President Donald Trump is ready to use his fists to win the nation’s war against Iran. As the military operation enters its sixth month, Trump has been using increasingly personal and physically aggressive terminology to describe how the United States will defeat the country. Most recently, Trump has promised to “beat the f**ing shit out of them,” “smack” and “hit” Iran.

And according to historians, this specific type of language may be a very deliberate method of propaganda.

The fight language Trump uses when discussing Iran is called “glittering generalities,” one of the seven propaganda techniques identified in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. Under this rhetoric, a leader promises an audience an inflated but imprecise outcome. (Some of the other techniques include name-calling, drawing upon “testimonials” to get respected or hated people to reject or endorse your message, and “plain folks” propaganda, or appearing to be ordinary to win audience’s confidence.)

Trump “is a master of glittering generalities,” said Nick Cull, a historian of propaganda and professor of communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Cull cited Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign speech as one famous example where Trump declared: “We are going to win so much you may even get tired of winning.”

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Trump is known for using “glittering generalities” in his speeches and threats, propaganda experts say.

When Trump talks about the U.S. attacks against Iran, the generality becomes a much more ominous, vague threat.

“Trump has hit on a dark version of glittering generalities where it is the promise of violence that is inflated but unfocused. Just raging against an evil ‘other,’” Cull said. “He is building himself up as the man in charge so it plays well to his base in the short term.”

What makes Trump’s war rhetoric different is that “normally when we go to war or we take military action, we’re trying to convey that it is in a limited sense. It’s proportionate,” said Emma Briant, a researcher and expert on contemporary propaganda and information warfare.

Meanwhile, “when someone says, ‘I’m going to beat the shit out of you,’ you imagine blood, you imagine bruises, you imagine faces distorted. It’s a very visual kind of way of talking. And the last thing that militaries normally want to do is have you picture the violence.”

Under Trump, the war is “being justified in a very different way, not with the sort of legitimacy of limited government and authority, but...a kind of war of the streets,” Briant continued.

“I think it’s very disturbing, actually, the potential for the way it could escalate and the normalization of this kind of language,” Briant said, noting that his “us vs. them” arguments are “constructions that are very common, obviously in authoritarian” governments.

The problem is that when war becomes a personal battle, anyone can easily become the enemy.

“I see dangerous territory as it erases the gap between an evil regime and its wider population,” Cull said.

And Trump’s words might be influencing how other nations do international relations, too.

In April, Trump threatened that he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age,” an aggressive rhetoric that Iran has echoed in its own updates.

“If a strike is made on Iran, we will return the entire region and its facilities to the Stone Age,” an Iranian Parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee spokesperson said at the beginning of August on X.

Of course, Trump’s actions can be unpredictable. On Sunday, Trump switched tactics from previous threats of a large military offensive and said he is counting on economic pressure to get concessions from Iran, a much less violent tone than his threats to beat the nation up.

“We are low-keying it,” Trump told Axios. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”

This ongoing unpredictability, may in turn, be sending a wider message to the world.

“Ordinarily, democracies don’t want to be seen as unpredictable, chaotic in international affairs,” Briant said. What Trump’s words about the Iran war show is that “having stable international relations and being seen as a predictable kind of stable superpower isn’t his goal.”