Trump says the U.S. can strike Iran again anytime we want after a very heavy attack

The Oval Office line is meant to sound like command: we can hit them whenever we choose. Literature has heard that sentence before. In Richard III, Shakespeare gives us a king who keeps violence in stock as a private inventory until the inventory is the only politics left. The crown is not a timetable. It is a claim on other people's consent. Swift, in Gulliver's Travels, makes the boast look smaller. When Gulliver offers the King of Brobdingnag the secret of gunpowder, proud that a few barrels can flatten a city anytime one wishes, the king is appalled that anyone would treat annihilation as a convenience. Seven months in, with most Americans opposed, the useful question is not whether Washington can strike again. It is why a campaign that still has to announce its own shortness needs that sentence at all.