After months of rhetoric about possible war crimes in Iran, Donald Trump upped the ante on Sunday morning, publishing an unhinged threat to his social media platform in which he explicitly vowed to target Iranian power plants and bridges. As Easter Sunday progressed, the president did brief interviews with several media outlets to echo that point.
The New York Times reported soon after that, according to legal experts, historians and former U.S. officials, “No other recent American president has talked so openly about committing potential war crimes.”
A day later, Trump fielded questions from reporters — first at a White House Easter Egg Roll event, then at a White House press conference — who pressed the Republican on his willingness to target Iranian infrastructure, in defiance of international law.
It didn’t go well.
The president, who must have realized he’d face these questions and had plenty of time to huddle with his aides and prepare coherent answers, peddled three distinct responses to the line of inquiry.
1. Refuse to talk about his plans for possible war crimes. MS NOW’s Lindsey Pipia asked, “Are you committed to committing a war crime in this war with Iran?” Trump heard the question but refused to answer it. “What else?” he said to no one in particular, as if the question wasn’t worth his time or consideration.
2. Change the definition of “war crime.” As part of a separate exchange, Trump was asked whether he considered hitting civilian infrastructure to be a war crime. “You know what’s a war crime?” he responded. “Having a nuclear weapon, allowing a sick country with demented leaders to have a nuclear weapon. That’s a war crime.”
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Steve Benen
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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