The Media Research Center kept up its rage against non-right-wing outlets that refused to toe the Trump Regime Media line on the war with Iran:
- MS NOW Guest: Trump Will Order ‘Indiscriminate Killing’ of Iranians
- CNN’s Pamela Brown Repeatedly Asks GOP Rep About Trump Threat to Iran Infrastructure
- Chuck Todd Hints We Should Worry More About Trump With Nukes Than Iran
- MS NOW Boasts Downed Jet ‘Humiliated’ Trump, Decries Rescue of Airman
- PREDICTABLE: Erin Burnett Proclaims ‘TACO’ After News of Iran Ceasefire Breaks
- PIVOT! Trump’s Iran Post During Evening Shows Pantsed ABC, Not CBS or NBC
This time around, the MRC was upset that non-right-wing media accused Trump of supporting war crimes because he used social media to rant, “A whole civilization will die tonight.” Mark Finkelstein groused in an April 7 post:
On Tuesday’s CNN This Morning, host Audie Cornish turned to retired Brigadier General Steven M. Anderson to assess President Trump’s potential expansion of military strikes on Iran.
Anderson repeatedly warned that targeting infrastructure such as bridges, power plants, and water facilities could amount to “war crimes,” even suggesting U.S. troops could be put in the position of refusing “illegal” orders.
Cornish failed to disclose that Anderson sits on the board of VoteVets, a progressive PAC that backs Democrat candidates. Nor did she note his record of sweeping, alarmist claims, including warning in a Washington Post op-ed of a potential military coup, and, in a recent MS NOW appearance, calling the Iran conflict ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster in the history of our country.”
Cornish reinforced the theme by playing a clip of a United Nations spokesman declaring that attacks on civilian infrastructure would violate international law. CNN senior reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere then pointed to Trump’s statements about targeting such sites, and said “there is a pretty clear line,” effectively backing the same argument.
Anderson doubled down, insisting the line was “very clear” and reiterating that such strikes would be criminal.
There was no meaningful pushback.
Finkelstein didn’t identify what possible pushback could be offered on behalf of Trump’s obvious threat. An hour and a half later, Nicholas Fondacaro groused:
It was TACO Tuesday on CNN’s The Situation Room. CNN and the rest of the liberal media spent much of Monday and Tuesday morning trying to scare the bejeezus out of the American public by ridiculously suggesting President Trump was going to commit “war crimes” and genocide all of the Iranian people. Something that was never going to happen. But the tone changed during The Situation Room when they mocked Trump and suggested he was going to “chicken out” of slaughtering millions of innocent people, even dropping the Democrats’ TACO line, proving that they didn’t believe their own reporting.
[…]Being so easily able to pivot from telling viewers that Trump was certainly going to commit war crimes one day to saying he was going to “chicken out” the next, proved that CNN was just spewing pure propaganda to gas light Americans. Efforts that could incite another mentally unstable liberal to violence. Or, was it an effort to goad Trump into committing a genocide?
Well, Trump did say “A whole civilization will die tonight,” so clearly he has put thought into committing genocide, even if he doesn’t have the attention span to follow through on it.
Later that day, Nicholas Spinnato ranted:
In a continued meltdown after President Trump’s press conference and continuous Truth Social posts, Tuesday’s Morning Joe on MS NOW continuously claimed Trump was about to commit war crimes in Iran, except for newly signed MS NOW analyst John Kirby, who acted as a voice of reason as he put trust in military leaders instead. Even after Kirby’s moment, during the 9 a.m. hour, co-host Jonathan Lemire called Trump “genocidal” as guests Andrew Ross Sorkin and Eugene Robinson said the U.S. will become a villain.
Late in the program, host Jonathan Lemire accused the president of threats of genocide:
Fondacaro returned to rant some more:
Fresh off of cheering on Iran for how they “humiliated” President Trump by trying to kill American airmen, MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell kicked off Tuesday night’s show by suggesting Adolf Hitler wasn’t as bad a leader as Trump. He went even further and suggested that America committed suicide as a civilization when voters elected Trump a second time.
As O’Donnell was coming on the air, his first words were a jab a trump and praise for Hitler. “’A whole civilization will die tonight.’ Hitler never said that,” he declared for the man who wanted to exterminate the Jews and wrote an entire book about it.
According to O’Donnell, no villain in the history of the world was as bad as Trump. “No head of state in the history of the world ever said that. Civilization had to wait literally thousands of years until today, April 7th, 2026 at 8:06 A.M. for a head of state to say and threaten ‘A whole civilization will die tonight,’” he asserted.
Adding: “No cruel king ever threatened that, no mass murdering tyrant anywhere in the world ever said that, or even thought it was possible.”
Since NewsBusters already established that O’Donnell either didn’t know history or was obfuscating it from his audience, he might want to chat with the Jews and Gypsies Hitler tried to eradicate, the Ukrainians who survived Joesph Stalin’s Holodomor, anyone living through any of the ongoing genocides in Africa, or anyone who survived any communist regime anywhere.
Fondacaro never actually proved that Hitler announced beforehand he was going eradicate Jews and Gypsies the way Trump declared he would eradicate the “whole civilization” of Iran. So maybe O’Donnell knows something about history after all.