Updated: 04/08/2026 10:00 AM EST

President Donald Trump once again delayed his ultimatum against the Iranian regime. Trump repeatedly warned that 8 p.m. on Tuesday night was the deadline for the Iranian regime to open the Strait of Hormuz or face bombing of the nation’s bridges and power plants. The drastic move — which Trump long delayed to give diplomacy a chance — aims to dislodge the Iranian regime from power by unseating a key source of that power: their money.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Trump announced in a not-very-Easter-y post on Sunday morning. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F**** Strait, you crazy b*******, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Trump reiterated the threat at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” the president warned. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?”

“We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World,” Trump oversold his campaign. “47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

“This is coercion, and coercion is part of both military and diplomatic policy,” assessed Michael Rubin, director of Policy Analysis at the Middle East Forum, on “Washington Watch.” “I don’t know whether Iran will make a deal now. But, if you weren’t willing to threaten Iran with something far worse to come, then the chance of Iran making a deal would be absolutely zero.”

Iranian state media said the regime rejected a 45-day ceasefire brokered by Pakistan, which would have involved opening the Strait. The report seems inconsistent with the Trump administration’s confidence that its negotiating partners are more reasonable than the previous leaders, who are all dead. However, Iran International reports “a deepening rift” at the top of Iranian leadership; civilian leaders are pushing for peace, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leadership is unilaterally escalating the situation and undermining ceasefire efforts.

In considering the IRGC’s motivations, “a segment of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” is still driven by ideology, but most of its intransigence comes down to “sheer greed,” Rubin asserted. “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls a business empire worth upwards of $100 billion. The same thing for the office of the Supreme Leader. And so, they’re loath to actually give that up and flee simply because they believe that they can outlast Donald Trump.” By targeting Iran’s energy infrastructure, Trump is taking direct aim at the IRGC’s business empire.

However, not everyone approves of Trump’s decision to expand the target list to Iranian infrastructure sites. On April 2, “over 100 international law experts” penned an open letter condemning nearly every aspect of Trump’s Iranian campaign, including “strikes on energy infrastructure.”

But “you can get 100 people, nowadays, in Washington, to sign anything,” Rubin responded. “None of these people are particularly knowledgeable about Iran. And so, for example, they don’t understand that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps manages most of the power stations which they’re talking about.”

Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy agreed. “In Iran, the infrastructure is controlled by the rulers and benefits them,” he argued. “The IRGC gets most of the energy revenue and controls about two-thirds of GDP. The regime — like the Hamas jihadist organization it trained, armed, and backed financially — uses infrastructure that is ostensibly ‘civilian’ to conceal forces and armaments. The infrastructure — very much including the energy terminals, the electrical grids, and the bridges and other transportation facilities — is thus the IRGC’s sustenance.”

In fact, McCarthy went further, “we should stop speaking of ‘civilian’ infrastructure, because it deludes us. ‘Civilian’ is a Western concept, based on the Western understanding of the individual’s relation to the state …. In a sharia-supremacist state such as Iran, there are no citizens … as we understand these terms. There are subjects and rulers. … In Iran, the infrastructure is controlled by the rulers and benefits them.”

Thus, “what we in the West are so deluded as to call ‘civilian infrastructure’ … is, in reality, the lifeline of the totalitarian sharia-supremacist regime that enslaves and kills Iranians while waging ceaseless jihad against the United States,” McCarthy concluded. “As the Western press obsesses over attacks on ‘civilian’ infrastructure, the Iranian people who despise the sharia regime know it cannot otherwise be defeated.”

Indeed, the Western press often gives the impression that “Iran is being destroyed willy nilly” by America’s bombing — “war crimes, and so forth,” Rubin acknowledged. But “what sets [the] Iran [campaign] apart [from other bombing campaigns] is more people have come to Iran than fled from Iran. And that’s because most Iranians understand that the Israelis and the Americans, when they bomb, bomb with great precision. And so, they’re going back to check on their families, check on their homes, check on their properties without real fear that they’re going to become collateral damage.”

The reality is, like its terrorist proxies, the Iranian regime embeds itself amid the populace, who the West considers civilians, but the Islamists regime considers subjects. It has deliberately used civilians as human shields.

The Trump administration gave Iran a deadline of 8 p.m. tonight before striking the IRGC’s infrastructure targets. By design — the design of the radical regime — these attacks will likely cause civilian casualties or adversely impact civilians. But without these attacks, the Trump administration cannot degrade the Iranian regime to the point of submission.

Before attacks began, President Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran. Rubin predicted this beforehand, “I suspect what Donald Trump is going to do is delay again,” he said Monday. “But the delay isn’t simply Donald Trump delaying for arbitrary sake. If when Donald Trump gives an ultimatum, he looks at how the Iranians act, and that actually feeds the U.S. intelligence community, the Defense Intelligence Agency and so forth. So, by giving several false starts, he’s enhancing American intelligence and diminishing Iranian readiness.”