9 AMERICAN CARNAGE

There is a scene in Robert Graves’s epic novel I, Claudius that recent events have often brought to mind. Poor, stammering Claudius is summoned before the emperor Caligula, who confides that he, the emperor, has been transformed into a god.

So it was with Donald Trump. From his first candidacy speech to his final ignominious exit—an absurdist coup d’etat—the same narrative played again and again. The president mouthed inanities, which were instantly accepted, adopted, and defended by his apparatchiks, supporters, and fellow party members. No lie was too brazen; even the risible could be labeled “alternative facts.” For over four years Trump and his team waged the greatest and most successful war on truth in human history. Falsehoods dropped endlessly like stones into a pond, sending out ripples beyond just the president and his staff. Again and again, wearily but inevitably, senators and congresspeople found some way to rationalize the nonsensical: how could you prove the emperor was not a god? Sympathetic news anchors and talk show hosts carried his message through the airwaves, broadcasting it to the remotest corners of the nation and the world. Even respectable journalists didn’t know quite what to make of it all. “That’s just the way Trump is, and we have to cover him no matter what he says,” went the refrain. Yet as one wrote later, the price of covering Trump was becoming a pollinator for his torrent of misinformation and slander.

One would assume, given the stupendous scale of misinformation emerging from the White House, that fashioning a cohesive narrative of human rights in the Trump era would be daunting. Beyond obfuscation and chaos there is also the problem of detachment. History requires a measure of distance before establishing objectivity, and the significance of events may not become fully known until sometime after the fact. When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938 declaring “peace in our time,” the crowds cheered; neither he nor they could have imagined that the moment would come to represent a nadir in the twentieth century. But fortunately this is not the case with Donald Trump. Paradoxically, despite—or, indeed, because of—its obfuscations, the Trump administration in retrospect has a crystalline transparency. From the moment Trump descended the infamous escalator, the shocking nature of his words and deeds generated correspondingly intense journalistic analysis. If we cannot say that every lie was reported (all 30,000 of them, by one count), we may say that almost every new lie was.

Perusing the list of his misdeeds, falsehoods, scandals, insults, blunders, and crimes, one apprehends two truths. First, neither the media nor the public ever became indifferent or desensitized to Trump’s actions. Each provoked a fresh storm of outrage, which reverberated within the echo chamber of the public sphere. What happened instead was that the list simply grew too long for any mortal imagination to comprehend. Not desensitization but deluge.

Second, the real-time analysis of the Trump presidency—and of the man himself—was both accurate and prescient. This is especially true on the subject of human rights.

Mr. Trump’s war on American values, and his effort to hollow out the nation’s image in the world, was, of course, already apparent in his rhetoric about Mexican immigrants and Muslims. As the world looks at the United States’ election this year, it is ultimately the American electorate that will have a final say about whether we, as a nation, are ready to embrace the idea that American democracy has nothing to offer the world.[3]

So it came to pass. Within months of taking office, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from both the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear treaty. To this list he would later add the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations; the Treaty on Open Skies; the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty; and, just over a year before a global pandemic killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, the World Health Organization.

After this clarion call, the disintegration of American human rights policy occurred in stages, marked by incidents large and small. In March 2017, the United States refused for the first time in decades to appear before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission—despite the fact that the event took place in Washington, DC. The American president was in a pique that certain Latin American nations had criticized his attempted Muslim travel ban. “The refusal to appear placed Washington in dubious company of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba on accountability for human rights compliance,” one journalist noted laconically.[5] Not long after, the State Department quietly proffered a plan to alter its mission statement. The old statement read: “The department’s mission is to shape and sustain a peaceful, prosperous, just and democratic world and foster conditions for stability and progress for the benefit of the American people and people everywhere.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson proposed dropping the words “just and democratic.” As one commentator wrote, “such a change might reflect a growing feeling that most of the programs to support democracy abroad and the importance of democratic ideals are wasteful, inefficient, unappreciated or even damaging.”[6]

Meanwhile, the full dimensions of President Trump’s transactional foreign policy began to take shape.

