If anybody besides the sitting president made a threat like this, we would correctly view them as an enemy of civilized society.

Consider this hypothetical:

Two apartment buildings share a single parking lot. Management from both Building A and Building B are engaged in negotiations over how the parking lot will be organized, painted, maintained, and paid for.

Across the street is a restaurant. The restaurant's customers primarily come from Building A, and internal studies have shown that Building B's tenants overwhelmingly patronize the restaurant's competition. Therefore, the restaurant is seeking to sway the parking lot negotiations to make it easier for Building A's tenants to get to their shop, and harder for Building B's tenants to get to the competitor.

Through back-channel discussions, the restaurant learns that Building A may be conceding to many of Building B's requests for how the parking lot should be organized. Worried that this will help their competition, the restaurant announces on social media that if Building A doesn't get their act together and negotiate more aggressively, they will "bomb the sh*t out of them."

Now, that's quite a leap. How did we go from negotiations one day to threats of mass murder the next?

If this scenario were to occur in Anytown, USA, we would immediately see this as unhinged and immoral. No, you cannot use murder as your default method of settling disputes. The vast majority of us accept this in our day-to-day lives, and the proof of this is that the vast majority of us have never murdered anybody. We settle disputes verbally, or through contractual agreements, and if negotiations fail we tend to just walk away. But for some reason when it comes to the global stage, where the harm caused by these decisions is far greater in scale, many struggle to see the issue with this type of rhetoric.

The Hormuz negotiations