THE LAST DEFENCE: My Latest ‘Hot Type’ Column in Byline
Today’s Hot Type column in Byline Supplement reveals an admission of guilt by Donald Trump, who lives in fear of being prosecuted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court
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In today’s Hot Type column for Byline Supplement, I reach further over the waves to an international community of sources who documented political leaders prosecuted in The Hague. There is nothing like people with lived experience to offer vital clues on how the Trump Regime might end.
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Below is an excerpt from today’s Hot Type, with additional quotes at the end of excerpt from Alex Alvarova that arrived past deadline. If you appreciate this work, please share far and wide.
The Last Defence Against Trump’s Total Immunity
Donald Trump’s recent threat to the International Criminal Court is a sign that he is in far more trouble than he is willing to admit, reports Heidi Siegmund Cuda
Donald Trump’s administration this week threatened new US sanctions on the International Criminal Court, in an attempt to strong-arm it into not investigating him and his top officials. Such a move is an admission of guilt. An innocent man would have no reason to demand that the ICC amend its founding document. Reutersfirst reported the threat on Thursday.
It’s just the latest in a series of coups in America.The media coup came first. Billionaires aligned with foreign autocrats own almost all our media and have spent the last decade tilting the playing field toward fascism.
Then came the judicial coup. In 2024, a Supreme Court heavy with religious extremists gave 79-year-old felon Donald Trump what he longed for — total immunity.
This parallels one of the first moves by the 73-year-old Russian president, Vladimir Putin, when he came to power. He made it impossible to prosecute a sitting president, and later, expanded the law to give ex-presidents lifetime immunity. Now, 26 years after first coming to power, despite international indictments for war crimes, he’s still running his decrepit empire.
If you view the so-called ‘peace talks’ as a meeting of crime bosses and not acts of diplomacy (why else the son-in-law?), everything comes into sharper focus.
The Last Defence
Not only is the Trump administration asking the Court to “amend its founding document to ensure it does not investigate the Republican president and his top officials… threatening new US sanctions on the court if it did not” but if the Court “does not act on this US demand and two others — dropping investigations of Israeli leaders over the Gaza war and formally ending an earlier probe of US troops over their actions in Afghanistan — Washington may penalize more ICC officials and could sanction the court itself,” according to the Reuters report.
“Only a man who knows he is guilty would do that, and in Trump’s case we can only expect his actions to get worse,” Finnish geopolitical analyst Joni Askola told Byline Supplement. “Trump is already illegally striking boats and showing the whole world what he is doing because he wants people to be scared, but also to become so used to it that they stop calling him out. That is why people need to keep calling him out, and why the ICC cannot give in to his pressure.”
Askola, who is currently in Kyiv delivering crowd-funded trucks to Ukrainian military units, said: “When the world’s most powerful country openly turns authoritarian and imperialistic, and its leader wants to force us to play along, we face a choice between becoming his accomplices or saying no and fighting back to keep our dignity. The more we appease him and accept his demands, the worse those demands and his behaviour will become. The most aggressive authoritarian leaders are often the most scared and cowardly ones, and Trump is no exception. Just as with Putin and others, he fears for his life and is afraid of courts.”
As the judicial system in the US is being systematically dismantled and/or ignored by the Trump regime, the ICC is the last, best hope for those who would like to see human rights and democratic freedoms continue.
Slavenka Drakulić, the Croatian journalist and author of They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague told Byline Supplement: “The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugloslova’s immensely important historical contribution was primarily to bring out truth about wars. Without trials we would not have proof that massacre/genocide in Srebrenica even happened.”
Drakulić, who was present at the Serbian war crimes trials in The Hague, which ran from 1993-2017, said that only about ten percent of the accused were ever prosecuted, which she said was bitterly disappointing “both for the victims and for the general public. Perhaps the Rwanda case was different.”
“ICC is the last defence of international law, but I am afraid that Trump’s threat is a very real one,” she said.
Vesna Pusić, who served as First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs in the cabinet of Zoran Milanović in Croatia, told Byline Supplement: “US president Trump has already shown his antipathy towards the ICC some time ago, when he introduced the first batch of sanctions against the Court and its officials. Now he has become even more aggressive.”
“I see three principal reasons for that,” she said. “One, Trump detests multilateral organizations in general, and the ones that can potentially produce some sanctions for states or politicians in particular.
“Two, Trump rejects international law, and the ICC is an embodiment of international law and holds all countries — big or small, to the same standards. Trump’s view of international relations is a “return to Yalta”, a world divided among the Big Powers’ spheres of interest, where the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. In such a world there is no place for the ICC, probably not even a place for the UN.
