On Tuesday evening, barely an hour before the deadline imposed by President Trump for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was rendered moot by the announcement of a two-week cease-fire in the American-Israeli war against that country, a small group of East Hampton Town residents gathered at the Hook Mill in East Hampton Village, where they held a hastily organized “no more war” vigil.
On Easter Sunday the president, who launched the war against Iran on Feb. 28 amid shifting and sometimes contradictory goals and rationales, posted a profanity-laden message on social media. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one,” he wrote, threatening to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, which could be deemed a war crime. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!”
On Tuesday morning, he wrote that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” among other threats.
Holding signs reading “No war,” “No war crimes,” and “We will not look away,” the gathering lined Pantigo Road as a steady chorus of approving horns were sounded by passing motorists. Alyson Follenius, an organizer of weekly Beacon for Democracy gatherings that have taken place at the Hook Mill over the past year, was briefly at a loss for words.
“I don’t really think there are words when you have an unhinged president posting on social media that he’s threatening to annihilate an entire country,” she said. “The time for us to decide what side of history we are going to be on has already passed. I think that we are at a point now where every single one of us, regardless of political affiliation and where you fall on the spectrum, needs to understand that a president doing that causes an unsafe situation for every single person living in this country.”
Gloria Frazee, who helped organize the vigil, quoted the economist and journalist Paul Krugman, who, responding to the president’s Tuesday social media post, wrote, “This is America’s darkest hour.”
“How do we react to that?” Ms. Frazee asked of the president’s threats. “How can we come together as a community to say this is not okay? We will not look away.”
Leonard Green said that he had awoken on Tuesday “realizing that we had a pretty good chance of committing war crimes, and I just wanted to say not in my name. This is just obscene. The least I could do was stand out here and say no, and hope that the message gets echoed, that people who drive by will begin to think that this is just, as I said before, obscene, and we shouldn’t allow it to pass in our name.”
Councilwoman Cate Rogers spoke of “the utter recklessness of the president of the United States and his nonsensical war that threatens the existence of all of us.” No president, she said, “should ever call for the end of a civilization. It’s an abomination, and we need to speak up and stand up, more now than ever before.”
