There are no limits to what he’ll do
“The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously” tops a Friday article in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols. Donald J. Trump, a man very much “not in full,” a man who’s spent his entire adult life complaining that “the world is laughing at us” (him), finds himself dismissed as a clown by the very dictators club he is desperate to have welcome him. <sad trombone>
The harder Trump tries, the harder he fails. And the more damage he does to his “Make Me Great” agenda, the more Americans pay for it in loss of services and international respect.
Max Boot this morning examines Trump’s pointless, silly, and illegal procalamtion that he’s changed the name of The Department of Defense to the Department of War. This comes on the heels of the military strike last week that killed 11 on a speedboat in the Caribbean:
The strike is a troubling new chapter in a trend that began in 2001, and continued through Republican and Democratic administrations, with the United States employing missile and drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists without benefit of trial. The administration is piggybacking on that history by designating Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization. But calling it a terrorist group doesn’t automatically give the president the power to kill its purported members.
(Trump should instead go to a gun show and buy something in a larger caliber than his willy.)
Trump is now committing war crimes on top of human rights violations for which at minimum, in a just universe, an indictment from the International Criminal Court (ICC) would prevent him from visiting his extraterritorial properties should he leave office without (likely) facing U.S. indictments. <louder sad trombone>
Max Boot writes this morning:
Senior officials, indeed, seem to revel in their contempt for the rule of the law. Hegseth said on Friday that the “War Department” would be concerned with “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” On Saturday, Vice President JD Vance, posting on X, called the strike on the alleged drug-smuggling boat “the highest and best use of our military.” When an online critic argued that “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” Vance replied: “I don’t give a s— what you call it.”
In Trumpistan, the law is what Trump says it is.
Maybe there will be an ICC indictment in Vance’s future as well.
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