After months of rhetoric about possible war crimes in Iran, Donald Trump upped the ante on Sunday morning, publishing an unhinged threat to his social media platform in which he explicitly vowed to target Iranian power plants and bridges. As Easter Sunday progressed, the president did brief interviews with several media outlets to echo that point.....

The president, who must have realized he’d face these questions and had plenty of time to huddle with his aides and prepare coherent answers, peddled three distinct responses to the line of inquiry.

1. Refuse to talk about his plans for possible war crimes. MS NOW’s Lindsey Pipia asked, “Are you committed to committing a war crime in this war with Iran?” Trump heard the question but refused to answer it. “What else?” he said to no one in particular, as if the question wasn’t worth his time or consideration.

Q: Are you committing a war crime?

TRUMP: *refuses to answer* What else?

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-04-06T15:42:40.701Z

2. Change the definition of “war crime.” As part of a separate exchange, Trump was asked whether he considered hitting civilian infrastructure to be a war crime. “You know what’s a war crime?” he responded. “Having a nuclear weapon, allowing a sick country with demented leaders to have a nuclear weapon. That’s a war crime.”....

3. War crimes are fine, because Iranian leaders are bad. Asked how U.S. military strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure wouldn’t be a war crime, Trump pointed to the Iranian government killing Iranian protesters. “They kill protesters,” the president said, claiming Tehran had slaughtered tens of thousands of its own people. “They’re animals.”

Q: How would it not be a war crime to strike Iran's bridges and power plants?

TRUMP: Because they killed 45,000 in the last month. They kill protesters. They are animals.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-04-06T16:01:40.467Z

Or, put another way, as far as the Republican sees it, the United States would be justified in committing war crimes because Iran deserves it — a line that is every bit as morally abhorrent as it appeared.

This is not simply an academic exercise: Trump has set a deadline for 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday by which he expects Iranian officials to accept his demands. If not, in the words of the American president, he’s prepared to “blow up the whole country.”