The unavoidable conclusion that must be drawn from the speech delivered on Wednesday night by Donald Trump is that the American president is a political criminal. If one grants that there exists a moral boundary, even in the realm of imperialist geopolitics, between the generally sinister pursuit of capitalist great power interests and fascist bestiality, the leaders of the US government have passed over it. The names of Trump, Vance, Hegseth, Rubio and Miller will live in perpetual infamy alongside those of the Nazi ringleaders of the Third Reich: Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Von Ribbentrop and Goebbels. The judgment of history will be merciless.

But that judgment will be delivered not only against individuals, but also, and more profoundly, against the social class that raised them to power and in whose interest they have committed their monstrous crimes against the people of Iran. Herein lies the significance of Trump’s Wednesday night rant. It exposed the irreversible political and moral putrefaction of the American ruling class.

Trump is not the first president to commit crimes. His predecessors have ordered the invasions of countries, the overthrow of governments, and the torture and assassination of individuals identified as opponents of American interests. But some attempt was made by previous administrations to provide at least some legal and democratic justification, however threadbare, cynical, deceitful and hypocritical, for their actions. The contempt for domestic and international law—and, along with it, the repudiation of any adherence to democratic principles—could not be openly embraced as the bases of state policies. When criminal acts were exposed, they were excused, with formal expressions of regret, as unfortunate departures from official enforcement of legal norms.

That stage has passed. Trump’s speech was remarkable for its lack of disguise. He chose words that exposed with unvarnished bluntness the deliberately genocidal aims of American actions. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” he declared. He threatened that the United States would strike “each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.” He boasted of the decapitation of the leadership—“They’re all dead”—and then added, with the coarse self-assurance of a Mafia don, “We have all the cards. They have none.”

Trump threatened the destruction of the material foundations of social life for an entire country, explaining that Iran’s oil sector had thus far been spared only because its destruction “would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding.”

What found expression in these remarks was not simply the pathology of an individual, but the essential character of a social layer that has become habituated to criminality and no longer feels compelled to apologize for it.

…