Trump said “I don’t need international law.” Hegseth calls rules of engagement “stupid.”

The new letter signed by over 100 experts acknowledges these quotes and then proceeds as if restating the rules of war louder will matter. I’m reminded of the early warnings of Haile Selassie about Mussolini, which obviously went unheeded. The whole thing is an appeal to a framework that fascist leaders explicitly repudiate.

Selassie’s 1936 League of Nations address is an exact historical parallel: a direct appeal to an international body that had already demonstrated it would not act. The outcome was catastrophic. We know, right? Mussolini showed us what’s next, right?

Let me put it in simpler context. The letter correctly lists violations. But who acts? The ICC? Trump targeted and sanctioned ICC officials to prevent this. The Security Council? Trump doesn’t believe in the UN but he is set up with a veto. The letter’s final section vaguely invokes Common Article 1 obligations on allies but never names a single ally, a single concrete action, a single consequence. “We urge”? That is not enforcement.

And there’s a gap in the analysis. Iran’s internet shutdown, Israel’s broadcast ban, Gulf states arresting citizens, FCC threatening US broadcasters. That’s the “Nixonian” operational reality this letter completely ignores. How does anyone enforce a law if they can’t document violations? Trump recently installed two Nixonian operatives to poison and destroy official communications.

It’s interesting that Congress is never mentioned in the letter. Wouldn’t domestic power be the usual answer to stop a democratic leader? The War Powers Resolution is never mentioned. Federal courts are never mentioned. If Trump openly says international law is a dead letter to the executive, the only remaining check is domestic. Yet the letter doesn’t touch it. To me this suggests loss of faith in American checks and balances, post-democracy, and thus it’s an appeal to the world for rescue.

However, the letter doesn’t rise to international enforcement because it seems overly focused on a tone problem. Trump asserts that the US president is above international law as a matter of constitutional authority. The letter says Trump’s statements are “alarming rhetoric” and “disrespect for norms.” But it isn’t just rhetoric. His words are chaotic, self-contradictory and random at best. They deserve little focus. His actions are the many crimes.

What’s really been happening is the systematic elimination of domestic enforcement of international law obligations. The only people inside the US government who could have flagged violations in real time all have been fired. That’s not a small consideration. That’s the whole ballgame. And yet the letter says it has “concerns about institutional safeguards”: removing JAGs, abolishing civilian protection teams, and gutting the law of war manual references from the NDS. Without those, what’s left? Game over.

And that brings us back to the historical perspective completely absent from the letter. When a powerful militant state openly declares itself unbound, and no one enforces, the bad behavior accelerates. The letter fails to state what they see happening when their appeal fails. It already has, as Selassie would say.

The real question, which the letter should have started with, is which allies are complicit and what domestic institutions have abdicated? Or to put it more clearly, now that all the guardrails are behind us, what prevents the world from repeating what comes next? The institution getting all the funding is the one committing the violations.

Trump told guests. “We can’t take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. We have to take care of one thing: military….”

Day four of the war with Iran, Hegseth boasted like a retro WWE announcer “the two most powerful air forces in the world will have complete control of Iranian skies” and “they are toast.”

By day ten of war he was practically hyperventilating as he ranted like a cleric about decimation “in a way the world has never seen before” and said Iran had “no air or maritime defenses, no Air Force or Navy.”

He pushed religious belief over logic when he declared “never in recorded history has a nation’s military been so quickly and so effectively neutralized.”

What day is it?

Today a crew from the 494th is missing over southern Iran. Their F-15E is confirmed down. Iran is actively running a civilian capture operation against them.

The stark contrast above, between armchair preaching and harsh reality on the ground, is that Hegseth’s role was never strategic. Many sources continue to point out that he plays the evangelist “performing for an audience of one,” with mounting war failures actually boosting his standing after a tenure of self-inflicted missteps. Trump loves the act because he doesn’t understand the action.

In classified briefings on Capitol Hill Hegseth awkwardly stuck to a prepared script, as if afraid to speak freely, while Rubio and Ratcliffe more directly addressed questions. Hegseth is a PR guy, a shallow spokesperson, not the strategist, beyond preaching cruelty. The claims he made all were designed for Trump, not for anyone else in the room let alone operations.

His theocratic register now is as real as if he were from Iran. He opened Pentagon briefings with “the bottom line up front, for the world to hear and the press to actually admit”, as a performative dominance framing, and called Iran’s leadership “rats” who “go underground, because that’s what rats do.”

As someone who has studied the desert rats of WWII for most of my life, I hope I’m not the first to point out how bad Hegseth is at his job, especially when he opens his mouth. Historian protip: it’s well known that in WWII the rats were the good guys who won, because they go underground.

His crusader rhetoric is why he rebranded the Department of War. His crusader brain is why he said the Iran war was immediately won and airspace was totally dominated, while U.S. intelligence assessed that roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers remain intact and thousands of one-way drones remain in the arsenal.

One source said Iran is “still very much poised to wreak absolute havoc throughout the entire region.” That assessment was filed before today’s shootdown. A few days ago, in widely circulated video, an F/A-18 only narrowly escaped an Iranian MANPAD attack.

