There Will Be No Post-Presidential Peace for Donald Trump

There is an ideal recent precedent for such a case: Last year, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by the Philippine government and transferred to The Hague. Duterte had publicly bragged about personally killing drug-trafficking suspects as mayor of Davao City and overseeing other extrajudicial killings during his term as president in the 2010s. His trial is expected to begin later this year.

Unsurprisingly, given the Trump administration’s apparent opposition to the concept of international law itself, it has been extraordinarily hostile toward the ICC, even by American standards. Trump imposed a wide range of financial sanctions for the first time against the court, its judges, and its prosecutors last February. The sanctions, which are typically reserved for rogue nations and terrorist groups, effectively severed the ICC employees from much of the world financial system and many digital goods and services. Targeted judges cannot even have Gmail accounts or conduct basic financial transactions with major banks.

The purported reasons for the sanctions were the court’s past inquiries into U.S. military actions in Afghanistan—the brief probe ended in 2021—as well as the ICC’s investigations of Netanyahu’s government, which is closely allied with the Trump administration. But the Trump administration wants to dispense with multinational tribunals for a deeper reason: They offend its vision of power that operates by brute force alone.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top advisers, proclaimed in a January interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, “but we live in a world—in the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

That reasoning applies to countries that may want to uphold international law as well. Even if Trump administration officials avoid the ICC’s scrutiny, they may be liable for prosecution by foreign governments anyway. In most countries, courts and prosecutors are bound by their jurisdiction: They can only charge and try defendants for offenses that occurred within their territory. In international law, however, some offenses are considered so grave that they can be prosecuted by any country.

This concept, known as “universal jurisdiction,” could make post-presidential life difficult for Trump and his associates if other countries are willing to use it. German prosecutors, for example, have successfully pursued charges against participants in Syria’s destructive decade-long civil war. In 2022, after hearing testimony from dozens of survivors, a German court convicted two former Syrian intelligence officers of crimes against humanity for their roles in overseeing the Bashar Al Assad regime’s torture camps. One defendant received a life sentence, and the other was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.

Even the threat of foreign prosecution could have a chilling effect on Trump administration officials. A post-presidency Trump may be more reluctant to visit his golf course in Scotland or his resort in Ireland if he fears that the British or Irish governments might arrest him and transfer him to The Hague. (A 2002 law prohibits the federal government itself from extraditing Americans to ICC custody.)

Trumbull cautioned that international law prosecutions can often face a significant time lag. “A lot of times, accountability for international crimes takes a long time to materialize,” he pointed out. “We’ll see prosecutions for crimes that were committed 10, 20 years ago. So the fact that there might not be accountability in the next few years does not mean that accountability might not happen at a later time.” In short, what Trump administration officials do over the next three years could haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Accountability for politicians can be a mercurial concept. Impeachment is the proper tool for it. When the Framers drafted the Constitution, they deliberated over how to properly structure it in a truly republican society. They knew that impeachments in Britain were often long, complicated affairs—colonial official Warren Hastings’s impeachment, trial, and eventual acquittal for alleged abuses in India lasted from 1788 to 1795—and had much higher stakes. Had Hastings been found guilty, the House of Lords could have ordered him to be imprisoned.

American impeachments are less punitive and more direct. Any federal official can be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” That last phrase is as broad as Congress wants it to be. “They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65, “as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” Or, as Gerald Ford once phrased it in more modern language, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

While the mechanisms of accountability are important, the spirit that drives them is just as vital. A jail cell may not await Trump. But after another four years of defiling the republic, there will be no post-presidential peace for him or his top associates. There will be no lighthearted vacations to Europe, for fear of trial beyond the Supreme Court’s reach. There will be no adjunct job at some university or quiet retirement to some farm or ranch. There will be investigations. There will be depositions. There will be hearings. There will be whatever other measure of lawful justice can be provided. The fears that Trump voiced at the Kennedy Center in January were well-founded. Dictatorships are always more fragile than they try to seem. If anything, the president has deeply underestimated his legal and political peril.