If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests…. It doesn’t mean that we don’t advocate for and aspire to freedom, human dignity and the treatment of people the world over. We do. But that doesn’t mean that’s the case in every situation.

The message was clear: America was out for itself and willing to do business with anyone on their terms. Woodrow Wilson’s “moral diplomacy” was officially dead. “To the president and his advisors,” wrote the New York Times, “human rights concerns can be an impediment to the flow of commerce between countries and a barrier to beneficial partnerships for the United States.”[7] To be sure, Trump and his cabinet were not the first to choose commerce over rights; American presidents had been straddling that line for decades. Trump was, however, unique in dispensing with the choice altogether. His personal diplomacy underscored this new amorality. He showed disdain for staunch allies like Angela Merkel of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France while basking in the mutual approval of strongmen: President Xi Jinping of China was “a very special man,” Egypt’s military dictator Adbel Fattah el-Sisi was “doing a fantastic job,” and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines was “a great guy” with whom the president had a “fantastic relationship.”

Worse was to come, as the consequences of American withdrawal began to manifest themselves.

Moreover, they knew they would face no threat of censure from the American president. After Syrian governmental forces began bombarding Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta in February 2018, killing nine hundred civilians including many women and children, the governments of France and Britain convened an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. Over 400,000 Syrians remained trapped within their own cities, in what the French ambassador described as “a siege worthy of the Middle Ages.” A coalition of nations demanded enforcement of a ceasefire; American ambassador Nikki Haley declined to attend the session. The United States ultimately did not join in the demand. A year later, in a sop to Turkish strongman Recep Erdogan, Trump abruptly withdrew support for the Kurdish militia, allowing Turkish-backed Syrian armed groups to perpetrate a massacre. Women were dragged from their cars and beaten to death; Turkish-allied forces used napalm and white phosphorus on civilians. President Trump said the Kurds were “no angels” and compared the slaughter to children fighting in a vacant lot. “This is an obscene and ignorant statement,” his own former special envoy, Brett McGurk, wrote. Senator Mitt Romney agreed: “What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a bloodstain in the annals of American history.”[9]

It was one stain among many. Not long after meeting with President Trump, Viktor Orban of Hungary flatly rejected a pledge to “the rule of law and respect for human rights” under the European Union, declaring instead: “We do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed; we do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others.”[10] There was no response from Washington. But when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gently criticized American demands to lower tariffs on milk, cheese, and yogurt from the United States, President Trump accused him of “betrayal,” backstabbing, and deserving of “a special place in hell.”[11]

When the administration did choose to highlight human rights abuses—which was rare—it did so for nakedly political ends. Again, it is not uncommon for presidents to use human rights as a weapon for shaming, or indeed to be politically motivated in whom they target. Donald Trump, however, took this to a new and profoundly cynical level. As one commentator wrote, “Mr. Trump rarely condemns repression overseas, except when Christians are being persecuted by Muslim extremists, or when human rights are abused by longtime foes of the United States—particularly Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea…. Instead of viewing human rights as a universal ideal, Mr. Trump invokes them only strategically, when they are useful as a geopolitical cudgel.”[12] Trump, lacking empathy, regarded victims as nothing more than convenient props. This was vividly on display when the president invited a number of former child sex slaves from various nations and paraded them before the cameras in the White House. “My administration is putting unprecedented pressure on traffickers at home and abroad,” he announced. “We’ve had a tremendous track record—the best track record in a long time.” This was not true. The number of prosecutions and crackdowns actually declined significantly under Trump, and available resources were not funneled to recognized NGOs but to dubious organizations with names like “Hookers for Jesus.” The New York Times was scathing: “Few people on earth are so exploited as children trafficked into the sex trade. And now they are being exploited again, by President Trump.”[13]

