“This is sickening.”

So said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk on Tuesday afternoon. He was referring to Donald Trump’s rather remarkable assertion that “a whole civilization will die” if the regime in Tehran doesn’t bend the knee.

One of Trump’s “greatest” tricks is legalizing the illegal by saying it out loud. He employed that strategy to great success with obstruction (a crime) during the Robert Mueller probe, and he’s used it on countless occasions since in both the domestic and foreign policy realms.

Of course, something’s either illegal or it isn’t. Preemptively telling on yourself in the public square shouldn’t work as an exoneration tactic. “I’m about to do some crime!” is the opposite of exculpatory, but somehow it works for Trump.

On Tuesday, he tried it with genocide. It didn’t go over well. First, Iran broke off direct negotiations, then indirect talks too. By the end of the day, more or less everyone had condemned Trump, from Marjorie Taylor Greene — who called for his immediate removal from office — to Candace Owens — who called him a “lunatic” and suggested the Pentagon should “intervene” — to Leo XIV, the first American-born pope — who said, of Trump’s threat, “this is truly unacceptable!”

To state the obvious, Trump “truly” doesn’t care about anyone’s moral qualms. Jesus Christ himself could — and surely would — chastise Trump’s Tuesday threat, and Trump would tell him to go hang on a cross.

To be fair to a self-confessed, potential genocidaire, Trump probably didn’t mean he was going to personally kill off all Persians in one shot with, say, a mega-nuke. Rather, he likely meant that “civilization” would be a misnomer once he’s done razing Iran’s civilian infrastructure.

I’m not sure that’s a distinction worth making, but… well, again, and with a despairing chuckle, “in the interest of fairness.”

In a just world where Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu (and Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush and on and on) had to answer for themselves, Trump would surely claim he was just doing what he always does in negotiations: Adopting a maximalist position on the way to extracting concessions that result in a deal which lands somewhere on his side of the middle.

Be that as it may, genocide’s too maximalist. I adopt a maximalist position at the car dealership. But I don’t start with, “$64,000 or I’ll come to your house and kill your whole family.”

By 5 pm ET in the US, it felt, for the first time in a decade, as if the American right, and the world more generally, was prepared to draw some sort of line.

Trump’s off-ramp, should he choose to take it, came from Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif. “Diplomatic efforts for peaceful settlement of the ongoing war in the Mideast are progressing steadily, strongly and powerfully with the potential to lead to substantive results in the near future,” he said, before beseeching Trump to extend his apocalypse deadline for two weeks “to allow diplomacy to run its course.”

In the same message, Sharif asked Iran to open the Strait “as a goodwill gesture.” Everyone, he went on, should “observe a ceasefire” while talks unfold on the way to “a conclusive termination” of the war.

Do I think Trump can get something from Iran right now, tonight, by telling everyone it’s too late and that he’s made his decision? Yes. Do I think he’ll do that? No. Not in light of Tuesday’s international backlash.

If Trump goes ahead with something that looks anything like what he’s threatened over the past 48 hours, he might risk a real revolt at home, and I don’t mean at the polls. I doubt JD Vance (who’s in Hungary to boost Viktor Orban) would take that step, and even if he did, I don’t think he could get a cabinet majority. But this feels dicey all of the sudden.

Tucker Carlson suggested the US military should “say no, absolutely not” to any order that entails the deliberate killing of Iranian civilians. Jenna Ellis, one of the faces of Trump’s effort to overthrow the 2020 election, described his rhetoric as “unmoored.”

“When you pair that tone with an apparent belief that executive authority is unconstrained, it raises serious concerns about decision-making in one of the most volatile geopolitical contexts in the world,” Ellis said Tuesday.