8PM

I have no idea what is going to happen tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern.

But I’m pretty confident about one thing: whatever happens, it’s not going to be good.

This morning Donald Trump posted the above message:

“A whole civilization will die tonight… We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world.”

That’s the President of the United States talking about wiping out a “civilization” on a public social media account. To put that into terms the Far Left can understand, Trump is planning on committing 10,000 Gaza’s tonight. Tehran alone has a population of 9 million.

Meanwhile, an Iranian propaganda video shows Iranian civilians gathering on bridges and around the infrastructure Trump has pledged to destroy.

We don’t know exactly what will happen at 8 p.m., but we do know something about Donald Trump. And that’s what makes this moment so dangerous. Trump has two options tonight. He can admit that he made a mistake, or he can double down so he never has to admit the mistake in the first place.

If you’ve been paying attention for the last decade, you already know which one he tends to choose.

This is a man who staged an insurrection rather than accept losing an election. His own advisors, intelligence officials, and campaign staff told him the same thing: he lost. The votes had been counted. The outcome was clear. But Trump couldn’t accept it. Instead of acknowledging reality, he tried to overturn the result and cling to power. For Trump, admitting error is worse than creating a crisis.

We’ve seen this pattern play out before in smaller but revealing ways. Bob Woodward documented one of the clearest examples in his book Fear: Trump in the White House, on Trump’s first term. In a meeting inside the Pentagon’s secure conference room — known as “the Tank” — senior military leaders tried to explain NATO to Trump. These were generals and national security experts walking the president through the logic of the alliance, why it exists, and why it benefits the United States. They spent hours laying out the strategic case. Trump’s reaction, according to Woodward’s account, was to repeatedly tell them they were wrong. Generals, diplomats, career experts — all wrong. Only Trump was right.

That meeting was what made then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called him a “fucking moron” if you remember that.

We’ve seen the same thing play out publicly. At one point Trump sat in front of a room full of economists at the University of Chicago — one of the most respected economics departments in the world — and essentially did the same thing. Rather than engaging with the substance of what they were saying, he dismissed them. The experts were wrong. Trump was right.

That personality trait matters right now, because the crisis with Iran didn’t emerge out of thin air. When Trump launched his attack during what were supposed to be peace negotiations, the military would have briefed him extensively on the consequences. They would have walked him through the risks of escalation and the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz. That’s how military planning works: scenarios are modeled, risks are explained, and the potential fallout is laid out in detail. There is simply no way he wasn’t warned about what might happen if Iran responded.

He did it anyway.

Now we are staring at a public ultimatum, a literal ticking clock, and a president who has announced to the world that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

Now that’s genocide.

I truly don’t know what will happen when the deadline arrives tonight. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe Trump TACO’s and pretends he has something in progress again. Maybe some last-minute maneuver allows everyone to step away from the brink. Or maybe he nukes Iran.

But if you understand Trump’s psychology — if you understand how he reacts when confronted with the choice between admitting error and doubling down — this moment becomes a lot more unsettling.

Because Donald Trump does not admit mistakes.