11/30/19
Donald Trump is a war-crimes enthusiast. This is not an exaggeration, a mischaracterization, or a misrepresentation. As a candidate, the president regaled his audiences with vivid tales of brutality, some apocryphal, and vowed to imitate them. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently invoked a false story about General John Pershing crushing a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, declaring, “There was no more radical Islamic terror for 35 years!” Trump declared that he would “take out the families” of terrorist suspects, assuring skeptics that the military would not refuse his commands, even though service members have a duty to refuse orders that are manifestly illegal. “If I say do it, they’re going to do it.” Although Trump was talked out of authorizing torture by his advisers, the president’s ardor for violations of the laws of war has manifested itself in his decisions to intervene in war-crimes cases on behalf of the defendants. In four separate cases since the beginning of his presidency, and for the first time in the history of modern warfare, an American president has aided service members accused or convicted of war crimes, against the advice of his own military leadership. The clearances eroded the rule of law, as well as institutional safeguards against authoritarianism and the politicization of the military. But they were also a rational extension of Trumpist nationalism, which recognizes no moral, legal, or institutional restraints on the president worth upholding, and which sees violence against outsiders as a redemptive expression of national loyalty. The White House’s formal announcement of the pardons argued that they were in the interest of justice, on behalf of service members facing extenuating circumstances. But the president himself does not make that case. Instead, he argues that the crimes of which the men are accused are not truly crimes at all. As the president put it on Twitter, “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” This is a philosophy that makes no moral distinction between killing combatants and killing the innocent.
Violations of the laws of war are among the most serious crimes service members can commit, and issuing pardons, countermanding demotions, or otherwise interfering with the legal processes for investigating and punishing such crimes makes it more difficult for commanders to maintain control of their subordinates. Many former officials have warned that Trump’s war-crimes pardons undermine “good order and discipline,” a jargony way to say that they signal the rules don’t matter. A military force where the rules don’t matter is not one that can fight effectively or with the necessary moral or strategic restraint. Defenders of Trump’s pardons dishonor service members by treating them as conscienceless automatons who need make no distinction between combatants and civilians. But murder, under color of authority, is still murder. Those service members who show a loyalty to principles above faction, such as Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who told Congress of the president’s scheme to extort Ukraine into falsely implicating a political rival, are not honored by Trumpists, but derided. Those who violate the laws of war against individuals Trumpists consider less than human, regardless of guilt or innocence, are to be praised as heroes. Patriotism here ultimately means something far less than love of country—it means love of a very specific group of Americans, who regard the majority of their countrymen as usurpers. And that love must manifest itself in loyalty to Trump, who represents their will. The ominous message, which echoes from the Justice Department to the Department of Homeland Security to the Pentagon, is that the only law that matters is Trump’s law, and the only loyalty that even counts as loyalty is fealty to Trump.