The president’s callousness seemed to strike an unlovely chord with many others. “Trump’s America does not care,” historian Robert Kagan summarized. “It is unencumbered by historical memory. It recognizes no moral, political or strategic commitments. It feels free to pursue objectives without regard to the effect on allies or, for that matter, the world. It has no sense of responsibility to anything beyond itself.”[14] The world was taking notice. President Duterte of the Philippines began jailing journalists; the ruling party of Cambodia purged all parliamentary opposition; Viktor Orban instituted a systematic rollback of LGBTQ rights in Hungary and a purge of the independent judiciary; the Modi government of India implemented a docket of anti-Muslim legislation; the Chinese government chipped away at democracy in Hong Kong. These were in addition to ongoing human rights crises in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. As one commentator noted, “Authoritarian forces everywhere perceive that there is no longer any price to pay for ruling as nastily as they want.”[15] Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, was horrified:

Today oppression is fashionable again; the security state is back, and fundamental freedoms are in retreat in every region of the world. Shame is also in retreat. Xenophobes and racists in Europe are casting off any sense of embarrassment…. Have we all gone completely mad?[16]

To the long list of international human rights violations ticking up around the world, the Trump administration in 2018 added its own: migrant children forcibly separated from their parents at the Mexican border and incarcerated. The base cruelty of the practice appalled even many traditional Republicans. Former first lady Laura Bush condemned the practice and demanded the children be restored to their families. But time and again, Trump and his circle proved themselves impervious to shame. Before a hearing of the ninth circuit, an attorney for the administration claimed that soap, toothbrushes, and bedding were unnecessary for the children to enjoy “safe and sanitary” captivity. One of the judges asked incredulously: “Are you arguing seriously that you do not read the agreement as requiring you do something other than what I described: Cold all night long. Lights on all night long. Sleep on the concrete floor and you get an aluminum blanket?” The Trump team was unconcerned and unrepentant. Fox News host Laura Ingraham compared the prisons to “summer camps” and speculated the children were better off than they had been at home. Journalists from the Associated Press found instead a bleak and hellish reminiscence of the very darkest moments in American history:

A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago.

Three girls told attorneys they were trying to take care of the 2-year-old boy, who had wet his pants and had no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him….

A 14-year-old girl from Guatemala said she had been holding two little girls in her lap. �?I need comfort, too. I am bigger than they are, but I am a child, too,’ she said.[17]

On June 18, 2018, with furor mounting around the world, the UN Human Rights Council entered the fray. Cannily, it referred to a statement by the president of the American Association of Pediatrics that called the separation and detainment policy a form of “government-sanctioned child abuse.” Such actions violated numerous articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including Article 9, prohibiting arbitrary arrest and detention, and Article 16, which stated, “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” The UN high commissioner for human rights said baldly, “The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable.”[18]

One day later, the United States formally withdrew from the Human Rights Council. No nation had ever voluntarily resigned, and among all the nations of the world only North Korea, Iran, and Eritrea were not members. Consistent with its habit of deflecting blame, the Trump administration insisted its withdrawal was due not to any criticism over child separation but rather in protest over the council’s unfair treatment of Israel. “If the Human Rights Council is going to attack countries that uphold human rights and shield countries that abuse human rights, then America should not provide it with any credibility,” Haley announced. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo concurred, calling the Human Rights Council “an obstacle to the progress of human rights and a threat to the United States.” This was an Orwellian inversion the Trump team used often: slavery was liberty, peace was war, and human rights organizations curtailed human rights. But there was a glimmer of honesty in Pompeo’s concluding remark: “When organizations undermine our national interests and our allies, we will not be complicit…. When they seek to infringe on our national sovereignty, we will not be silent.”[19]

The concept that fundamental rights supersede national sovereignty is the bedrock upon which all human rights rest. Yet the Trump administration regarded even polite criticism as an attack on its sovereignty, in effect articulating a legal vision synonymous with Xenophon’s: law was the will of the state, nothing more. Worse yet, the withdrawal formalized what had already been an accepted fact. The United States no longer had any voice on human rights. Rob Berschinski, senior vice president of Human Rights First, warned: “Countries like China, Russia and Venezuela will applaud this decision because we are freely giving up leverage over them that we previously had.”

