Last weekend, President Donald J. Trump committed one, and probably two, crimes that call for the death penalty.
On Friday he ordered the murder of eleven men, then publicly bragged about it and said he would do it again. On Saturday he appears to have committed treason by threatening to order a military attack on an American city.
It is beyond mindboggling that a U.S. president stands credibly accused of committing two capital crimes in two days. That would be mindboggling if anybody did it, but the president of the United States? Unbelievable, even for Trump. But there it is. It happened. It is happening.
And thanks to the Supreme Court granting him permission to commit any crime he can claim as an official duty, he will never be punished for any of it. Instead of sitting in a prison cell, where he belongs, contemplating whether he prefers death by gas chamber or firing squad, Trump will continue sitting in the White House, where he doesn’t belong, contemplating his next step in the process of cementing himself as the first U.S. dictator.
That’s a major part of all this, Trump cementing himself as our dictator. More about that in a moment, but first a quick recap of Trump’s felonious weekend.
The murder happened on Sept. 2 when Trump ordered the U.S. Navy to destroy an unarmed Venezuelan speedboat with eleven men aboard because he had evidence – no proof, just evidence – that it was headed for the United States with drugs and terrorists aboard.
He said that his duty to “protect the national interest” gave him the right to invoke wartime rules, which allow troops to lawfully kill enemy combatants on sight, something that civilian rules clearly prohibit. Former Pentagon lawyers and other legal sources say that explanation is nonsense because Congress must approve wartime rules in advance, which it did not do, and therefore Trump plain-out murdered those men.
Trump’s apparent treason took place the very next day when he posted a dramatic paro63dy meme on Truth Social that referenced the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now”, which dramatizes the Vietnam War: ‘”I love the smell of deportations in the morning…Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.'”
(The reference to “the Department of WAR” is the name, or at least the secondary title, that Trump assigned to the Department of Defense last Friday by signing an executive order.)
The dramatic meme depicts Trump in front of Chicago’s burning skyline, its sky filled with clouds of smoke and helicopters. The helicopters evoke a military assault setting, suggesting an aggressive, warlike federal intervention in the city. They also serve as an emblem of political intimidation.
In a post on X, Gov. JB Pritzker accused Trump of “threatening to go to war with an American city. … This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman; he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson also condemned Trump in his own post on X: “The president’s threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but the reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution. We must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump.”
Trump tried to take it all back the next day. He had his spokespeople say his words were “taken out of context,” a laughable defense given that the “context” of the threat was superimposed over a graphic of Chicago in flames.
Other Republicans claimed the posting was a threat to fight drug cartels, or capture people breaking the law, although the statement does not say anything like that.
And while all that was going on, Trump, who is campaigning hard to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, threatened to deploy the National Guard to New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, all heavily Democratic cities, but none to heavily red cities, although their crime rate is worse than the cities Trump threatened. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, also suggested the president is prioritizing federal action in cities with pro-immigrant policies.
As for what constitutes treason, the U.S. Constitution is clear about that: Article 3, Section 3, Clause 1 (1789), reads:
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them [the states] …”
Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor Paul Gowder, an expert in the rule of U.S. law, said the Constitution defines only one crime – treason – and the president’s Truth Social post about Chicago could rise to that level.
Gowder wrote: “The first thing that the treason clause says about that crime is that it is constituted by levying war against the United States. I don’t understand how we can interpret that threat as anything other than a threat to levy war against a city in the United States. The picture of an American city in flames with the statement that Chicagoans are going to see why it’s called the Department of War is a quite clear implication that it’s a threat to wage war against the city of Chicago.”
Either one of those crimes, murder or treason, should be enough to expel him from the White House right now, but there are so many other reasons, too.
The most obvious reason is the Epstein files. Trump, who has been briefed about what the files contain, is doing everything he can to prevent them from becoming public, even though he promised during his campaign he would release them. There must be a reasonfor his reticence.
But even if the files do not show that Trump participated with his good friend Jeffrey Eckstein in seducing young teenagers – raping little girls – he certainly knew it was going on, files or no files, and did not report it. That, just like murder and treason,should be reason enough to drum him out.
Why Congress won’t do their job and impeach him amazes me. Democrats are all for it, but so far only a handful of Republicans have signed on, and you have to wonder why. You would think that any decent person, regardless of party, would want to know – would demand to know — the truth about the president, especially on something this important, regardless of where it led. Outside of cowardness in the face of angering Trump, why would they not demand it? Could their names be in the files? Could they be under pressure from powerful people whose names are? What, then?
There are so many reasons to get rid of Trump now that there is no reason to wait until 2028, or even 2026, or even tomorrow. A team of constitutional lawyers at Free Speech for People has been tracking Trump’s impeachable offenses and has released a formal impeachment resolution featuring 17 fully documented articles of impeachment, and that was before last weekend.
There is no reason to wait and every reason not to wait. Let’s get on with it. Pressure your representatives to get the ball rolling. Do something today.
- Trump claims Chicago is ‘world’s most dangerous city’. The four most violent ones are all in red states
- Chicago leaders slam Trump’s “Chipocalypse Now” threat to send troops; “It’s really the act of a tyrant”
- Trump threatens Chicago with apocalyptic force and Pritzker calls him a ‘wannabe dictator’
- Conservative podcaster calls for Chicago mayor to be ‘executed’ for not kowtowing to Trump’s takeover
- Trump’s latest Chicago threat rests on a dangerously flawed trifecta
- The Treason Clause: Interpretation & Debate
