The Daily Populous Saturday April 4th, 2026 night edition
Authored by inews.co.uk and submitted by theipaper

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This week, Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iranian oil infrastructure and desalination plants — the facilities that keep civilian populations alive. When critics pointed out that deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure constitutes a war crime under international law, the White House waved them off. The President, his spokesmen assured us, was engaging in tough diplomacy.

But the man wasn’t bluffing. He’s got an almost obsessive attraction to the idea of maiming civilians. I know. I’ve personally heard him propose the most inhumane acts.

There’s a particular kind of horror that comes from watching a powerful man describe, in clinical detail, how he wants to hurt innocent people and realising that the only thing standing between his fantasy and its execution is a room full of aides, scrambling to remind him what is illegal and what is not. That’s the horror I experienced in late 2018 and early 2019, when I was helping to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in Trump’s first term.

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Back then, he was fixated on the caravans of migrants slowly making their way toward the US from Central America. Trump was almost manic about it. He’d phone our leadership team at DHS late into the night to breathlessly report the latest images he’d seen on TV. He was furious that these people would dare defy him by coming to the US to claim asylum. And he regarded them as if they were a hostile foreign army planning invasion. To be eliminated.

They were, in fact, mostly women and children, or young adult males looking for refuge for their families.

What followed was a sustained campaign of derangement unlike anything I’ve witnessed in years of government service or since. In Oval Office meetings, on Air Force One, and in Situation Room briefings, the President demanded that his government do things that would’ve been unthinkable to any prior American president — or even considered sane by most rational people — to stop these people from arriving at our territory. Trump proposed violence. More specifically, he wanted to use the threat of physical harm and death to deter them.

Hundreds of migrants, mostly from Central America and Venezuela, in Mexico, set out in a US-bound caravan in July 2024. Trump was ‘almost manic’ at the development (Photo: Isaac Guzman/AFP)

For instance, he sought to deploy soldiers to carry out shows of force along the border with heavy weaponry; he ordered us to paint the border wall black so it would get boiling hot in the sun and burn the hands of anyone who touched it; he demanded the we install flesh-piercing spikes at the top — so that those who attempted to climb would be visibly bloodied, sending a message to the others; and most ludicrously of all, Trump toyed with digging a 2,000-mile moat along the southern border and filling it with deadly snakes and reptiles to devour the arriving asylum seekers. (Inquiries were also made from the White House about heat-ray devices that could be pointed at the migrants to make them feel like their skin was on fire.)

This may all sound draconian — and it was — but the President seemed to settle on a simpler demand than elaborate booby traps and military spectacle to scare people away from the border: just shoot them. Trump proposed, on more than one occasion, having authorities fire upon the migrants. What better way to deter them than to kill some of them? When told that using deadly force against unarmed civilians was illegal, Trump bristled, as if we were weak-willed.

“Yeah, yeah yeah” was the tenor of his response. We hoped he’d never raise the subject publicly.

Then he did. While I was on a flight to New York, I watched live on television as the President responded to footage of migrants throwing rocks at border authorities. Trump erupted. He publicly declared that if migrants threw rocks, the American soldiers he’d sent to join our border agents wouldn’t hesitate to respond. They’d open fire.

“They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” the President said. “We’ll consider — and I told them — consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say consider it a rifle.”

Trump was frustrated that US troops stationed at the border between Mexico and the United States could not use deadly force (Photo: Christian Torres/Anadolu via Getty)

Rocks versus rifles. We scrambled to get in touch with the Pentagon to have them remind Trump about the rules of engagement and that shooting civilians, whether they were clutching stones in their hands or not, would be unlawful.

A few months later, he recalibrated. We were in the Oval Office for what was supposed to be a short chat about opioids getting smuggled across the border, and Trump unspooled again. Red-faced and clearly frustrated, he complained that the troops at the border were ineffective because they couldn’t use deadly force. Reminded that he couldn’t kill unarmed civilians, Trump pitched another approach.

“Then shoot them in the legs if you have to!”

By the look on his face — and the looks on ours — Trump hardly needed to be told what we thought. It wasn’t the last time the topic came up, and the President seemed aware he was playing with fire. At one point, he eyed me on the couch, jotting down a meeting summary.

“I don’t want any f**king notes,” he snapped. “Stop taking notes.”

I dutifully obliged and closed my notebook. Of course he didn’t want any documentation. He didn’t want essays like this to be written in the future. He didn’t want people documenting his musings about civilian harm. And he certainly didn’t want pesky aides to try to stop him from breaking the law. My former colleague, then-defence secretary Mark Esper, later recalled how Trump proposed shooting civilians in the streets during nationwide protests in 2020, likewise down-shifting his demand to shooting them in the legs, rather than killing them.

So it should come as a surprise to no one that the leader of the free world might be actively considering — and perhaps eager to carry out — direct attacks on civilians or civilian infrastructure in Iran. This is how he thinks. This is what he does. And these days, he’s got an obliging coterie of staff willing to indulge those brutish impulses.

Trump appears eager to carry out direct attacks on civilians or civilian infrastructure in Iran. He boasted about a US air strike targeting the B1 Bridge near Tehran, in Karaj, on Thursday (Photo: Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty)

You needn’t be a law of war expert to render judgement on Trump’s threat this week. If he wants to bomb power plants and clean-water facilities, seemingly to punish the Iranians as a way to get leverage over the regime, it’s obviously immoral. But there’s also a term in international law for deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure to inflict suffering on a population. That word is “war crime”.

And if he carries out war crimes with impunity, the West will have lost whatever moral authority remains in its grasp. The Geneva conventions, the laws of armed conflict, and the architecture of rules designed to spare civilians from the worst of war are symbolic of all that we stand for in the West — of how democracy restrains our inner demons. But those principles are not self-enforcing. They’ve endured because Western nations, led by the United States, treated them as binding on themselves first. The moment America becomes the country that bombs desalination plants and calls it diplomacy, we have not merely broken a rule, we have announced the rules are dead. Every authoritarian watching in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang will take notice.

My successors in the second Trump administration are apparently unwilling to restrain the President. So America’s allies in Britain and beyond should take note. If they care about what’s happening, they should speak up. But if they’re willing to submit the future of the Western world to the conscience of Donald Trump, then I would advise them to begin writing its obituary.

“I don’t need international law,” Trump told The New York Times in January. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”

Asked if there were any limits on his powers, he said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

StabbingHoboReturns on April 3rd, 2026 at 14:48 UTC »

> Trump toyed with digging a 2,000-mile moat along the southern border and filling it with deadly snakes and reptiles to devour the arriving asylum seekers. (Inquiries were also made from the White House about heat-ray devices that could be pointed at the migrants to make them feel like their skin was on fire.)

What in the actual fuck?

waterdaemon on April 3rd, 2026 at 14:33 UTC »

Mitch McConnell knew what Trump was, but assured us the legal system would handle him as McConnell blocked conviction within the senate. Truly one of the most un-Patriotic acts by one of history’s great cowards.

Asiatic_Static on April 3rd, 2026 at 14:09 UTC »

> “I don’t want any f*****g notes,” he snapped. “Stop taking notes.” I dutifully obliged and closed my notebook

If someone is telling you to stop writing things down, that's probably a sign that it needs to be written down in triplicate.