The most pernicious attack on human rights was yet to come. Beyond abrogating its responsibilities, the Trump administration in its waning days embarked on a quixotic crusade to undermine the very definition of “right” under law. In May 2019 Pompeo ordered the establishment of a “Commission on Unalienable Rights.” The commission’s goals seemed, at first glance, laudable: “To provide the Secretary of State advice and recommendations concerning international human rights matters [and] fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”[20] In abstract, the mandate appeared not unlike that proposed by this book: reconsidering and determining the difference between essential rights and privileges—or, as Pompeo put it, “ad hoc rights created by politicians and bureaucrats.” That was the first clue something was not quite right. Certainly politicians and bureaucrats had been manufacturing rights, even relabeling privileges as rights, but most of these—labor, welfare, education, etc.—were centuries old. What “ad hoc rights” was the secretary referring to?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Pompeo defended the commission by saying the administration “takes seriously the founders’ ideas of liberty and constitutional government.” The purpose of the commission, he insisted, was to “address basic questions: What are our fundamental freedoms? Why do we have them? Who or what grants these rights?…What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right? How can there be human rights, rights we possess not as privileges we are granted or even earn, but simply by virtue of our humanity?”[21] These were old questions, and good ones.

But then Pompeo went on: “Rights claims are often aimed more at rewarding interest groups and dividing humanity into subgroups. Oppressive regimes like Iran and Cuba have taken advantage of this cacophonous call for �?rights,’ even pretending to be avatars of freedom.” This was dangerous language. The secretary of state appeared to be casting doubt not merely on the subject of rights but the entire mechanism for identifying and protecting them—in other words, the UN itself. The purposes of the commission were becoming clearer.

A group of Democratic senators wrote in June to “express our deep concern with the process and intent behind the Department of State’s recently announced Commission on Unalienable Rights…. With deep reservations about the Commission, we request that you not take any further action regarding its membership or proposed operations without first consulting with congressional oversight and appropriations committees.”[22] A few days later the House voted to defund the Commission on Unalienable Rights. Representatives of GLAAD, Amnesty International, and the Cato Institute also criticized the commission’s mandate, which they feared might have a deleterious effect on women’s and LGBTQ rights.

Neither Trump nor his advisers have ever been accused of subtlety, and the consensus was that the commission was a blatant attempt by the president to redefine rights out of existence and thus give the United States a plausible excuse for disengagement on the world stage. Writing for the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen warned: “Trump, having shown willful neglect toward human rights, now wants to redefine them. The exercise can only reflect his contempt for the rule of law, a free press, an independent judiciary, gays, minorities, women’s reproductive rights, the safety of migrant children, truth and decency—as well as his boundless affection for human rights violators. It is, in other words, a disaster in the making.”[23] This was fair criticism. Unto itself, the commission seemed harmless enough. But placed in the broader context of the assault on human rights outlined earlier, a different image appears. The Trump administration began by ignoring human rights, then progressed to formally abandoning them, and was now attempting to delegitimize the very concept.

