US President Donald Trump threatened Sunday to bomb Iran’s civilian power grid and bridges after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) re-closed the Strait of Hormuz. In Truth Social posts Saturday night and Sunday morning, Trump wrote that unless Iran accepts his terms, “the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran.” He added: “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!”
In a pre-taped phone interview aired Sunday on Fox News Sunday, Trump told chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst: “You’re going to see bridges and power plants dropping all over their country.” If no deal is reached, he said, he is “considering blowing everything up and taking over the oil.” On ABC’s This Week, he told Jonathan Karl that the Strait of Hormuz could be run as “a joint venture” between the United States and Iran.
Trump also announced on social media that the destroyer USS Spruance had seized the Iranian-flagged cargo ship Touska in the Gulf of Oman, firing into its engine room and putting Marines on board.
Iran’s state news agency IRNA then said Tehran would not attend the second round of negotiations supposedly scheduled for Monday in Islamabad. The Pakistani capital was placed under lockdown Sunday night, with 10,000 additional security forces deployed.
Trump’s threats and the US seizure of the Iranian ship came on Day 51 of the US-Israeli war on Iran, on the 12th day of a two-week ceasefire set to expire within 72 hours. On Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X that the Strait of Hormuz was open to commercial shipping on a route close to the Iranian coast.
Nineteen ships transited the Strait on Friday and Saturday morning, the first meaningful movement of cargo since the February 28 start of the war. The United States did not reciprocate the Iranian reopening, however. Because the US Navy maintained its blockade of Iran’s ports, Iran could not export a single barrel of oil.
On Saturday evening, the Revolutionary Guard announced over Iranian state media that the Strait was being re-closed. “No vessel should move from its anchorage in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” the statement warned. “The violating vessel will be targeted.” Within hours, IRGC gunboats fired on two ships reported by the UK Maritime Trade Operations organization—one, a tanker, hit by automatic weapons fire; the other, a container ship, struck by “an unknown projectile.” Both flew the Indian flag; New Delhi’s foreign ministry summoned Iran’s ambassador Sunday morning.
The French shipping line CMA CGM turned four of its ships away from the entrance to the Strait. Maersk suspended transits entirely. The Brent crude oil price rebounded to $95 a barrel on Saturday.
The bombing of civilian power plants, bridges and water systems is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. On Sunday’s political programs, senior administration officials openly defended such criminal actions. US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz told CBS’s Face the Nation: “Bridges, power plants that are run by the IRGC are absolute legitimate military targets, not only now, but have been historically. That is a false, fake and ridiculous notion that this is some type of war crime.”
On NBC’s Meet the Press, Waltz cited the Allied bombing of Germany during the Second World War as the precedent for destroying the Iranian civilian grid, on which 90 million people depend for water, electricity and refrigeration. Neither Margaret Brennan at CBS nor Jonathan Karl at ABC pressed Waltz on the clear contradiction between Trump’s threats and international humanitarian law.
On CNN’s State of the Union, Jake Tapper asked Representative Elise Stefanik, chair of House Republican Leadership, whether a president should threaten to “wipe out an entire civilization.” She would not answer the question directly, pivoting to defend Trump’s language as directed at “the Iranian regime” rather than at the country as a whole.
The ceasefire in Lebanon, brokered at midnight Friday, was broken within 48 hours. On Saturday morning, an Israeli drone killed a motorcyclist in Kounine, in the Bint Jbeil district. The Israeli military defended the strike under a “Yellow Line” doctrine applied to 55 towns in the Lebanese south, modeled on the occupation grid used in Gaza. The same morning, French Staff Sergeant Florian Montorio of the 17th Parachute Engineer Regiment, serving with the UN peacekeeping force, was killed and three fellow soldiers wounded near Ghandouriyeh.
Lebanese government casualty figures now stand at 2,167 killed, including 172 children, and 7,061 wounded. In Iran, the Al Jazeera casualty tracker records 2,076 dead—including 240 women and 212 children—with 26,500 wounded; the independent monitor HRANA puts the total at 3,636. The Pentagon has acknowledged 13 US service members killed in combat. The US average price of gasoline is now $4.09 a gallon. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Sunday on CNN that it will not fall below $3 this year.
The Democratic Party functions as a critical enabler of Trump’s war. In an interview Sunday on Face the Nation, Amos Hochstein, the senior Biden energy adviser who brokered the November 2024 Lebanon ceasefire, said that a Democratic administration would also be bombing Iran. Asked what the previous administration’s approach would have been, Hochstein said: “We thought that the spring, summer of 2025 was probably, we may have to be there in the same place. And we did, we did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like to look into it, because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.”
Hochstein’s admission renders absurd all attempts by the Democrats to place the blame for the Iran war on Trump alone or on Netanyahu. The war is a joint, bipartisan policy of US imperialism, prepared by both parties and executed by whichever held the White House when the moment came.
On Thursday, the House of Representatives held a vote on a War Powers Resolution to end the war. It failed 213-214. Maine Democrat Jared Golden, a combat veteran of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, cast the lone Democratic “no,” arguing that constraining the war would “weaken the US position” in the Islamabad talks. In the Senate, a parallel resolution failed 47-52, the fourth such defeat in a row.
No member of the House Democratic leadership has endorsed Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari’s impeachment articles against U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, filed Tuesday and built on the February 28 Tomahawk strike that destroyed a girls’ school in Minab, killing more than 160 children.
The Sunday television interview programs of April 19, 2026 are a portrait of a ruling class with no significant opposition to mass murder. The sitting president threatens the destruction of the civilian infrastructure on which 90 million people depend. His ambassador to the United Nations defends the threat by citing the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II. A former senior Biden official admits on camera that the previous administration had war-gamed the same strikes.
The war on Iran is the policy of both parties of American capital, backed by their German, British and French partners, against the peoples of Iran, Lebanon and Palestine. The struggle against this war cannot be waged through the existing two-party framework, entirely controlled by corporate America. It requires the independent mobilization of the American and international working class, on a program of socialist internationalism, led by the International Committee of the Fourth International.