President Trump held a lengthy press conference today. The presser began with Trump, Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine detailing what they could of the daring rescue operation to retrieve the second (and last remaining) aviator from Friday’s take down of an F-15E in Iran.
The Q&A that followed their remarks focused, for the most part, on the war in Iran and what lies ahead in terms of peace talks and threats. President Trump yesterday told Fox News that a peace deal could come about Monday or Tuesday, but so far, Iran has rejected every deal offered, whether by Trump or by Middle Eastern negotiators in Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey.
This leaves the threats. Trump has promised that, in the event of no deal, he will take out Iran’s electrical power plants and all its bridges. Iran, in turn, has threatened massive retaliation. The Trump deadline is 8 p.m. ET tomorrow, April 7, 2026.
Of course, President TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) could show up and find a reason not to carry out his threat, or — more likely — he could say that talks are moving in a favorable manner, so he’s extending the never-ending deadline.
Taking out a nation’s civilian infrastructure runs against the Geneva Conventions that followed the conclusion of World War II. These documents protect civilians in wartime and make it a crime to take out, for instance, electrical plants that serve only civilian purposes.
If Trump is going to abolish all of Iran’s electrical plants, according to the Geneva Conventions, he will be a war criminal unless he can show that these generating plants served military purposes, at least partially.
My guess is that this massive destruction — which Trump today said would take only four hours to accomplish — is never going to happen. Trump, in TACO mode or not, will find a way to get Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to run cover for him with some sort of real or imagined negotiations with Iran.
Trump covered his own ass, so to speak, when today he said that Iran has lost all means of communications (yeah, right), so he can say tomorrow night that he got word through undisclosed sources that a deal is imminent. He also keeps saying that it’s not clear with whom to negotiate, though at the same time he says these leaders — whoever they are — are more reasonable than the rulers the U.S. and Israel took out early in the war.
Set your clocks for 8 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow. It should be grand theater, one way or another.
[PICTURED: An electrical generating plant taken out in Kosovo during the war there in 1999]
