When it comes to the power of the courts, President Donald Trump has learned his lesson. Unfortunately, thanks to the United States Supreme Court inventing a new form of immunity to protect him from any consequences, the lesson Trump seems to have learned is that all courts, everywhere, should do the same.
So Trump is taking his show on the road to demand that the International Criminal Court agree never to prosecute him or any of his top officials who have been party to the straight-up murder of boaters in the Caribbean. If they won’t agree, he’s going to slap sanctions on the whole court.
Trump is right to worry, as should Attorney General Pam Bondi and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Whether you characterize their actions as war crimes or murder, they are crimes nonetheless.
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To get a special gift of immunity from the ICC, however, is a wee bit harder than getting it from the Supreme Court, which only required convincing six amoral conservative justices. The ICC would literally have to amend its founding documents, known as the Rome Statute, just to protect Trump.
Well, how hard can that be, really? Just yell at the ICC and threaten sanctions until they do it, right?
Not quite. The ICC was established by a treaty, the aforementioned Rome Statute. It lays out the international crimes that the ICC can investigate: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. The ICC only has authority to act if a state will not. In other words, the ICC couldn’t do a thing to Trump if the United States were investigating or prosecuting him, but we know that’s never going to happen.
Amending the Rome Statute to somehow give Trump special protection would require two-thirds of the signatories to agree to the amendment. There are 125 countries that have signed, and we’ve alienated a bunch of them, so the idea that 80 or more countries would agree to wrap Trump in a blanket of immunity is absurd.
Nonetheless, that’s the idea being floated by an unnamed administration official.
“The solution is that they need to change the Rome Statute to make very clear that they don't have jurisdiction,” the anonymous lackey said.
Oh, wait, it might be even harder than that. The move would also need approval from the ICC’s governing body, and because the change in the court’s jurisdiction would be so major and so fundamental, it might require approval from more than two-thirds of the members.
The United States had already slapped sanctions on individual ICC judges and prosecutors for daring to investigate Israel’s war crimes back in August, and to force the ICC to stop investigating possible U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, we sanctioned nine ICC officials. We have never, however, sanctioned the whole court, which is what Trump is threatening to do.
These sorts of sanctions are designed to grind the court's work to a halt. Sanctioned prosecutors and judges can’t travel to the United States because they can’t get visas, their bank accounts get frozen, and they face the possibility of up to 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine if they continue their work. If Trump sanctions the whole court, it would drastically affect its ability to function.
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As is so common these days, Trump is just following the lead of his favorite strongman buddy. After the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, the dictator responded by issuing warrants for ICC staff.
Trump’s belief that he somehow has authority over the ICC springs from the same dumb, poisoned well as his belief that he should be allowed to dictate court outcomes in other countries. Witness his sanctions on Brazilian judicial officials because they dared to prosecute their corrupt former president, Jair Bolsonaro. Don’t these fools know that their job is to protect strongmen and ensure they get elected again?
Trump has been so coddled by the Supreme Court that he seems genuinely confused that other courts won’t simply bend to his will. But those courts aren’t in thrall to him and they’re not controlled by his pals and cronies, so it’s not going to work.