But why bother? Trump had already walked off the stage; why tear it down too? Michael H. Fuchs of the Guardian provided a possible answer: “The Trump administration wants to gaslight Americans into believing that this new commission is necessary because the fight to expand rights protections somehow gives cover to other countries to abuse the language of human rights to defend their repression.” In other words, Trump and Pompeo sought a new relativist standard, so reductive as to be virtually worthless, that gave an automatic pass to both the United States and all other nations that didn’t wish to be niggled by pesky accusations of atrocity. It was the same old Orwellian inversion. “Don’t be surprised,” Fuchs warned, “if one of the conclusions of this new commission is �?human rights is repression.’ ” The irony of a nihilist administration founding a commission on human rights would be laughable if it wasn’t also terrifying:

They want everyone to believe that what they are doing is in support of laudable goals—freedom, democracy, security, choose your own lofty noun. They make racist and antisemitic comments against others while claiming that they are somehow fighting antisemitism and defending Israel. They tear children from their parents and place them in cages and claim that it is all a deterrent to protect those same migrants from the dangers of the journey to the United States.”[24]

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the commission was its deliberate mutilation of natural law. When Secretary Pompeo mused on how America and other nations had drifted away from the principles of “natural law and natural rights,” what exactly did he mean? The rights to life, liberty, property, and security are enshrined by the Constitution and upheld by every court in the land. So are they in almost all of America’s traditional allies. Which “natural law” rights were being abused, and which “ad hoc” rights had usurped them?

The composition of the commission offered a clue to Pompeo’s thinking. It featured, among a collection of relative nonentities (many of whom had no prior experience or knowledge of legal issues), Islamicist scholar Hamza Yusuf Hanson; Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought; and Mary Ann Glendon, a devout Catholic, avowed antiabortionist, and former US ambassador to the Holy See. Dr. Glendon once remarked that giving the Pulitzer Prize to the Boston Globe journalists who uncovered decades of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy “would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Osama bin Laden.” She was also Pompeo’s former mentor. “For Pompeo, �?unalienable rights’ comes from God,” wrote Jayne Huckerby, a law professor at Duke University. “It’s shorthand for erasing subsequent rights guarantees for LGBTI persons and rights guarantees for sexual and reproductive health.”[25]

The Catholic Church often refers to God’s law as “natural law,” borrowing the term from medieval understandings of law emerging from the mind of God. A handful of fundamentalist legal scholars, among them Princeton professor Robert P. George, have also espoused this view. But it has not been the accepted meaning among states for centuries; natural law is not divine law. As Grotius wrote, Etiamsi daremus non esse Deum, “Such things as these would still be true even without God.” Nevertheless, Secretary Pompeo appeared to be favoring abandonment of traditional human rights—which themselves rested upon a foundation of natural law—for a new “ad hoc” understanding based on religious principles. As one correspondent wrote of the commission, “One concern is the reference to �?natural law,’ which is held to be more powerful than the laws people write, and can suggest a narrower, religious sensibility. When the term natural law has been thrown about, it’s often been by people concerned with what they think is unnatural—homosexuality, transgender rights, reproductive choice and sexual equality.” Yale law professor Harold Hongju Koh was equally dismissive: “Modern rights are based on the dignity inherent in all human beings, not on God-given rights.”[26]

Any lingering doubt about Pompeo’s motives was put to rest in a speech given at the National Constitution Center in July 2020 announcing the completion of the commission’s report. The event began, appropriately, with an invocation by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan. Then Pompeo took the stage. “America is fundamentally good, and has much to offer the world, because our founders recognized the existence of God-given unalienable rights and designed a durable system to protect them,” he declared. The commission’s report, Pompeo went on, would enshrine religious liberty as the paramount human right “for decades to come”: “It’s important for every American, and for every American diplomat, to recognize how our founders understood unalienable rights. Foremost among these rights are property rights and religious liberty.” How the secretary arrived at this remarkable (and false) conclusion he did not say. Instead he went on to name, for the first time, those “ad hoc” rights that in his view usurped the church’s supremacy in law. “Today, the very core of what it means to be an American, indeed the American way of life itself, is under attack,” he said. “Instead of seeking to improve America, too many leading voices promulgate hatred of our founding principles.” He was referring to the 1619 Project, a scholarly reexamination of the legacy of slavery in contemporary American culture, which Pompeo called “a dark vision of America’s birth” and a “disturbed reading of our history.”[27] By dismissing the corrosive effects of slavery on the lives and legal status of African Americans in favor of illusory threats against Christianity, the Trump administration finally had its own Magna Carta: rights to life, liberty, equality before the law, and security were out, property and religion (at least some religions) were in. Even more incredibly, this was alleged to be a reaffirmation of both the founders’ intent and natural law.

