Trump threatened to commit genocide and Iran came to the table. A little threat – plus the deaths of thousands of Iranians and 13 Americans, the obliteration of schools, homes, hospitals and mosques, the waste of $40bn by the US and losses to the Gulf nations of as much as $200bn – is all it took. Ergo: threatening genocide works.

That, anyway, is what the “secretary of war”, Pete Hegseth, strongly suggested in a press briefing on Wednesday, the day after the president vowed to wipe Iran’s “whole civilization” off the map and then a few hours later announced a ceasefire, obviating the need to wipe Iran’s civilization off the map, at least for two weeks.

All in all, “a big day for World Peace!” Trump posted – or as Hegseth put it: “Truthed.”

Hegseth was armored in his usual muscle-enhancing blue suit; he declaimed in his usual ready-for-primetime style. Yet he looked uncharacteristically wan and puffy. War is hell on the complexion. Still, the secretary had the energy to rhapsodize about all the Iranian military stuff “wiped out”, “sunk”, “destroyed”, “depleted and decimated” by Operation Epic Fury. He boasted that the country’s factories, too, had been “razed to the ground”. But there was plenty more to hit. “You see, had Iran refused our terms, the next targets would have been their power plants, their bridges and oil and energy infrastructure,” said Hegseth, enumerating all the things whose deliberate destruction constitutes a war crime.

The happy warrior exalted his leader as a lion: “No other president has shown the courage and resolve of this commander-in-chief.” And also as a lamb: “President Trump had the power to cripple Iran’s entire economy in minutes. But he chose – he chose mercy.”

Just 40 days in, “Iran begged for this ceasefire,” Hegseth claimed, “and we all know it.” All except Iran’s supreme national security council, whose 8 April statement read, in part: “Our hands remain upon the trigger and should the slightest error be committed by the enemy it shall be met with full force.”

That’s when the president clarified that US forces remained massed around Iran and, in the unlikely event that it violated the ceasefire, “the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before”. Until a pact is signed, he added, “our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest”.

Aside from former Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who called Trump’s rantings “evil and madness” and demanded his removal via the constitution’s 25th amendment, few Republicans found the president’s publicly advertised intention to commit war crimes offensive enough to object to. One bold detractor was Texas representative Nathaniel Moran, who posted: “So, let me be clear: I do not support the destruction of a ‘whole civilization.’”

Well, maybe part of it. Moran has voted with his party against repeated attempts by the Democrats to invoke the 1973 War Powers Act, which codifies the power to declare war that the constitution grants exclusively to Congress. On Thursday, a House Democrat was prepared to introduce a war powers resolution, but the Republican presiding over the session gaveled it to a close without calling on him.

In fact, Republicans have preferred to call this, um, happening, in which bombs are dropped and people die, a “combat operation” rather than a war, even though the president frequently does and Hegseth never ceases to. It’s not just politesse. If the Iran incursion were a war, the lawmakers would be compelled to vote for or against it, neither of which is an attractive political option.

In the press conference, Hegseth declared: “America’s military achieved every single objective on plan, on schedule, exactly as laid out from day one.” Observers note that while the US blew up a lot of Iran’s weaponry, there’s little evidence it has it achieved its main stated goal, to eliminate the country’s nuclear capacity. The beauty of having no clear objectives, plan or schedule is the wiggle room it allows.

Nobody’s even talking about liberating the Iranian people anymore. In fact, as Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in the New Yorker, “one tragedy of Trump’s war is that, in January, the Iranian regime was under extreme pressure from protests, which it quelled by murdering thousands. The right kind of coordinated push might have toppled it.” Instead, Trump and Hegseth abandoned the Iranian resistance and unleashed the maximal lethal might of the most powerful military on earth.

“We stand against both the foreign invaders and the regime,” lamented an Iranian poet in an anonymous dispatch from Tehran, published in the New York Review of Books. “We are left doubly alone.”

Is the war over? Perhaps it’s a good sign that the president is asking Congress for only $80bn to $100bn in supplementary funds for the Pentagon, less than half the $200bn he was going to request just days ago. He’s saving the American taxpayer $120bn!

And that’s not the end of the profits that could flow from the Gulf: “Big money will be made,” Trump crowed on Truth Social. The finance and real estate moguls Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have certainly taken advantage of the multibillion-dollar opportunities opened through their freelance gigs as US Middle East envoys. Trump has business ideas too. On ABC, he mused about a “joint venture” between Iran and the US running the strait of Hormuz. “It’s a beautiful thing,” he said, not specifying what “it” might be. As Hegseth declared: “Nobody makes a better deal than President Trump.”

What deal is Trump making? The ceasefire started falling apart before it began, doomed by Israel’s assault on Lebanon. In a phone call on Wednesday, the US president asked Benjamin Netanyahu to make that campaign “more low-key”, a suggestion the Israeli prime minister is vigorously ignoring. By Thursday evening, Trump was showing his irritation. “There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait – They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now!” he posted just after 5pm. And an hour and a half later: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!”

But a few hours after that, the commander-in-chief’s attention had already begun to stray from these mundane hassles toward his loftier legacy. At 1.13 on Friday morning, he reposted a story from the right-leaning publication justthenews.com: “With Trump at the joystick, moon mission launches patriotism ahead of America’s 250th.” By afternoon, he was releasing the designs for his triumphal arch.

• Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist and frequent contributor to the Guardian. Her Substack is Today in Fascism