Sex Crimes. State Crimes. War Crimes.
We’re detecting a pattern with this administration.
You really just can’t take breaks around here, huh? While we were all busy digesting dinner Thanksgiving night, Donald Trump was tapping away at his phone doing a little supervillain brainstorming on Truth Social. The president promised to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries,” “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States or is incapable of loving our country, and “end all federal benefits and subsidies” to noncitizens living in America. On Friday, Trump went further, posting that “any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated.”
Now this week we get to find out how much of this was tantamount to Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy and how much the president intends to actually pursue as policy. 2025! Happy Monday.
Trump’s Gang of Criminals
by William Kristol
“Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?”
Augustine made this suggestion 1,600 years ago, in The City of God. Today, in the country of Trump, we’re getting a convincing demonstration of Augustine’s proposition. Justice has been removed and a gang of criminals are in charge.
They’re certainly acting on a large scale. Their expertise ranges from ordering war crimes to covering up sex crimes to engaging in all manner of financial criminality. They’re a diverse bunch, from tough guys outfitted in combat gear and masks rampaging through the streets of our cities, to smooth operators in tuxedoes who mingle with ease at state dinners. Their ranks encompass experienced criminals and newbies. They commit novel crimes and cover up old ones. Allies who had the misfortune to be caught—or were too bumbling to succeed—get pardons from the boss.
It’s all a veritable festival of law-scorning; an amazing smorgasbord of law-breaking. And it turns out that if a president aggressively shuns any concern for justice and is willing to demonstrate utter contempt for the law—if he then disables the Department of Justice and the judge advocates general and almost all other internal checks and mechanisms of accountability—his gang can get away with a heck of a lot. They don’t even have to shoot particularly straight.
And so we have an administration that embraces and pursues criminality greedily and shamelessly. They’re so far unpunished, and there doesn’t seem to be much expectation that they will be punished.
Over Thanksgiving break, the Washington Post reported that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered a second firing on a suspected drug-running boat near Venezuela to ensure that the survivors clinging to the wreckage were killed.
Almost every serious person agrees with Andrew McCarthy of National Review and Fox News that, even without the second firing on the survivors, the three months of military strikes on the boats in the Caribbean are either “a war crime under federal law” or more likely simply “lawless.”
But, McCarthy stresses, even “if we stipulate arguendo that the administration has a colorable claim that our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors . . . the laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered hors de combat (out of the fighting)—including by shipwreck.”
In fact, every serious person knows that the second strike that reportedly took place to kill those two survivors of the original September 2 attack was illegal. Indeed, in its discussion of the duty to refuse illegal orders, the Department of Defense’s current law of war manual offers (in section 18.3.2.1) this instance of “Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations”: “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
Even President Trump gave a hint that he understood the problem when said last night that he would not have fired on the survivors. But he also said he didn’t know what happened and seemed pretty uninterested in finding out. And his secretary of defense hasn’t actually denied issuing that order. On Sunday evening, he put out a tweet with an AI-generated children’s book cover leaving the clear impression he’d do it again (see below).
Based on what we’ve seen over the past year, there will be no internal investigation or consequences. McCarthy himself emphasizes that “this is a very serious matter”—but seems to accept that nothing is going to happen because even were efforts made, “President Trump is undoubtedly going to pardon any administration officials in potential legal jeopardy.”
He’s probably correct. But are we simply stuck in this situation? Do we have no recourse? We have an utterly lawless administration both at home and abroad. Do we just have to live with it for at least three more years? And then hope the criminal gang permits free and fair elections?
Yes, the courts can do some things. But they have to wait for cases to come to them, and ultimately they have a limited ability to force the administration to change course.
There is one body in our system of government that could provide a recourse, that could make a difference: Congress. It may seem wishful to say—once again—that the rule of law depends on a Congress willing to assert its rightful authority and to hold the executive accountable. It may seem wishful to implore—once again—Republican members of Congress to put country and Constitution over party and political convenience. But could the wish finally be father to the thought?
It was somewhat heartening to see the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees join the Democratic ranking members in expressing alarm at the reports of the killing of the survivors. They said they were going to look into what happened. We’ll see how far they’re really willing to go.
And we’ll see if, perhaps, as they explore accountability in that one arena, they’ll dip their toes into the many others. We’ll see if anyone is willing to act against the mind-boggling and pervasive grift of Trump and cronies, and their subordination of foreign and domestic policies to their own personal financial interests. We’ll see if they push back against the rampant use of the pardon power in return for what are effectively bribes. We’ll see if they’re willing to treat this White House as what it truly is: a hot bed of corruption; a grift operation wrapped in the emblems of the state.
