It's not us. It's them, the craven few.

This needs to stop. To be a trifle more specific, by this must stop I don't mean what's articulated in the title of David French's latest NYT column, "It Doesn't Seem Wise to Let Trump Decide What War Is." For that matter, it's catastrophically unwise to let Trump decide anything. No, I mean something else — his exhortation in the column's final passage:

It’s up to the American people to hold Trump accountable for his lawless acts. Every person who pumped his fist at Trump’s news conference [when he 'proudly display(ed) grainy footage of a military strike on what he said was a boat full of narco-terrorists on their way to the United States with a load of drugs'] should pause and think very hard about letting him — or any president — expand the definition of war.

First, and this is integral to that very definition, which we'll get to in the next paragraph, Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice lays out a critical distinction pertaining to Trump's airstrike: "An order requiring the performance of a military duty or act may be inferred to be lawful, and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate. This inference does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime."

That Trump's order was nothing if not "patently illegal," that he commissioned a crime, is conversely illustrated by defining a legal war. Notes French: "The thing that separates war from murder is the law, and the law of war contains two key components." They're Latin terms (of course): One is jus ad bellum, the legal right to go to war; the other is jus in bello, legal conduct in a war. "For the use of military force to be lawful, it must satisfy the requirements of both doctrines."   

Trump violated both. He and his secretary of state, acting national security adviser, acting archivist of the United States and, until last week, acting director of the gutted U.S. Agency for International Development Marco Rubio are lawfully free to designate foreign drug traffickers as members of a "terrorist organization," however silly that may be. But there is no statute that frees Trump to deploy lethal military force against them — such as blowing up a boatful of suspected dope smugglers — as though the human targets are combatants in a U.S. state of war.

"It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted,” said NYU law professor and former DOD lawyer Ryan Goodman to the Times' national security correspondent Charlie Savage. (Actually it's quite easy to imagine Pete Hegseth's unctuous legal staff arriving at an idiotic conclusion.)

Savage elaborates on Goodman. "As a matter of international law, the Pentagon has accepted that 'murder' is prohibited everywhere, as its military operational law handbook says. Those limits apply in situations governed by peacetime and human rights law, in which governments address threats using law enforcement rules. They do not restrict the killing of a legitimate military target in an armed conflict" — neither of which existed at the time of Trump's order. And so in its issuance, he committed the crime of murder under U.S., international, and human rights law.

No person of careful allegiance to the rule of law would object to French's concluding remarks: that Trump should be held "accountable" for his criminality and reckless expansion of "the definition of war." I'd happily join the conscientious parade accompanying him on his perp walk to a conscientious Department of Justice — those were the days — or better yet scavenge for plane fare to subsequently witness his indictment by the Hague's International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

What is objectionable on grounds transcending a mere pet peeve, and applies to veritable swarms of columnists, not merely Mr. French, are his concluding remarks: "It's up to the American people to hold Trump accountable" and that somehow these folks (whether gung-ho belligerent or, presumably, apathetic) are "letting him ... expand the definition of war." Precisely how do those two, exhortation and admonition, work?

They don't. The first is sublimely unserviceable; the second, perfectly fictional.

Even if Trump were to commit yet another unlawful act by running for a third term and losing because accountability at last concussed his thick ghoulish skull, such would be more than three bloody years away — scarcely suitable justice to boot. Moreover, it's not everyday people letting Trump expand war's definition. The folks doing that are his servile comrades in Congress, his perjured vassals on the shadowy docketed Supreme Court, and lavishly beribboned generals and admirals who merit court martials for cowardice in the face of a markedly insecure jackal.

No doubt I've been as culpable as David French et al. for casting saccharine cris de ceour for "the people" to do this or do that in triumphant opposition to the loathsome creature now occupying the White House, squiring every human indecency and rotting America's core. But I finally, perhaps rather suddenly, had enough of such a useless, lazy hortatory way. It needs to stop.

* This piece is cross-posted at Substack. Subscribe to be notified of new posts.