You really just can’t take breaks around here, huh? While we were all busy digesting dinner Thanksgiving night, Donald Trump was tapping away at his phone doing a little supervillain brainstorming on Truth Social. The president promised to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries,” “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States or is incapable of loving our country, and “end all federal benefits and subsidies” to noncitizens living in America. On Friday, Trump went further, posting that “any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated.”

Now this week we get to find out how much of this was tantamount to Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy and how much the president intends to actually pursue as policy. 2025! Happy Monday.

Trump’s Gang of Criminals

by William Kristol

“Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?”

Augustine made this suggestion 1,600 years ago, in The City of God. Today, in the country of Trump, we’re getting a convincing demonstration of Augustine’s proposition. Justice has been removed and a gang of criminals are in charge.

They’re certainly acting on a large scale. Their expertise ranges from ordering war crimes to covering up sex crimes to engaging in all manner of financial criminality. They’re a diverse bunch, from tough guys outfitted in combat gear and masks rampaging through the streets of our cities, to smooth operators in tuxedoes who mingle with ease at state dinners. Their ranks encompass experienced criminals and newbies. They commit novel crimes and cover up old ones. Allies who had the misfortune to be caught—or were too bumbling to succeed—get pardons from the boss.

It’s all a veritable festival of law-scorning; an amazing smorgasbord of law-breaking. And it turns out that if a president aggressively shuns any concern for justice and is willing to demonstrate utter contempt for the law—if he then disables the Department of Justice and the judge advocates general and almost all other internal checks and mechanisms of accountability—his gang can get away with a heck of a lot. They don’t even have to shoot particularly straight.

And so we have an administration that embraces and pursues criminality greedily and shamelessly. They’re so far unpunished, and there doesn’t seem to be much expectation that they will be punished.

Over Thanksgiving break, the Washington Post reported that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered a second firing on a suspected drug-running boat near Venezuela to ensure that the survivors clinging to the wreckage were killed.

Almost every serious person agrees with Andrew McCarthy of National Review and Fox News that, even without the second firing on the survivors, the three months of military strikes on the boats in the Caribbean are either “a war crime under federal law” or more likely simply “lawless.”

But, McCarthy stresses, even “if we stipulate arguendo that the administration has a colorable claim that our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors . . . the laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered hors de combat (out of the fighting)—including by shipwreck.”

In fact, every serious person knows that the second strike that reportedly took place to kill those two survivors of the original September 2 attack was illegal. Indeed, in its discussion of the duty to refuse illegal orders, the Department of Defense’s current law of war manual offers (in section 18.3.2.1) this instance of “Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations:” “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”

Even President Trump gave a hint that he understood the problem when said last night that he would not have fired on the survivors. But he also said he didn’t know what happened and seemed pretty uninterested in finding out. And his secretary of defense hasn’t actually denied issuing that order. On Sunday evening, he put out a tweet with an AI-generated children’s book cover leaving the clear impression he’d do it again (see below).