Not to try to stop the reckless criminality of this administration is to collude in it. It is to accept the collapse of our experiment in republican self-government into rule by a lawless gang.
Yet Another Ridiculous Pardon
by Andrew Egger
Now, look. Sure, Donald Trump may be committing a few war crimes here and there as he indiscriminately blows up boats off the coast of Venezuela. But you guys aren’t getting the big picture! Trump has to blow those boats up, because anyone who would scheme to bring illegal drugs into our great country is a narcoterrorist, and the punishment for narcoterrorism is death. If you’re upset about that, well, you plainly aren’t as mad about America’s drug crisis as Trump is.
This is the argument that Trump’s and Hegseth’s MAGA defenders have gotten used to making in recent months. But on Friday, Trump blew it all up like one of those boats in the Caribbean with an unexpected Truth Social proclamation: He would soon be pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras currently serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States for allowing hundreds of thousands of pounds of cocaine to be trafficked through his country during his tenure.
During Hernández’s trial, prosecutors showed evidence he had taken enormous bribes from drug kingpins like El Chapo to allow them to use Honduras as a staging ground for cocaine smuggled from further south. They also showed that he had used drug money to manipulate the vote in national elections and even had a co-conspirator killed in prison to cover his tracks. A New York jury convicted Hernández on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy. Trump, however, had a different take: Hernández had been, “according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”1
To say this pardon is out of step with Trump’s typical approach to drug-crime issues would be an understatement. To make the two line up, you’d have to hypothesize that Trump is springing Hernández from federal prison just to have the military shoot down the plane carrying him home.
But sometimes a politician has to set aside a lesser priority for the sake of a greater one. And while Trump might care quite a bit about cracking down on the drug trade, that doesn’t hold a candle to the agenda item that has quickly become one of the most consistent of his second term: the desire to aid right-wing world leaders accused of criminal behavior.
Trump has attempted to browbeat Israel into abandoning the corruption prosecution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, threatening to withhold further U.S. funds to Israel over the matter. When he slapped enormous tariffs on Brazil earlier this year, Trump cited that country’s prosecution of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, over his clumsy attempts to steal a presidential election. He has called France’s embezzlement charges against right-wing leader Marine Le Pen a “witch hunt” and speculated that a special prosecutor investigating a coup attempt by former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol might have been like “deranged Jack Smith.”
Trump plainly sees himself in all these leaders. But the Hernández pardon is particularly remarkable for its overturning of a conviction by an American court. Trump doesn’t appear to have even bothered to look up any of the details of the trial—people he trusts say it was a witch hunt, so a witch hunt it is.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Danger of Patriotism Detached From American Ideals. MARK HERTLING writes on how Ronald Reagan’s notion of ‘informed patriotism’ offers a path out of our political dysfunction.
Why a Jackie Chan Sequel Says a Whole Lot About Trump’s Economy… In Receipts, CATHERINE RAMPELL reports on what can best be described as Kung-Fu Corruption.
America’s New Crisis: We Can’t Build… On How to Fix It, JOHN AVLON sits down with MARC DUNKELMAN, author of the new book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Get It Back, to dig into the real reasons our government can’t get shovels in the ground, and how we fix it.
Steve Bannon Was Epstein’s Comeback Consultant. Where’s the Uproar? The MAGA architect is escaping opprobrium for his chummy relationship with the notorious pedophile. MONA CHAREN wonders why.
A Backlash Is Brewing Against Companies Helping ICE… Activists are targeting the reputations of Home Depot, AT&T, and other businesses, reports ADRIAN CARASQUILLO in Huddled Masses.
Quick Hits
WE DO A LITTLE WAR CRIMING: The Washington Post’s bombshell report last week that the troops who carried out one of administration’s strikes on a boat off the coast of Venezuela fired a second volley to kill survivors clinging to the wreckage has shaken loose a remarkable amount of bipartisan alarm on Capitol Hill. That might be because what the Post describes is likely a war crime. Even though Republicans control both houses of Congress, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees both announced this weekend that they will open inquiries into the matter. The Wall Street Journal has more:
Rep. Don Bacon (R., Neb.), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said in an interview on ABC that if the strike occurred as the article said, “that is a violation of the law of war. When people want to surrender, you don’t kill them, and they have to pose an imminent threat. It’s hard to believe that two people on a raft, trying to survive, would pose an imminent threat.”
Rep. Mike Turner (R., Ohio), a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, also raised concerns. “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that would be an illegal act,” he said Sunday on CBS.
