the right response,” he said during a visit to Budapest, the Hungarian capital. Vance said the U.S. “wants a world where oil and gas is flowing freely,” which he said won’t happen if Iran engages in “acts of economic terrorism.”
Israel attacked train tracks and bridges in Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement Tuesday, which he said were used by the IRGC. The Israel Defense Forces said Tuesday that it had targeted eight Iran bridges.
IRGC Aerospace Force commander Majid Mousavi said Tuesday that in a “new stage of war,” Iran will unleash a new wave of strikes using dual launchers that will multiply strikes by two, the semiofficial Iranian Tasnim News Agency reported.
Westfall reported from Jerusalem. Arnsdorf and Copp reported from Washington. Suzan Haidamous in Beirut and Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo contributed to this report.
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