Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, November 2019:
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. ...
[T]he 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 [were] ... 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. Even the cynical invocation of legal restraints on warfare can provide a modicum of protection for civilians, but Trump would do away with this meager safeguard in pursuit of political advantage, in part because he does not see the people whom those restraints protect as fully human to begin with. In the long run, Trump hopes to do with the U.S. military what he has done with the police and immigration enforcement: forge the institution into a partisan weapon for himself to wield against his enemies, using the promise of impunity for crimes against the weak or despised. ...
[Trump] 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.
Trump pardoned Mathew Golsteyn, once a decorated Army Special Forces officer, who told the CIA in a job interview that he killed an Afghan detainee he suspected of being a bomb maker; Trump prevented the demotion of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted of posing in photographs with a detainee's corpse, but who was acquitted on more serious war-crimes charges; and he pardoned Clint Lorance, an Army lieutenant who ordered his unit to fire on unarmed Afghans. In May, Trump pardoned Michael Behenna, a former Army lieutenant who was convicted of killing an unarmed Iraqi detainee. ...
"I will always stick up for our great fighters," Trump told the crowd at a rally in Florida yesterday. "People can sit there in air-conditioned offices and complain, but you know what? It doesn't matter to me whatsoever."
The seven Navy SEALs who told investigators that Gallagher shot unarmed civilians from his sniper nest, including "a girl in a flower-print hijab who was walking with other girls on the riverbank," after being warned that doing so could "cost them and others their careers" were not sitting in an office. The soldiers who testified that Lorance ordered his unit to fire on unarmed Afghans who were "definitely not any type of threat" were not luxuriating in an air-conditioned building. ...
It would be a mistake, however, to view Trump's pardons as stemming from a deep reverence for the military or an understanding of the difficulties faced by service members. Rather, he views these crimes as acts of nationalist solidarity against Muslims, against whom crimes are not simply acceptable but praiseworthy. Trumpists are capable of recognizing the evils of excessive state power—but only when it is directed at those they see as like themselves. When it is directed at those they hate and fear, such excesses are not crimes but virtues.
The crimes of which these service members are accused were committed against people the president does not consider fully human. It would not do to punish Americans for killing people whose lives, in the eyes of the president and many of his supporters, do not matter. ...
Trump is already reportedly planning to have one or more of these service members appear at his campaign rallies. Trump's ideology is also his politics: As with calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers who must be kept out, Muslims terrorists who must be banned, and black Americans criminals who must face unrestrained brutality, Trump divides the nation by making everything a test of loyalty. ... To respect the rights of those who are different, to even acknowledge that they exist, is to show disloyalty and weakness, is to side with the "animals" against civilization. To disregard them as nonexistent is to display patriotism and strength.
The very act of concern for those harmed by Trump's policies—migrant children separated from their families at the border, Muslims banned from entry, or black people murdered by police—is itself a kind of treason. As a con man, Trump cannot fathom why anyone would adhere to principle when there is an advantage to be gained, and he regards such people with contempt ... Doing the right thing without expectation of material reward is not something Trump can personally comprehend—even his war-crimes pardons are themselves transactional. At future campaign rallies, if Trump has his way, the president's enthusiastic retelling of war crimes will come with props, as legions of Trump supporters cheer. ...
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.
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