Two people, at least, aren’t so concerned. President Donald Trump waved off questions Sunday about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s supposed “leave no survivors” order: “He said he didn’t do it. He said he never said that.” And Hegseth’s own response was emblematic of the dignity and moral character for which he is so justly famous:
SACKS FULL O’ GOLD: Billionaire tech investor David Sacks is an unusual character. He’s a semi-formal Trump adviser who has been given enormous latitude to shape the White House’s policy on AI and cryptocurrency—all while continuing to run his own Silicon Valley investing firm raking in huge sums in these very fields. The New York Times reports on a summer White House AI summit hosted by Sacks’s All-In podcast and Sacks’s many other remarkable conflicts of interest:
No event better illustrates Mr. Sacks’s ethical complexities and how his intertwined interests have come together than the July A.I. summit. Mr. Sacks initially planned for the forum to be hosted by “All-In,” which he leads with other tech investors. “All-In” asked potential sponsors to each pay it $1 million for access to a private reception and other events at the summit “bringing together President Donald Trump and leading A.I. innovators,” according to a proposal viewed by The Times.
The plan so worried some officials that Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, intervened to prevent “All-In” from serving as the sole host of the forum, two people with knowledge of the episode said.
Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and a critic of Silicon Valley billionaires, said Mr. Sacks was a quintessential example of ethical conflicts in an administration where “the tech bros are out of control.”
“They are leading the White House down the road to perdition with this ascendant technocratic oligarchy,” he said.
Sacks and his defenders (he has many in the tech crowd) insist the piece is a real nothingburger—that the Times doesn’t understand the lengths Sacks went to to unravel his conflicts and that the paper doesn’t emphasize enough that he is essential for this role, and that he can do this because he is a “special government employee.” It boils down to this: Could our government’s crypto policy survive without David Sacks? Read the whole thing and decide for yourself.
ICED OUT: There’s always been a chasm between Donald Trump’s rhetoric about sticking up for the “forgotten man” and his actual policies—perhaps never more so than in his cuts to federal disaster aid this year. Politico reports on the economic crisis bearing down on a region in rural, Trump-voting northern Michigan, where a March ice storm devastated local utilities—and where Trump’s Federal Emergency Management Agency unexpectedly denied emergency disaster relief:
The Oct. 22 denial is a striking example of how Trump’s cuts to disaster aid—and his vow for deeper reductions next year—threaten to shift billions of dollars in costs from federal taxpayers to households struggling to rebuild. In this case, it would hit a working-class region that voted overwhelmingly for the president last year, helping him win the crucial swing state.
Those households could now face thousands of dollars apiece in rate hikes to make up for the costs of rebuilding their communities’ electric grids after a three-day ice storm in March, utility officials and lawmakers warned.
The denial came after the Trump administration documented $90 million in damage to utility infrastructure, according to records obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News. The amount is nearly five times the federal threshold to qualify for disaster aid. But in its October denial letter, the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer that assistance to the utilities “is not warranted.”
Gov. Whitmer has taken it on the chin from Democrats this year for trying to play nice with Trump and meet him halfway in order to protect good relations between the federal government and her state. But that approach doesn’t seem to have helped much here. Who knew the guy could be so unreliable?
Cheap Shots
All that tweeting can tire a fella out.
Perhaps the most significant of the “people” that Trump greatly respects to have argued in favor of Hernández was infamous dirty trickster Roger Stone. Another was convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. And Paul Krugman notes that Hernández had interesting ties to other Silicon Valley titans who hold increasing sway in Trump’s orbit: guys like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen.
Bill, you are right. Augustine is 100% right. We elected twice, (and according to his lying mind, three times) the most cruel, criminal, vulgar, perverse, ignorant, corrupt, amoral, racist and misogynistic person of my long lifetime. Anyone with half a brain could have seen this coming. And thanks Supreme Court, you own this obscenity lock, stock and barrel. Every Republican politician in America, you own every bit of this too. And you too, American people. 77 million of you decided murder and cruelty and sexual perversion, together with unimaginable stupidity, illegality and the all the rest, as well as unthinkable grift, theft and financial corruption are just fine. We have sown the wind, and we are reaping the whirlwind. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul.” Mark 8:36. America sold its soul to Trump, and I fear we are not getting it back.
Hegseth and the entire chain of command that followed the kill order must be tried and convicted in either a military or civilian court. Even the lowest level soldier who carried out that order knew it was illegal and did it anyway. At the very least, every officer and enlisted individual who has participated in these killings must be given a dishonorable discharge, as this is the very definition of dishonorable.