With malice toward all, with charity for none

A major trope of Trump minimization in term one was to talk about “mean tweets,” as if this anyone thought this was the central problem with the administration. This can also lead to the assumption that a tweet is just a tweet. With respect to this morning’s threat of world-historic war crimes on the president’s vanity site, however, as Krugman says we should take very, very seriously the possibility that he means it:

But let me do a Heather Cox Richardson here and talk about history for a second. Think about what Abraham Lincoln, a president who was actually winning his war, said in his second inaugural. You’ve all probably heard the magnificent conclusion, which begins,

with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

Determination, humility, decency, Now, let me read you Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from this morning:

Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day, all wrapped up in one in Iran. There will be nothing like it. Open the fuckin strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to Allah.

What happened to us? This is not the country we were supposed to be.

If Trump is actually going to give the order for massive war crimes, for destruction of civilian infrastructure, power plants, bridges, which will, among other things, lead to a lot of deaths in Iran, will the military obey it? A year ago, I would have said no.

But what we do know now is that, first of all, there turns out to be at least a significant MAGA component inside the officer corps. And we know that Pete Hexeth has been systematically corrupting, dismantling the military over the past 14 months. Generals who raise ethical concerns have been fired. Officers who even just want to be intelligent about warfare. and not believe that it’s all about warrior ethos and lethality have been fired, so it’s quite possible that there’s a quorum of officers who will follow instructions to commit war crimes.

You can get even more pessimistic. Tim Snyder has been arguing that we’re basically in preparation for a coup, that somehow or other the war will be a pretense and arguing that this insane expansion of military spending in the latest Trump budget is a bribe to the military.

I hope he’s wrong. But in any case, my God, if Trump gets his way, and if he doesn’t chicken out —and I think TACO is greatly overrated, I think all too often Trump actually does follow through on his insane stuff.

Perhaps there’s someone left in his team of sycophants who can talk him down. But it’s worth remembering that Pete Hegseth wasn’t chosen to be “Secretary of War” in spite of his strong affirmative support for war crimes but because of it. Maybe the military brass will quietly do its own little 25th Amendment, but Krugman is right that Trump’s second term has mostly been about making such legalistic resistance to his arbitrary whims less likely. This ain’t no foolin’ around.