Trump Is Rage Posting His Way Into Genocide Charges

The president is on the verge of courting the severest possible legal punishments for he and his enablers.

President Donald Trump spent the Easter weekend issuing a belligerent stream of threats to destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure. He set a deadline of 8 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday night for the Iranian government to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or U.S. airstrikes would destroy the country’s power plants and bridges. On Tuesday morning, his language took an even darker turn towards genocidal rhetoric.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote on his personal social-media website. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

Trump administration officials have already faced serious allegations of war crimes for their military operations in Latin America and Iran. In an article for our March issue that went to press before the Iran war began, I reported on Trump’s legal peril under international law at length. But the president’s latest post opens up him and members of his administration to something completely new: potential criminal charges for genocide.

Genocide has been considered a violation of international law for almost 80 years. Since then, genocide-related prosecutions have typically occurred through bespoke international tribunals like the ones created for the Yugoslav wars, the Khmer Rouge, and the Rwandan genocide. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has also had jurisdiction to prosecute genocide-related crimes since its establishment in 2002.

A federal law passed in 2002 on the eve of the Iraq War forbids the U.S. government from extraditing U.S. citizens to the International Criminal Court or cooperating with its investigations in any meaningful way. The law is colloquially known as the Hague Invasion Act because it gives free-standing congressional authorization for military operations to “use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release” of any U.S. soldier or official in ICC custody. It is meant to deter international-law investigations into U.S. military operations.

International tribunals are not necessary to prosecute Americans who commit genocide, however. The Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987 criminalizes the act of genocide “whether in time of peace or in time of war” under federal law. Unlike ordinary crimes, genocide is carried out “with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial........

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