War, Criminals, and War Criminals

Corruption, lawlessness, and evil inside Trump's inner circle.

Illustration by Riley Levine

There is a point in any declining republic where foreign and domestic policy stops looking like strategy and starts looking like a racket. We are well past that point.

Look at the map.

In one corner, Pete Hegseth is turning the Caribbean into his own personal live-fire video game, with U.S. drones directed by SEAL Team Six blowing up supposed “drug boats” off Venezuela. (Pete, get Battlefield 6; it is the best in the series in a long time and might help you sublimate some of that rage.) While no one in the Pentagon can quite explain who we are killing or why with any detail, we are doing it with vigor.

Human rights lawyers, military JAGs, and even the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees are saying “war crimes” in their out-loud voices concerning a reported second strike that targeted survivors in the water after one boat was hit by a drone, something the Washington Post says Hegseth ordered and that he spent the weekend posting cartoon social media memes boasting about.

Not that little niceties like the law matter to this claque of criminals, but once an enemy combatant is hors de combat (a phrase one loves but so rarely gets to use these days), that is it. At that point, they are no longer combatants. Even accepting the thin argument that these are drug traffickers, ordering a second strike to “kill them all” was not lawful; it was straight-up Article 118: murder, a violation of the Geneva Conventions (again, a little trifle to which the United States happens to be a signatory).

This is wrapped, of course, in the usual Trump flourish. We are told it is a noble war on “narco-terrorists,” even as U.S. officials admit they often have no idea who is actually on these boats, only that they might be tied to gangs like Tren de Aragua. At least 80 people are dead in this campaign, but who is counting?

Marco Rubio’s war against Venezuela and SECDRUNK’s shooting gallery need content to feed the MAGA media machine before we start turning Caracas into a Grozny. Expect the rubble to begin bouncing soon. We have not parked all those naval and air assets in the Caribbean to deny Donald Trump his light show.

Enter Marco Rubio, the nebbishy fauxhawk turned Secretary of State, whose entire brand is being the most sanctimonious guy in any room that contains a camera. Rubio has wanted a showdown with Venezuela for years. Now he has it, with aircraft carriers parked off Caracas and the State Department designating Venezuelan gangs as foreign terrorist organizations. So we are abundantly clear, this war is the predicate for his 2028 presidential campaign.

In theory, Rubio is the cautious one. In reality, he is the same guy he has always been. Too timid to stand up to Trump on anything that might cost him power, but perfectly willing to risk other people’s lives. He talks like a nervous bank manager and governs like a man whose spine was repossessed in 2017.

Which brings us to the other front in this carnival of “war, criminals, and war criminals”: Trump’s so-called peace plan for Ukraine.

You have seen the images.

The American delegation to “end the war” gathers, not at a neutral diplomatic venue, but at Steve Witkoff’s luxury Shell Bay club in Florida. The cast list reads like a local dinner-theater production of Great Moments in Diplomacy: Marco Rubio, now in his statesman cosplay, plus Jared Kushner and Witkoff, both of whom stand to benefit to the tune of billions of dollars if parting out Ukraine and feeding it to Putin’s savages can somehow be packaged as a real estate, rare earth mining, and reconstruction bonanza.

On paper, they are pitching a “revised plan” to Kyiv, something allegedly less written by Putin’s team than the original Trump fantasy where Ukraine gives up a quarter of its own territory and promises never to join NATO.

In reality, every leak from these talks tells the same story. This is not a peace process.

This is a business plan with drone strikes on civilians as a KPI. One recent report said Trump’s team was salivating over a two-trillion-dollar scramble for contracts and concessions that would put Trump and his friends at the center of rebuilding Ukraine’s shattered economy, if they can first convince Kyiv to swallow terms that destroy their nation.

It is a lie sold by Russia to Trump, Witkoff, and Kushner, and like rubes, they bought it lock, stock, and barrel. “You will get so rich off this deal. Russia is a land of golden opportunities for you all. You will get Trump Tower Moscow, at last.” In turning espionage assets, it is always one of the four elements in the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. Witkoff is the Money column. Trump is all four.

You do not send Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to negotiate the end of a European war because you crave justice. You send them because you want a taste. A cut. The vig.

Kushner’s post-White House career has already been one long case study in “legal if you squint hard enough” influence peddling, fueled by billions from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and sweetheart deals from Gulf monarchies who learned that the fastest way to get to Trump is through the family cash register.

The fact that he has slithered out of his hole and into the public eye is telling in the most damning way. He is the bagman, and just like with his bro MBS, he never minds the blood.

Witkoff is a developer whose Trump-adjacent deals, from Belgrade to Dubai, blur the line between diplomacy and branding opportunity. Now he is a “special envoy” to Putin, jetting to Moscow and literally coaching the Russians on how to keep Trump on-side. I know we throw around terms like “treason” and “espionage” these days, but what he is doing could be prosecuted by a kid five minutes out of law school.

