Deadline day. President Donald Trump continues to threaten Iran’s energy and transportation infrastructure.
At a press conference Monday afternoon, he warned of grave consequences for Iran should leaders not agree to American terms. “The entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night,” the president said Monday.
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“We have a plan, because of the power of our military, where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again,” he said. “It will take them 100 years to rebuild.”
Trump reiterated and amplified his warning in a social media post:
???? BREAKING: Trump warns ‘whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again’ if Iran doesn’t agree to deal to end war pic.twitter.com/1PyIR5kM6J
— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 7, 2026
As Monday began, there was talk of a 45-day ceasefire. But reports indicated that Iran would likely reject the plan. Via intermediaries in Pakistan, the country offered up a new 10-point proposal, described by some as maximalist. Trump won’t accept it.
The New York Times reports that “American representatives have already rejected [the Iranian peace proposal] as unacceptable.” And The Wall Street Journal says the U.S. negotiation team is “pessimistic Iran will bend to meet President Trump’s demand to reopen the Strait of Hormuz before his Tuesday-night deadline.”
Talks are ongoing. It remains possible that Trump won’t follow through on his threats. “Only President Trump knows what he will do,” a White House spokesperson said yesterday. Some sort of deal or extension could emerge before the deadline. But as of early Tuesday morning, it doesn’t particularly look hopeful.
What does all this mean? How will it play out? On this week’s Reason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and I talked about Trump’s vigorous threats, shifting timelines, and goalpost shifting with regard to the war in Iran.
Unlike many military conflicts, this war started out unpopular and has remained so. It’s also proving to be quite expensive, with President Trump asking for a $1.5 trillion defense budget, which, if enacted, would represent a 43 percent year-over-year increase, the largest in decades.
The White House budget proposal is essentially never enacted verbatim, but the figure nevertheless reveals something about the White House’s spending priorities. After running on staying out of expensive, pointless wars, Trump has gotten America into another expensive, pointless war, and is now demanding that Congress massively jack up spending to pay for it.
To infinity and beyond: Yesterday, astronauts on the Artemis mission traveled further from planet Earth than any other humans before them, ever.
The four-person crew went 248,655 miles from Earth. In comparison, a flight from New York to Los Angeles is a little less than 2,500 miles. To put it in terms Star Trek fans will understand, they boldly went where no one had gone before. Space really is the final frontier!
The mission crew is now headed back to Earth, where hopefully their email inboxes and toilets will work.
Scenes from Washington, D.C.: Janeese Lewis George, a leading contender to be the next mayor of Washington, D.C., introduced a shutoff moratorium bill for the city’s electrical utility, Pepco. The bill prohibits the electricity provider from disconnecting customers who owed less than $1,000 for 90 days.
This is a terrible idea. But as The Washington Post editorial board notes, it’s one that will be familiar to those of us who have observed the consequences of bans on evictions and extended pauses on student loan repayment.
What happened when politicians enacted rules saying it was OK to not pay bills was fairly predictable: Fewer people paid their bills. The same would happen here. And that would, at the margins, shift the burden to the remaining payers. As D.C.’s current mayor, Muriel Bowser, wrote in a letter opposing the plan, “This emergency legislation will not solve the problem; it will just shift the costs to other paying customers.”
QUICK HITS
- Lawmakers in Massachusetts are expected to pass a bill reforming the state’s legal pot market this week. According to Axios, the bill will increase legal purchase limits and eliminate an existing requirement that pot business licensees grow and produce their own products.
- Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service have reached a deal in which Amazon will cut back on deliveries through the government mail carrier.
- Federal authorities are targeting health care fraud in California.
- It’s not just OpenAI and TBPN: JP MorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon is considering a new media venture.
- It’s quite unclear what the best practices are when filing tax returns that include winnings from prediction markets, according to Wired. Who wants to bet on when the IRS will fix this?
- “The idea that if you appear on a stream with someone, or do an event with them, you ‘take on all [their] baggage’ is the sort of thing you could only come to believe if you are an overpaid political analyst.” Jesse Singal on Hassan Piker.
- Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) is back, with record-setting ticket sales for two live shows and a new album. At least one U.K. official is not happy with the rapper’s return. I’m not sure what to think about the new record—it feels like a work in progress rather than a complete statement—but I really, really wish that Brian Doherty, who wrote a great Reason cover story on Kanye back in 2019, was still around to share his thoughts.
