A recently discovered e-mail in the Donald J. Trump presidential archives

From: H.M. Henry V
To: President Trump
Subject: Advice on war rhetoric.

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility (nothing personal, you understand), but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger. Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage. You might also want to lend the eye a terrible aspect and let it pry through the portage of the head like the brass cannon and blah, blah, blah. I’m sure you can improvise all this. Just set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit to his full height. You probably thought of all that for yourself.

So much for form. Now to content.

The first thing you need to say is that this is the latest parle you will admit. Therefore to your best mercy they should give themselves or, like to men proud of destruction, defy you to your worst. What your “worst” is, they’ve already got a pretty good idea, I think, but it does no harm to bring the point home by mentioning that if you begin the battery once again you will not leave the half-achieved Iran till in her ashes she lie burièd.

And if that sounds a little too peaceful to people who probably expected to die anyway, you might want to remind them of what your band of wild savages (as they are already disposed to see them) intend to do to the people they leave behind. Therefore, let them take pity of their country and their people whiles yet your soldiers are in your command (hint hint), whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace o’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds of heady murder, spoil and villainy. If not . .

Well, I leave to you the details of the picture of destruction you choose to draw for them. I’ve found that I get pretty good results by mentioning how the blind and bloody soldier with foul hand will defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters; how your fathers will be taken by the silver beards and their most reverend heads dashed to the walls; how your naked infants will be spitted upon pikes, whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry at Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen — though on second thoughts maybe you shouldn’t mention the idea of Jews as victims.

Anyway, you may find the portrayal of different sorts of devastation more effective. The key thing is to end with something along these lines, straight up: “Will you yield, and this avoid?
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroyed?” I know that “guilty in defence” thing doesn’t make a lot of sense, but if you paint a picture that is terrifying enough, no one will think to question it.

By the way, one of your predecessors in office, fellow by the name of Lincoln, had a great comeback to that kind of reasoning:

We hear that you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that event, you say you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you and then you will be a murderer!”

Somehow, I don’t think the Iranian holy men are either students of American history or cool enough themselves to think so clearly.

No, the only “resistance” you have to worry about will come from your own people, or those of them who, having decided long ago that you are evil, or mad, or both, think (or pretend to think) that you, personally, seriously intend to commit such atrocities — or “war crimes” as they will call them, having heard the expression somewhere before. But that’s politics, I guess, in your day as in ours. We called it the “Wars of the Roses.”

The main thing is to remember, as I’m sure I don’t need to add, is that when the enemy’s people respond as you want them to do, you must use mercy to them all. That will really mess with their heads.

Yours in Christ,
Henricus Rex.

P.S. What’s with the “No Kings” deal? I thought you guys got rid of us 250 years ago?