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Standing behind all this, nodding sagely like the world’s smuggest Greek chorus, is Vice President JD Vance. The man who spent years as a Russia-curious populist influencer has now turned his shtick into official U.S. policy. Every time he talks about the war, it is to insist that Russia has made “significant concessions,” that Ukraine must be “realistic,” that maybe we should all just move on and start trading again, never mind the war crimes and civilian attacks.

It is a longer story of why J.D. loves Putin and Russia, but for him it really is ideological; the false image that Putin’s Russia is the last white Christian conservative empire, something even the most tentative Russia scholars find utterly laughable.

This is the same J.D. Vance who used to argue that aid to Ukraine was a waste, that European security was someone else’s problem, that we had more important things to do than stand up to a genocidal fascist regime. Now he is in power and still running the same script, rehearsing for the moment Trump strokes out and his first call is to Daddy Vladdy.

Now layer on top of all this the behavior of the Trump Department of Justice and the Trump White House, and the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.

This may feel like ages ago, but the criminality is so baked in that we forget the DOJ/DHS/ICE role in weaponizing. (Weird. It was always projection, was it not?) This is an administration that secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a two-century-old wartime law, to deport Venezuelans en masse, then blew off court orders when a federal judge tried to stop the flights.

Men were shipped to a brutal for-profit prison in El Salvador despite explicit instructions from the bench, and only later traded back in a prisoner swap, all while DOJ lawyers are still trying to maneuver their way around contempt charges.

This is an administration whose prosecutions of Donald Trump’s enemies keep collapsing because the cases are so nakedly political and so sloppily constructed that judges throw them out on basic rule-of-law grounds. The indictments of James Comey and Letitia James were just tossed because the handpicked prosecutor, a Trump loyalist with great hair but no real experience, was appointed in a way the court called flatly illegal.

Outside watchdogs and former DOJ officials are now openly saying what everyone in the building whispers. Internal safeguards have been dismantled. Cases are steered toward friends and away from judges and circuits viewed as “unfair,” which is to say, fair. Prosecutorial power is being used as a blunt instrument of retribution and reward. The whole-of-department effort to shred, redact, and hide the Epstein files is the largest coverup in American history, bar none.

And over all of this hovers the Trump family’s global cash grab.

The failsonsons, Cokely and Gums, are not even pretending to separate business from government now.

They run a sprawling, criminally adjacent crypto empire, World Liberty Financial, and a network of ventures that have pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars in 2025 alone, much of it from foreign investors who are receiving favorable treatment, including pardons, from the Trump administration.

Reuters noted that the Trump crime family made more than $800 million from crypto sales in just six months, while congressional Democrats released a report detailing how foreign interests with regulatory exposure keep turning up in Trump-branded coin and token deals. Hell, Trump Vodka made a comeback this weekend, for those of you with a taste for yak urine strained through the oil filter of a 1956 Soviet-era farm tractor and aged in toxic waste drums.

At the same time, a new wave of Trump-linked funds and projects, from 1789 Capital to luxury developments in the Gulf, are vacuuming up money in jurisdictions where U.S. policy now conveniently aligns with the financial stakes of the First Family and its friends. Ethics experts are not subtle about it. No president in history has come anywhere near this level of lavish, in-your-face corruption and graft.

So when you hear that Witkoff is flying to Moscow to talk “peace,” remember what game is actually being played: they are not negotiating between powers to end a war. They are ending a war so Trump and his allies can collect their cut.

When you see Pete Hegseth grinning on an aircraft carrier while Congress debates whether his orders amount to a war crime, remember who benefits if Venezuela collapses. Its oil reserves are suddenly up for grabs. Spoiler: it is not the people of Venezuela, liberated from the tyrant Maduro.

Hell, we are not even pretending to be in the “get rid of dictators” business anymore. This is a straight-up corporate raid, backed by B-2 bombers.

When Marco Rubio, the man who never found a moral crisis he could not hide from, tells you that these deals will secure America (and by America he means his 2028 campaign against J.D. Vance), remember whose freedom he is talking about. It is the freedom of a criminal organization to profit off human misery and suffering.

This is not foreign policy in the classic sense. It is not the messy, compromised, often honorable work of trying to prevent worse wars in a dangerous world.

It is something cruder and uglier. It is the merger of war and business, of the criminal and the official, of missile strikes and term sheets. It is a government that sees every conflict as a branding opportunity, every crisis as a chance to mint a token, launch a fund, and cut a side deal.

War. Criminals. And, very possibly, war criminals.

The only question left is whether anyone in Congress, in the courts, or among our allies will treat this for what it is, and not just another episode in the never-ending Trump reality show.

We should be looking at Real Housewives of The Hague, if God is just. Trump has blazed past accountability all his life. His minions are learning the same lessons.

It is up to us to put a stop to it.