War Crimes Are Trump's Truest Liberation

You liberal ninnies aren't going to stop him from committing genocide if he wants to.

White House photo by Molly Riley

I did not intend to write about the Iran war today; I’ve written about it plenty, and I figured my subscribers could use a break. But when the president of the United States openly threatens another country with genocide, it’s hard to think about anything else. By now you’ve surely seen this:

If you are reading this after Tuesday, April 7, you know how it turned out, at least in the short run. But until then, this is the situation: Because he loves attaching a deadline to a threat in order to create a ticking clock that heightens dramatic tension and encourages viewers to tune in to the next episode, Trump has told Iran that if it doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 pm eastern time, then he will destroy all the country’s power plants and bridges. But that alone wouldn’t obliterate Iranian “civilization” for all time. For that, you’d need nuclear bombs.

Despite all we’ve been through, I doubt Trump would actually nuke Iran and kill all its 92 million citizens. But I’m not 100% sure he wouldn’t, and neither is anyone else. This is one of the most horrifying things: When Trump is told that his current plans would make him a war criminal, that may make him even more likely to raise the stakes higher, bring more destruction, kill more people, and cause more global instability.

Part of him wants to be praised as a peacemaker, to have everyone say he stopped fifty-seven wars and finally get that Nobel Peace Prize. But another part of him yearns to be the destroyer of worlds.

This is an exchange he had with a New York Times reporter at his press conference on Monday:

Reporter: Deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure violate the Geneva Conventions and international law.

Trump: Who are you with?

Reporter: I’m with the New York Times.

Trump: Failing. Failing. Circulation way down at the New York Times. What’s going on there?

Reporter: Are you concerned that your threat to bomb power plants and bridges amount to war crimes?

Trump: No, not at all. No, I’m not. I hope I don’t have to do it. But again, I just said 47 years they’ve been negotiating with these people. They’re great negotiators and because- they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon. And if somebody that takes my place someday is weak and ineffective, which possibly that will happen because we had numerous presidents that were weak, ineffective, and afraid of Iran, we’re never going to let Iran have a nuclear weapon.

Trump doesn’t bother saying that America doesn’t target civilians, or that we take care to minimize collateral damage, or anything like that. He doesn’t recoil from the idea that he’d be committing war crimes or argue for why civilian infrastructure is actually a legitimate military target. He just dismisses the criticism out of hand. Unlike his predecessors, he says, he is not “weak and ineffective,” and he’ll prove it by being more brutal and less concerned with the niceties of international law, the Geneva Conventions, universal horror at genocide, or even the most fundamental human morality. He has identified a goal, and if he achieves that goal to his satisfaction, the fact that he committed horrors along the way is immaterial.

What norms and morality mean to Trump

In January, Trump was asked in an interview with the Times whether there is any constraint on his power in foreign affairs. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he responded. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” For him to say “my own morality” was particularly curious and may have been just a slip of the tongue, because there has never, not for a single moment, been any evidence that Trump possesses any morality at all. He believes in no abstract principles or standards of conduct that apply equally to himself and others. It’s impossible even to say what “morality” means to him.

When Trump breaks ordinary political norms, there are always two things going on at once. First, he breaks the norm because he doesn’t like being constrained in that particular way; the norm would keep another president from, say, personally attacking a judge who ruled against the administration, and that’s something Trump just wants to do. Second and more important, breaking the norm is a kind of meta-transgression. It’s an assertion of power, a statement that Trump is beyond all the rules that govern everyone else.

I can’t help but suspect that when he first suggested bombing civilian infrastructure and critics quickly began using the phrase “war crime,” that made him more, not less willing to go through with it. What better demonstration of his unlimited power would there be than to do something so shocking that all the world’s whiny libs will cry “War crimes!” and he’ll laugh in their faces?

This has been a consistent enough theme from the administration’s key figures that it is congealing into an ideology. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” said Stephen Miller a few months ago, “But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Pete Hegseth is secretary of defense today because he and Trump bonded over his advocacy for accused and convicted war criminals, and when the war began, he promised that the military would proceed with “No stupid rules of engagement.” Rules are for wimps; real men commit war crimes.

It’s not as though Miller and Hegseth had to work to convince Trump to agree with them; don’t forget that all the way back in 2016, he advocated murdering the families of suspected terrorists and pledged to reinstate George W. Bush’s torture program (“I would bring back waterboarding, and I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”). And now, Axios reports that “Trump might be the most hawkish person in the top echelons of his administration on Iran, according to a U.S. source who spoke to him several times in recent days. ‘The president is the most bloodthirsty, like a mad dog,’ another U.S. administration official said, downplaying stories that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or Secretary of State Marco Rubio were egging him on. ‘Those guys sound like the doves compared to the president.’”

The foundation of Trump’s movement, and the thing that made him so appealing to all the worst people in America, was the promise of liberation. No longer would you be constrained in what you can say or do by society and its rules, by “political correctness,” by women and minorities and liberals, by the annoying demand to consider the wishes and feelings of those around you. By becoming your worst self, you would at last be free.

Now Trump has his war, and even if it’s not turning out quite the way he wanted, he has a chance to show how free and powerful he is. War crimes, you say? Just watch me.

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