The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Marco Rubio, now secretary of state and apparently also secretary of no consequences ever, has launched a full-blown campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court because it might one day inconvenience US soldiers, Border Patrol agents, or the occasional allied prime minister accused of bombing civilians. He’s out here warning that American officials could be “dragged before an international court” by scary foreign judges whose radical agenda includes such extremist concepts as "don’t commit war crimes in other people’s countries."

The State Department plan is as subtle as a Trump tweet: pressure countries to abandon the ICC or face US sanctions, travel bans, and visa revocations. So if your government wants US aid, you’re expected to help kneecap the only court on Earth that can prosecute atrocities when local systems won’t. As Kenneth Roth helpfully notes, Rubio is just slapping a "sovereignty" sticker on what is transparently a quest for blanket impunity for American and allied war crimes. Minor detail: the ICC doesn’t even claim jurisdiction over crimes committed inside the US.

The Trump-Rubio axis has already sanctioned the ICC prosecutor, his deputies, six judges, a UN special rapporteur, and three Palestinian human rights groups for the high crime of documenting possible Israeli and US war crimes. Now they’re floating sanctions on the entire tribunal, which would make it illegal for Americans, banks, and companies to work with the court at all. According to human rights advocates, this isn’t just hypocrisy; it may itself amount to obstruction of justice under the Rome Statute. So yes, the administration’s strategy for avoiding war-crimes charges is to commit more crimes against the system that prosecutes war crimes. Bold.

Rubio insists he’s saving the “rules-based international order” by smashing the only institution that occasionally enforces any rules on powerful countries. As one advocate put it, he’s not dismantling the ICC brick by brick so much as kicking over what was left of the post–World War II legal order to make sure that from Ukraine to Sudan to Palestine, anyone with enough firepower and a Washington lobbyist can go back to the simpler era where the only real international law was "who’s going to stop us?"

At the University of North Texas, an exhibit by Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez lasted about as long as due process at an ICE check-in. His show, Ni De Aquí, Ni De Allá — Neither from Here Nor from There, featured giant Mexican paleta sculptures with handcuffs, replica guns, rosaries, and popsicle sticks stamped with a parody ICE logo reading: "U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement". You know, a factual statement.

The exhibit had already run peacefully at Boston University, but once it hit Texas, it apparently triggered the state’s Standing Your Ground Against Metaphor statute. Within days, students started pinging the artist: the show was suddenly shut down, works quietly removed, and administrators started speaking fluent Bureaucratic Passive Voice about "concerns" and "procedures." Translation: you can enroll, pay tuition, and live with the consequences of immigration policy — you just can’t visually criticize the people enforcing it.

So on a campus where a quarter of the students are Hispanic, an artist who literally grew up in East Dallas was told, effectively, that his experience of U.S. immigration enforcement is too spicy for the gallery walls. The message from the state that worships "free speech": by all means, celebrate tacos and folklórico — but the minute you mention cages, handcuffs, or the agency doing the caging, the First Amendment gets deported.

Lindsey Graham, who spent the last decade as the Senate’s most accomplished political weather vane, has died at 71 after what his office calls a sudden illness. The retired air force reserve JAG, famous for loving every war he met and wanting to meet several more, went from calling Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic bigot" in 2016 to becoming one of his loudest hype men once the base made it clear they preferred the bigot over the hawk.

Washington reporters are already workshopping solemn tributes about his "independence" and "bipartisanship", carefully skipping the part where he helped launder Trump’s authoritarian impulses through the Senate, defended every new executive power grab, and treated constitutional checks like a suggestion box. The GOP, meanwhile, loses a reliable vote for forever war abroad and judicial extremism at home – and Trump loses one of his most practiced cable-news defense attorneys.

His death leaves an open Senate seat in South Carolina and a temporary vacuum in the "I used to have principles, then I met Donald" caucus. Expect a brisk primary among aspiring mini-Grahams, all eager to prove they, too, can go from calling Trump unfit for office to swearing eternal loyalty the moment it looks politically useful. The legacy of enabling doesn’t die; it just waits for the next host.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that if you can’t secure Air Force One, you can at least try to secure the narrative. After New York Times reporters revealed that Trump’s shiny new $400m Qatar-gifted presidential jet might be missing basic antimissile protections, the Justice Department helpfully showed up at their homes with grand jury subpoenas. Because nothing says “state-of-the-art security” like sending federal agents to intimidate the people who noticed you forgot the flares.

Press freedom groups are, shockingly, not thrilled that federal prosecutors are dragging journalists toward a secret grand jury for the crime of reporting on whether the president’s foreign-donated plane is a flying bullseye. Times lawyer David McCraw called the doorstep visits from federal agents an assault on the Constitution, which is generous, since this White House mostly treats the First Amendment like a suggestion box it can set on fire.

The White House insists the new Air Force One is totally safe and “state-of-the-art,” while also bragging that they use “distraction and misdirection” as security tools — which is one way to describe subpoenaing reporters who expose your security gaps. This comes on the heels of Trump’s team trying (and in other cases temporarily succeeding) to subpoena journalists at the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, prosecuting Don Lemon and other journalists for covering a protest, and greenlighting an FBI raid on a Post reporter’s home. The message is clear: the press is free to report anything it wants, as long as it’s flattering, pre-cleared, and doesn’t question the presidential warplane gifted by a friendly petro-monarchy.