The response among legal scholars and within the global community was derisive. “Human rights are not a choose-your-own-adventure,” said Tarah Demant of Amnesty International. “The U.S. State Department’s effort to cherry-pick rights in order to deny some their human rights is a dangerous political stunt that could spark a race to the bottom by human rights-abusing governments around the world.”[28] Later that year, the State Department reached out to the European Union, Britain, and other nations to drum up support for the commission’s report. It was a signal failure. Changing tack, the department then tried to convince the UN to issue a statement reaffirming its commitment to rights as defined by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This seemingly innocent request was seen through at once; what Pompeo and Trump actually wanted was to rhetorically erase decades of evolution in human rights. Or, as the director of Human Rights Watch described pithily, “It’s moving backward. It’s returning us back to some kind of �?Leave It to Beaver’ world where the international protections against racial discrimination, against discrimination against women, people with disabilities and LGBT people don’t exist.” Scholars and experts noted that the commission and its proponents might encourage other nations to attempt to “redefine” human rights, fueling debates over cultural relativism—debates in which, until recently, the United States always stood as a bulwark for universalism. No fewer than 230 human rights organizations, religious groups, and former US government officials wrote a public letter to Pompeo condemning the commission and its report. Its vision, they declared, “will undermine American commitments to human rights and provide cover for those who wish to narrow certain categories of rights protections, resulting in a weakening of the international human rights system and its protections in the process.”[29] Other organizations went so far as to file an injunction in federal court to prevent the State Department from adopting the report’s recommendations, on the grounds it violated constitutional protections.

In the end, the Commission on Unalienable Rights was a Pyrrhic victory for Trump and Pompeo. Scorned by the US allies and the UN, condemned by experts, and ultimately dismissed by the incoming Biden administration, it disappeared within State Department archives: one failed draft among many. Yet it was also a tragically wasted opportunity. The fundamental question put before the commission—the distinction between right and liberty—urgently needs to be addressed. As this book has argued, the list of “rights” has grown exponentially over the last century into an unworkable compendium in which basic rights to life, liberty, and security under natural law are lost within a deluge of other claimants. A serious scholarly endeavor might have yielded useful results. Instead, Pompeo convened a kind of twenty-first-century theological disputatio, as King James I of Aragon once summoned Dominicans and Jews to settle questions between the faiths. The result of the 1263 Dispute of Barcelona, in fact, gave judgment to the Jews, but the Dominicans claimed victory anyway and had all the proceedings burned—a historical precedent Donald Trump certainly would favor.

Of the last few fevered months of the Trump administration, little need be said. When in August of 2020 the International Criminal Court began investigations into possible war crimes committed by American troops in Afghanistan, Secretary Pompeo decried it as an attack on American sovereignty. He described the ICC as a “thoroughly broken and corrupted institution” and took the extraordinary step of imposing sanctions on its chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. Ms. Bensouda abruptly learned that her bank account had been frozen, as well as those of several family members—even though none was connected to the ICC. The top diplomat of the European Union called Pompeo’s actions “unacceptable and unprecedented,” while the German foreign minister warned they were “a serious mistake.” Weeks later, the State Department revoked Ms. Bensouda’s visa, as well as those of several of her colleagues.[30]

Considering the provocation, Ms. Bensouda was surprisingly unruffled. “It definitely is quite unprecedented,” she admitted in an interview. “These are the kind of sanctions that we normally reserve to be used as a mechanism to target narcotic traffickers, notorious terrorists and the like. But not professional lawyers, not prosecutors, not investigators, not judges or others who are working tirelessly to prevent atrocity crimes.” Still, she refused to be fazed by acts of petty spite, even when they took the form of American foreign policy. “This will not deter us. This will not stop us. We will continue to do our work.”[31]

