The Daily Populous Sunday April 5th, 2026 evening edition
Authored by independent.co.uk and submitted by theindependentonline

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President Donald Trump began his Easter Sunday with another blustery warning to Iran and claimed that U.S. forces would begin a series of strikes against Iranian civilian infrastructure targets in two days.

The U.S. president wrote early Sunday morning on Truth Social that Tuesday would be “Power Plant Day” and “Bridge Day” for American forces selecting targets in the region, adding: “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy b*****ds, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

“Praise be to Allah,” Trump concluded his Easter Morning statement to Americans. That line earned him a mock-up on the conservative site Drudge Report, which depicted the president bearded, wearing Islamic garb.

U.S. forces continue to conduct strikes within Iranian airspace as the president has vowed to unleash a more devastating salvo of attacks if the key waterway which serves as a crucial passage for a large fraction of the world’s oil traffic is not opened up by Iranian forces. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused global oil prices to spike past $100 per barrel.

There’s little sign that Trump’s threats have been effective, however, and Iranian officials maintain that peace talks are not happening in any meaningful sense. The issue has angered the president, who has spent the past week making sequentially angrier and more severe threats to Iran’s military and civilian population. Like other messages Trump has sent recently, Sunday’s indication that Trump is considering targeting Iranian civilian infrastructure is a suggestion that the U.S. military could violate international law by expanding to include non-military targets.

open image in gallery Donald Trump made a new threat against Iran’s infrastructure on Sunday ( AP )

On Saturday, he wrote that he’d “reign down hell” on Iran if the Strait wasn’t opened, his latest messaging flub as the White House and broader administration hope to sell the president’s expanding war to a skeptical American public and Congress, where the Pentagon is asking for billions to fund the war effort.

Trump and his allies continue to insist through all of this bluster that the war is actually won already, and that Iran’s military might has been devastated.

“Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating, large-scale losses in a matter of weeks,” Trump told Americans during a primetime address last week, before claiming that the U.S. was “winning and now winning bigger than ever before”. That address ripped largely from his Truth Social posts.

Even so, the downing of a second American fighter jet and the continued inability of the U.S. to say it has reached its military objectives — either pertaining to the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s ballistic missiles, or other factors — cheapen that view.

A U.S. airman was rescued from Iranian territory late on Saturday after being shot down in an F-15 days earlier, with Trump making that announcement shortly after midnight Sunday morning. The crew member had been missing since Friday.

On Sunday, Trump’s latest threat evoked a wave of head-shaking and exasperation from Washington as it becomes clear that few outside of the president’s core base of support trust the White House’s judgement as it relates to the war.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former MAGA congresswoman who publicly broke off from the president in 2025 over a disputer over the Epstein files, urged Republicans in the White House to pray for forgiveness on Easter Sunday.

“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness,” she wrote on X. “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.”

open image in gallery A US F-15, similar to the one shot down, is seen supporting Operation Epic Fury ( via REUTERS )

The Strait’s closure has become a central point of the war as the president’s critics question why the administration did not plan for Iranian forces mining the area and shutting down sea traffic indefinitely. With the war now in its second month, U.S. predictions of a timeline for ending the conflict seem inaccurate and Trump’s own angry messages suggest that the White House is largely out of ideas to that effect.

The president separately claimed on Saturday that another U.S. strike had killed a number of senior Iranian military commanders. And in an interview Sunday with Fox’s Trey Yingst, he simultaneously claimed that Iran was on the verge of surrender and would accept a deal with his administration “by tomorrow.”

On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Sen. Tim Kaine reacted to the president’s threat and called it “juvenile.”

"I hope the White House – I doubt the president will – but please dial back the rhetoric, because you don’t need to put people like these pilots more at risk,” said the Democratic senator from Virginia. He added that he didn’t believe the threat, or others to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age” were effective, labeling them embarrassing.

“It’s people trying to act like they are puffed up and tough when what we really see from this administration is the absence of a plan, the absence of a clear rationale, no effort to get our allies onboard, and thus deep unpopularity of this war with the American public,” Kaine added.

Mysterious_Liv on April 5th, 2026 at 12:50 UTC »

This is officially the most surreal Easter in American history. Threatening to bomb civilian infrastructure while mockingly using Islamic religious phrases is a scorched earth strategy for both the war and international relations. The Praise be to Allah comment is clearly meant as a sarcastic jab at the regime, but it's going to be interpreted as a direct insult to 2 billion people worldwide.Happy Easter.

albatrossSKY on April 5th, 2026 at 12:46 UTC »

nothing says 'He is Risen' like threatening to level a power grid while dropping f-bombs and randomly saying 'Praise be to Allah' on a Sunday morning. its actually impressive how he manages to be this unhinged before most people have even opened their eyes today

WontThinkStraight on April 5th, 2026 at 12:45 UTC »

> “Praise be to Allah,” Trump concluded his first Easter Morning statement to Americans.

This wasn't on my bingo card.