For Trump, Every Accusation Is a Confession

Early Wednesday morning, Trump announced on social media that every time the Iranians hit a ship in the Straits of Hormuz, the US military would take out an Iranian bridge or power plant.

Under international law, the targeting of civilian infrastructure is a war crime. That doesn’t mean that previous administrations haven’t flouted these laws, but they generally haven’t publicly gloried in ordering such crimes. Trump, by contrast, is gleefully promising to do so, essentially daring the world to stop him.

In bygone years, the military’s legal watchdogs would have raised enough red flags that such threats (a) likely wouldn’t be made in the first place and (b) wouldn’t be acted on if they were made. But the Trump administration has neutered the military’s watchdogs, and with the leadership of the armed forces besmirched by having gone along with such obviously criminal acts as the assassination of sailors in the Pacific and the Caribbean, there’s little chance of seeing significant military opposition to Trump’s demands to strike civilian infrastructure.

Coopting the military leadership in the crimes of a civilian leadership is a telltale sign of authoritarian governance. The dirtier you can get the hands of the generals and admirals, the easier it is to then involve them in additional plans to solidify your power and to destroy your political opponents. Trump seems to instinctively know this. He knows, too, that his rationales for expanding the Iran war are flimsy and ever-changing—but that this shapeshifting justification for military aggression almost certainly won’t trigger effective resistance within the US military.

Witness his recent pivot to focus on Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified underground site in Iran that may or may not host some basic nuclear facilities and storage sites. This renewed focus on the remnants of Iran’s nuclear program would perhaps carry some moral weight if Trump hadn’t paired his newfound attention on this site with the signing of an extraordinary agreement with Saudi Arabia to allow the dictatorial, fundamentalist kingdom to go whole-hog on enriching its own nuclear fuel.

To put it plainly: While the United States is now spending tens of billions of dollars in a war of choice to stop Iran—which hasn’t directly attacked the United States—from getting nuclear fuel, it is inking a deal with Saudi Arabia, home country to most of the 9/11 hijackers, allowing it to accumulate the same uranium fuel deemed too dangerous for the Iranians to possess. This is morally imbecilic.

Not surprisingly, the administration’s authoritarian actions are not confined to events overseas. Addressing an international security conference in Washington, DC, last week, Stephen Miller, architect of the most ghastly and violent of Trump’s domestic policies, not only mocked the physical appearance of left-wingers but gloried in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which, as he put it, “directs for the first time in American history all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country. It’s very important to understand that left-wing political terrorism seeks as its ultimate goal the overthrow of our system and form of government.”

Miller went on to warn that “left-wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery, suffering… inevitably, left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag, the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, and suffering in order to establish total control.”

Hmm… I can think of another group of people, with far more power than antifa, who seem to be experts on inflicting pain, humiliation, and suffering on vast swaths of people in the United States and overseas. This recalls, of course, the adage about the pot calling the kettle black. The White House often ascribes attributes to its opponents that most neutral observers would say best describe the administration itself.

Here we have Trump’s right-hand man, the architect of the occupation of Minneapolis and the assault on migrant communities around the country, ranting about how the left wing wants to put its opponents in prison, while, down the street, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin was putting together a plan to jail local elections officials who refuse to comply with unlawful federal efforts to intervene in state election systems, the Department of Justice was subpoenaing the phone records of New York Times journalists and their family members, and the State Department was attempting to smear, by name, an array of left-wing individuals and organizations for allegedly pro-Cuban activities in the United States. In Texas, a group of anti-ICE protesters were recently sentenced to prison terms ranging up to 100 years in length. In Minneapolis, 15 anti-ICE protesters have been indicted on charges of conspiring to “violently oppose law enforcement” after attempting to use messaging apps to coordinate a “blockade” of a federal building.

As for the inflicting of “pain, humiliation, and suffering,” perhaps Miller should look at how elder-care homes around the country are firing support staff because of the administration’s vindictive decision to remove Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Syrians, and other vulnerable groups. Perhaps he should focus on Trump’s imposition of 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian produce—a move that could result in huge numbers of Canadians losing their livelihoods—days after he threatened to levy tariffs on Canada as punishment for being the source of wildfire smoke drifting across the border into the United States. Perhaps he should look at the growing body count associated with ICE enforcement actions, including two recent fatal shootings of immigrants, one in Texas, the other in Maine. Perhaps he should read the recent Washington Post exposé of how immigrants are being held without adequate medical care and supplies of food in overcrowded rooms that lack beds, toilets, and showers. Perhaps he should talk to Cyclospora victims caught up in a public-health emergency thanks in part to the firing of so many Cyclospora experts who might have identified the outbreak in its early stages before it spread around the country.

When Trump and his henchmen accuse others of crimes, it’s a pretty good bet that they are deflecting from their own immoral actions. Today, the enemy is Iran and antifa; tomorrow—since in the authoritarian schema, new enemies must always be found—it will be some other targets of convenience.