A measured but devastating coda came from the president of the ICC, Chile Eboe-Osuji. “These acts of coercion and their premises are wrong,” he wrote bluntly. “The ICC is not intent on �?hauling’ Americans up to trial before it. The real issue is whether investigations—and any resulting prosecution—may be conducted to examine allegations of violations committed mostly in Afghanistan by the Taliban, Afghan security personnel and, yes, United States security personnel while stationed in Afghanistan.” Having laid down the parameters of the dispute, Judge Eboe-Osuji offered an indictment of his own. Referencing the Nuremberg Tribunals and chief prosecutor Robert Jackson (who had famously warned of the “poisoned chalice” passing to American lips one day), the judge concluded:

It is not impressive that the American leadership insists that these questions of justice dare not be asked, if they might implicate Americans in allegations of wrongdoing abroad. It is enough that senior American officials, well attuned to the old-fashioned American sense of justice, readily accept that not even American soldiers are immune from accountability when they are suspected of committing crimes in foreign countries.[32]

At last, on November 8, 2020, the fever broke. Even as Trump and his advisers spun fantastical claims of election fraud and suborned party regulars to indulge these dangerous absurdities, President-elect Joe Biden began quietly assembling a team of foreign policy advisers to begin righting the ship on day one. Several months before the election, Biden laid out an ambitious foreign policy agenda in Foreign Affairs magazine. It began as an indictment. “For 70 years,” wrote Mr. Biden, “the United States, under Democratic and Republican presidents, played a leading role in writing the rules, forging the agreements, and animating the institutions that guide relations among nations and advance collective security and prosperity—until Trump. If we continue his abdication of that responsibility, then one of two things will happen: either someone else will take the United States’ place, but not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one will, and chaos will ensue.” The only error in Mr. Biden’s analysis was his use of the future tense; in fact, the worst had already happened. But it was not too late to reverse course. For the incoming president, said Biden, the first and most important goal must be to “place the United States back at the head of the table,” reestablishing connections with allies and reengaging with the United Nations and its ancillaries. Beyond rebuilding bridges, he pledged in his first year of office to host a Summit for Democracy to “bring together the world’s democracies to strengthen our democratic institutions, honestly confront nations that are backsliding, and forge a common agenda.” More specifically, the summit was intended to foster commitment to fighting corruption, defending against authoritarianism, and advancing human rights. On the one hand, this vision of America and its role was a clear break from the isolationism and amorality of his predecessor; on the other, it was couched in terms familiar to anyone who remembered Ronald Reagan’s “city on a hill.” Like Reagan, Mr. Biden is fond of homilies, and expressed himself in similar language: “The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world. But this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well…. As a nation, we have to prove to the world that the United States is prepared to lead again—not just with the example of our power but also with the power of our example.”[33]

It was not entirely clear, however, whether the rest of the world was ready to allow the United States to regain its moral authority. The lacerations of the previous four years did not fade so easily, especially with the possibility of a second Trump administration in 2024. Questions were being asked that had been unthinkable a decade before: could the United States be trusted to remain a steady hand, or would it backslide into xenophobia and isolation? Moreover, during its absence, other nations had stepped up. In July 2020, Britain announced it had blacklisted a long roster of suspected human rights abusers from Myanmar, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, charged with acts ranging from executions to beatings to the persecution of minorities.[34] Even as they welcomed the end of the Trump era, the international community was not about to fall obligingly back into its Cold War–era role of approving chorus for American policy. As one op-ed summed up pithily: “Biden Wants America to Lead the World. It Shouldn’t.” This was not a defense of isolationism, the author explained, but a caution against presuming the old order of things could be reestablished. Indeed, it mustn’t be: the vision of human rights interwoven with liberal democratic values was precisely what had hampered US policy for years and allowed nations like China and Russia to dismiss such rights as imperialist propaganda. A renewed commitment to internationalism meant that the United States shouldn’t try to sit at the head of the table but among its peers: “The point isn’t that American participation in common global efforts is unnecessary. To the contrary—it’s vital. But most of the time, America best serves these efforts less by dictating the rules than by agreeing to them. Choosing partnership over leadership may strike some as un-American. But it’s what most Americans want.”[35]

