The Nuremberg Scenario

I don't know if this is any sort of stunning insight, but ruminating on the latest "illegal orders" kerfuffle, it occurred to me yet again that Trump's whole political career can be understood as an extended Road Runner cartoon. In the 2016 election alone, a number of issues arose, including allegations of Russian collusion and hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, that would resurface in repeated attempts to bring him down in two impeachments and several criminal cases, but to no effect.

The Access Hollywood tape was an October surprise that just about everyone was convinced would destroy his 2016 candidacy. Repeated attemnpts to tie him to the January 6 Capitol incursion have been just as ineffective. The Schumer Shutdown, ditto. Now it turns out that even before the shutdown, the idea of creating some sort of "illegal orders" scandal was a glimmer in certain eyes:

A left-wing group is putting up billboards in high-crime cities where President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard, telling military service members that is not what they “signed up for” and encouraging them to refuse “unlawful orders.”

Win Without War, a self-described “diverse network of activists and national organizations working for progressive foreign policy,” launched its billboard campaign in September in Washington, DC, before expanding to Chicago, Memphis, and the military bases Ft. Bragg and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

Thus the Mark Kelly-Elissa Slotkin "subversive six" ad wasn't without context. But its effect was blunted when Slotkin herself acknowledged to Martha Raddatz, "To my knowledge, I -- I am not aware of things that are illegal, but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes and everything related to Venezuela". Then last Wednesday's shootings of two National Guard troops in Washington distracted attention from the whole issue.

But don't lose hope! The Washington Post, which brought us Deep Throat half a century ago, is back on the case!

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has declared recent reporting that he may have illegally ordered all people to be killed in a military strike in the Caribbean as “fake news” on Friday evening, adding that the series of strikes of people on boats had been “lawful under both US and international law”.

. . . The remarks came after a Washington Post report this week alleged that Hegseth ordered defense officials to “kill everybody” traveling on a boat that was being surveilled by analysts on 2 September, the first strike of many carried out in recent months by the Trump administration. The White House said – without proof – that the people in the boats in the Caribbean, killed in Pentagon operations, were drug smugglers.

I'm linking to The Guardian's account, because the Post is behind a paywall. But where's the smoking gun?

During the 2 September operation, led by the elite counter-terrorist group Seal Team 6, a first missile strike left two survivors clinging on to the wreck, the Post reported. Adm Frank M “Mitch” Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, reportedly ordered a second strike to kill the two survivors to comply with Hegseth’s orders.

Is that it? Apparently so. The rest of the story is just filler to bulk things out, such as:

Trump has said that the US is attacking the boats due to high rates of fentanyl-related overdose deaths. But lawmakers, narcotics experts and former law enforcement officials have rejected that claim, since fentanyl does not come from Venezuela.

So far, only The Guardian has run with this story. This could well be because everyone else is watching football over the four-day weekend, and it'll get legs on Monday. Deliberately shooting survivors, if this happened, would be a violation of international law and US military policy, but even The Guardian's account suggests this may not be what happened:

Throughout the course of the strikes, there have only been a few survivors, including an Ecuadorian man and a Colombian man, who were captured by the US then returned to their home countries.

One boat strike in October, off the Pacific coast of Mexico, led the Mexican navy to begin a search-and-rescue operation for survivors.

Among the few reactions has been, predicatably, from David French:

If true, this is heinous and illegal. You do not kill helpless survivors of a sinking boat. (It enraged us when, for example, the Japanese would machine-gun American survivors in the water.)
You do not kill someone who is hors de combat, and no quarter orders are flatly illegal. https://t.co/lhaL89s650

— David French (@DavidAFrench) November 28, 2025

The Nuremberg scenario has been the ultimate leftist fantasy at least since the 1966 Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal, although this itself was just a manifestation of earlier fantasies. As described inb the link,

The Russell Tribunal, also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal, Russell–Sartre Tribunal, or Stockholm Tribunal, was a private people's tribunal organised in 1966 by Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner, and hosted by French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, along with Lelio Basso, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Dedijer, Ralph Schoenman, Isaac Deutscher, Günther Anders, Lázaro Cárdenas and several others. The tribunal investigated and evaluated American foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam.

. . . The tribunal was constituted in November 1966, and was conducted in two sessions in 1967, in Stockholm, Sweden and Roskilde, Denmark. Bertrand Russell's book on the armed confrontations underway in Vietnam, War Crimes in Vietnam, was published in January 1967. His postscript called for establishing this investigative body. The findings of the tribunal were largely ignored in the United States.

So far, the idea of bringing about a Nuremberg scenario strikes me as about as effective as any of the other schemes Wile E. Coyote cooks up from the Acme catalog.