It’s a tough gig, being the Easter Bunny. Santa gets a flying sleigh, omniscience and moral authority. The Tooth Fairy gets hard cash to hand out. But the bunny just hides chocolate and fields awkward questions about how it’s produced (does he lay the eggs? How? Where from?). And yet this year, the discomfort was something new; this year, he had to stand next to Donald Trump while the president talked about crushing his enemies.
A few days before his appearance with the world’s top chocolate-distributing rabbit, Trump had threatened to conclude his war on Iran by “blowing up and completely obliterating” the country’s means to produce energy and fresh water. Targeting the infrastructure needed for civilians to survive is a war crime, and to affirm his commitment to such crimes, Trump had subsequently announced his intention to send the people of Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”. On Easter Sunday, imbued with Christian forbearance, Trump had reiterated his threat to blow up bridges and power stations in Iran before adding, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” and then, for some reason, “Praise be to Allah.”
On the White House balcony on Easter Monday, the Easter Bunny conveyed all the seriousness and discomfort that it’s possible for a portly, 7ft-tall rabbit in a bow tie to convey. The paschal rodent applauded politely as Trump celebrated the rescue of two American servicemen from Iran, then stood motionless as Trump described another rescue attempt, one he had just made up, and in which he imagined hundreds of Americans would have died, had it happened, although to be clear, it didn’t happen. When Trump declared his command of “the most powerful military in the world”, the Easter Bunny nodded gently, dipping his ears in recognition of America’s immense capacity for violence, measuring it against his own meagre ability to dispense confectionery.
The marching band struck a tune and Donald Trump, his wife Melania and the Easter Bunny descended to the White House lawn. He paused to speak to a gaggle of journalists. “We are obliterating that country,” he told them. He spoke of the war as an opportunity for plunder: “I’d take the oil, I’d keep the oil, and we’d make plenty of money,” he said. The Iranians, he imagined, were thankful to him: “The Iranian people, when they don’t hear bombs go off, they’re upset. They want to hear bombs, because they want to be free.” Behind him, the band moved into a jazzy number.
Melania and the Easter Bunny stood to one side. The First Lady would later take part in the Easter tradition of reading stories to children, an activity that for many years took place in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, until the Trumps had the garden bulldozed last year to make way for a new ballroom, a building Trump has described as “a monument to myself”. One of the reporters asked if the First Lady had a message for the children of Iran. Melania, ever the beauty-pageant contestant, declared that, “All of this is happening for their future, so they will be safe in years to come.” The latest figures from the Iranian health ministry say that more than 2,000 civilians have so far been killed by the conflict in Iran, including at least 216 children. The youngest victim is understood to have been eight months old. A further 1,881 children have been reported as injured in strikes that Iran says have damaged 763 schools.
When Trump spoke about the Iranian refusal to surrender, he used the language of the playground: “They don’t want to say uncle,” he said (“uncle” being an old-fashioned American way of surrendering to a bully). “And if they don’t, then they’ll have no bridges, they’ll have no power plants, they’ll have no anything… there are other things that are worse than those two, and we might have… well…”
And there it hung, in the bright spring air: the threat of nuclear war.
This, he said, was the whole point: maintaining Israel as the only nuclear power in the Middle East. “The war is about one thing. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” he said. “They are lunatics, and you can’t put nuclear weapons in the hands of a lunatic.”
Towards the end of his presidency, Richard Nixon had two hobbies: heavy drinking, and trying to start a nuclear war. A sozzled Nixon is said to have boasted to guests at the White House that he could leave the room, place an order and within minutes, tens of millions of people would be dead. It is believed that, one night in 1969, he ordered the military to prepare for a nuclear strike on North Korea; Henry Kissinger intervened and the order was suspended until the president had slept and sobered up.
As Winston Churchill reportedly pointed out to the MP who accused him of being drunk (“and you are ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober”) drunkenness is a temporary state. At least Nixon could sober up. Trump never will, because he doesn’t drink. He’s a lunatic every hour he is awake. Worse still, there is none of the Nixon-era game theory at work, and no Kissinger to intervene – only a group of swivel-eyed halfwits and evangelical loons, all hot for the apocalypse.
At the White House, having officiated an egg-rolling event, Trump sat with a group of schoolchildren who were drawing pictures. The children listened patiently as their president rambled at them about how the previous president, Joe Biden, used an “autopen” to sign documents, and why that was bad (Trump himself has used an autopen, as have many former presidents). “He was incapable of signing his name,” Trump huffed. The kids squinted at him and said nothing, wondering at the spectacle of a 79-year-old man boasting that he can still write his own name.
At the press conference that followed, Trump wished the room a happy Easter. “This is one of our better Easters,” he said, “in a lot of different ways… militarily, it’s been one of the best.” After threatening to imprison journalists who reported on his war, he took questions from them. The Iranian people, he said, welcomed air strikes, even near their homes. The grateful messages arrive, he claimed: “Please keep bombing.” God, too, was on his side. And then he reiterated his contempt for Nato, a contempt that he said was informed by his chats with Vladimir Putin, and he talked about how well he got along with the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, and he repeated his desire to invade Greenland.
By the time this magazine arrives with you, the situation will have changed, perhaps horrifyingly so; shortly before going to press, hours before his latest deadline, Trump had posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, the clearest intention to commit war crimes: “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back.” But on Monday, as the eggs rolled on the White House lawn, he had made the truth very plain: “You know what’s a war crime? Having a nuclear weapon. Allowing a sick country, with demented leadership, to have a nuclear weapon – that’s a war crime.”
[Further reading: The United States is no friend of Europe]
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This article appears in the 08 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall
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