Let me be clear about this. The F/A-18 carries no detection system for common infrared-guided MANPADS in Iran. That pilot survived due to regular course change, which was luck, not capability. Video shows exactly how Hegseth’s “complete control” rhetoric disrespects the airmen flying blind against the shoulder-fired weapons that survive every Hegseth outburst precisely because they’re man-portable.

The gap between claim and reality is now so obviously wide that even the hedges Hegseth inserted early (saying “this does not mean we can stop everything”) look insufficient. While he said that to cover against drone and missile strikes, a manned fighter down over enemy territory with two crew missing is a different order of falsification.

To recount, today’s shootdown is just the latest falsification event: 16 MQ-9s lost, three F-15Es down in the Kuwait friendly fire incident March 1, an F-35 forced to emergency land with a pilot injured by shrapnel, and now this. Every loss showed up after a Hegseth outburst about winning.

The dominance claim was always evangelical nonsense for a President who can’t handle the truth. Today it broke publicly, and Iran looks more dangerous whenever Hegseth starts preaching nonsense to keep his entertainment paycheck.

What’s notable in the latest Trump administration move is the role of a legal operative named T. Elliot Gaiser.

He clerked for Alito, was Trump’s 2020 campaign legal advisor, advising that Pence had a “substantive” role in certification and could keep Trump in power, and is now the author of a Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion declaring a post-Watergate accountability law unconstitutional.

He’s moved from election subversion to records destruction immunity.

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires presidential documents be sent to the National Archives and Records Administration. In an opinion released Thursday, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found the law “is unconstitutional for two independent but interlocking reasons.”

It exceeds Congress’ powers and it does so at the expense of the autonomy of the presidency, T. Elliot Gaiser wrote in the opinion, noting that Congress can’t order the papers of Supreme Court justices to be sent to the archives.

Election subversion to records destruction. Who is he?

At his confirmation hearing, Senator Whitehouse called him “completely unqualified.”

…Trump and the GOP had set the stage for a “MAGA DOJ that is actually weaponized.” …Gaiser [was] emblematic of that effort.

Whitehouse also slammed Gaiser… “Why would you want to put in somebody who is completely unqualified for the Office of Legal Counsel?” he opined. “…you put somebody in who knows they’re unqualified for their job, and so they’ll do whatever they’re told, whatever they’re asked.”

On the OLC Venezuela memo for Operation Absolute Resolve a legal analyst described it as “largely incoherent,” finding that Gaiser struggled to sustain a legal argument for more than a couple of paragraphs without contradicting or undermining it.

How incoherent? Legal analyst Asha Rangappa found that Gaiser destroyed his own case. His memo concedes the administration had no intelligence that Maduro would attack the United States, that his actions posed no imminent threat to U.S. forces, and that Venezuela’s regional aggression would not justify an attack. The only legal justification left was self-defense. And then Gaiser’s memo ruled it out. The entire analysis rested on an assurance from Trump that there was no plan for the US to run Venezuela. Trump then said the opposite at the press conference announcing the operation.

The Gaiser memo authorizing the operation explicitly stated it could proceed only because there was no plan to run Venezuela. Trump then announced it was starting and the US planned to run Venezuela.

The OLC isn’t just advisory. Its (now unqualified) opinions carry the same legal force as the statutes they interpret, and are binding on other agencies and officials unless the attorney general overrides the office or the president opts not to take its advice.

Gaiser produces legal cover on demand, insulated from peer correction, building a chain of classified precedents that no one can challenge.

His loyal incompetence is the whole point. He’s unqualified by design. His incorrect opinions are the product.

Trump already fired the head of the National Archives and used a loophole to poison it with a Nixon loyalist, which is the one agency with standing to challenge this. There is no internal actor left to push back. Only courts. And by the time a case reaches a court, the records will be gone.

Young American white men who don’t remember Nixon, yet who were raised intentionally to venerate that criminal President and undo protections, seems to be a theme. Gaiser was curated through Hillsdale, Heritage, Ginni Thomas’s org, and the Federalist Society clerkship circuit: his entire career path was explicitly a counter-Watergate project to rehabilitate the unitary executive theory that Nixon embodied. Watergate discredited it all but Gaiser is here to disagree.

He argues Congress cannot preserve presidential records “merely for the sake of posterity” as if no valid legislative purpose. But the PRA’s stated purpose was explicitly anti-corruption, enacted four years after Nixon. Gaiser erases real and very important history in the opinion and then rules there is no identifiable purpose. That’s not an interpretation, that’s a lie.

He is committing gross falsification of the legislative record.

Last September, Gaiser signed a memo arguing incorrectly that US strikes on alleged drug traffickers during Operation Southern Spear were lawful, comparing alleged drug traffickers to foreign nations attempting to invade the United States.

Then in November, he incorrectly told Congress the strikes on Latin American cartels were not subject to the War Powers Resolution, which is a violation of US and international law. That month, he also authored a memo supporting detailing military lawyers as immigration judges.

Election subversion. Civilians as militants. War powers without Congress. Military lawyers as immigration judges. Presidential records destroyed. Each opinion is meant to bind the executive branch to criminal acts, as if to bring Nixon back. Each incorrect one builds on the last.