Nevertheless, it was a mark of how dearly American engagement was missed that the global community—and the United Nations in particular—reacted to Joe Biden’s electoral victory with modified rapture. “I have never known nor can I ever imagine the secretary general doing cartwheels in his office or anywhere else,” his spokesperson said repressively. “What I can tell you is that the secretary general has always worked very closely with every US permanent representative that has been sent by Washington and will do so in the future.” Behind her careful words was the discreet sound of champagne being popped. “Under Joe Biden, the international human rights community and beyond will breathe a sigh of relief,” said Agnès Callamard, the UN Human Rights Council’s special investigator on extrajudicial killings. She particularly hoped that President Biden would rejoin the Human Rights Council, as he was almost certain to do. “The absence of the US there in some of the council’s difficult debates and issues has led to a weakening of those espousing positions supportive of human rights protection,” she admitted. Most discussions were now “largely taken by countries whose primary interest is to weaken international scrutiny over their human rights records.” Similar expressions of relief and reengagement came from almost every quarter. Richard Gowan, UN liaison for the International Crisis Group, dismissed the argument that America had somehow forfeited a place at the table. Yes, he said, “Biden faces a very difficult world, but a very easy pathway to gaining some political good will at the United Nations.” He concluded bluntly: “Biden and his UN ambassador just need to be human, and they will be treated as conquering heroes.”[36]

Such expressions of relief and optimism were perhaps inevitable, but they must not be taken too far. It is a human trait to want to turn the page, put uncomfortable memories behind us. Thus it is tempting to dismiss Donald Trump as an aberration, a brief, chaotic interregnum between the ordered administrations of Barack Obama and his former vice president, Joe Biden. Perhaps eventually it will come to be regarded as such. But if so, it will not be because of the passage of time but rather because of the proactive efforts of Trump’s successors to completely and thoroughly destroy every vestige of Trumpism at home and abroad, and sow the fields with salt. That has not yet been done.

Consequently, it is necessary to regard the narrative of events described above not as mere history, but as a warning. To quote Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” We are still reckoning with the damage wrought by four years of mismanagement, ignorance, avarice, indifference, and cruelty. The word most commonly used to describe Trump and his actions is “unprecedented.” Now there are precedents. It was unimaginable that the United States, which crafted both the UN and much of the postwar geopolitical landscape, should abandon its own creation. It was unimaginable the American president would willfully disparage democratic allies and coddle dictators instead. But it did, and he did, and they may do so again.

Trump’s presidency might be unprecedented, but there are still discernible patterns worth considering. The withdrawal from all rights organizations and duties was part policy, part pique. When the Inter-American Human Rights Commission dared criticize Trump’s Muslim ban, he withdrew from the commission. When the UN Human Rights Council criticized his incarcerating children, he withdrew from the Human Rights Council. When the ICC began investigating possible war crimes by American soldiers, he did not withdraw from the ICC (he couldn’t, as the United States is not a member) but instead imposed sanctions on the chief prosecutor. In every instance—as with other interactions in his presidency—he turned charges against himself back at the accuser and had his underlings do the same: thus Nikki Haley accused the council of being “so corrupt,” as Pompeo did the ICC. American foreign and domestic policy became reduced to a series of Orwellian inversions. In the end, to reach the bedrock truth of the Trump presidency, one need only revert all the accusations it made against others back upon itself: weak, broken, treacherous, untruthful, vacillating, ungrateful, and so, so corrupt.