“Three, a more recent and closer to home reason is probably the fact that shelling boats, killing people and hijacking tankers off the coast of South America might eventually prove to be criminal acts upon which the ICC would have to take some action, where Trump would be directly affected.”
Pusić also said she thought there was “a fourth reason, not specifically related to ICC, but to the institutions and individuals of international reputation and respect in general. Trump’s administration is making a point, especially lately, of intentionally disrespecting, demeaning and attacking such institutions and individuals, as a sign and symbol of their personal power and as part of their strategy of disrupting the international, rules-based order.”
Dangerous Times
“These are dangerous times, and Trump, the world’s most dangerous man, is openly telling us that he will make them even worse,” said Joni Askola. “Venezuela is likely not the only place where he plans to do things that could get him sentenced. We cannot fall for his pressure because doing so would make us his enablers.”
In addition, it’s important not to continuously fall prey to the Trump regime’s fascist clickbait — but to look further over the waves to see where criminals are being prosecuted and convicted. In the UK, the Russian propagandist Nathan Gill’s sentencing has renewed the will to expose political charlatans working for Putin.
On Friday, an Estonian court sentenced pro-Russian politicians to prison terms for high treason. One of the leaders of the pro-Russian party Koos, Aivo Peterson, has been sentenced to 14 years in prison, while Dmitry Rootsi and Russian citizen Andrei Andronov received 11 years. Peterson and Rootsi were found guilty of high treason, while Andronov was convicted of participating in non-violent activities against Estonia.
According to DW Russian, “the court found it proven that Peterson and Rootsi maintained contact with Russian authorities, discussed political cooperation and the creation of a party capable of changing Estonia’s political course. This could have given Russia the opportunity to covertly influence Estonian politics in the future, the court decision states…
And in news that is likely hitting Trump closer to home, former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is currently in The Hague awaiting trial for crimes against humanity for dozens of murders in his so-called war on drugs, which Trump himself championed and which parallel Trump’s extrajudicial murders in Venezuela.
In a transcript from a 2017 phone call, Trump applauded Duterte’s murderous rampage.
“I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” Trump told Duterte, according to the transcript.
Now, after multiple attempts by his lawyers to get him released from The Hague, Duterte sits and waits.
In addition to ICC judges issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim al-Masri last November for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Gaza conflict, the ICC previously issued arrest warrants for Putin and five other Russian officials over their war crimes in Ukraine, including illegally deporting children.
War Crimes Tribunal for the World
The ICC is the permanent war crimes tribunal for the world, with 125 member states — excluding China, Russia and the US — but including the whole of the EU. The precursor to the ICC were the Nuremberg Trials — military tribunals following World War II held to prosecute Nazi war criminals. They directly inspired the creation of the ICC in 2002, which prosecutes individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression.
According to the ICC’s mandate, sitting heads of state can be prosecuted, as well as individuals for crimes they commit or crimes committed by nationals under their command.
According to the Reuters report on Trump’s ICC threats, an anonymous source cited “‘open chatter’ in the international legal community that the court could target Trump and his top officials in 2029, when the Republican president’s term ends.”
Accountability Is No Longer Unthinkable
Why wait? If sitting heads of state can be prosecuted for war crimes, why enable more crimes by waiting?
Since September, the US military has murdered more than 80 people in the Caribbean and off the Pacific coasts of Latin America. Last week, members of Congress promised to launch an investigation into whether the US military, which killed two survivors of a boat strike, broke the law.
UK activist Matthew Pearce isn’t holding his breath in the hopes that Congress does the right thing. Pearce, a founding member of the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, submitted his own exhaustive report to the ICC, documenting how Trump’s unlawful killings at sea and domestic patterns of persecution, fit the rubrik for an advance stage of genocide.
“Hope doesn’t come from Trump changing — it comes from institutions finally acting like institutions,” Pearce told Byline Supplement. “The ICC moves slowly, but when it moves, it rewrites assumptions for decades. The fact that this administration is trying to pre-emptively shut it down is, paradoxically, the strongest evidence that accountability is no longer unthinkable.
“I filed my dossier with the ICC not as an abstract exercise, but because these issues are personal. I am the parent of a trans man, and the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. History teaches that crimes justified as ‘security,’ ‘order,’ or ‘national interest’ only escalate when they go unchallenged. Accountability isn’t vengeance — it’s prevention. And it matters precisely because real people live downstream of these decisions.”
As the means to accountability erodes in the countries where these crime bosses rule, Trump’s threats to the ICC are a wake up call to do something. At this point, even prosecuting ten percent of the accused might be enough to give the free world a reprieve from these monsters.
The above is an excerpt from my Hot Type column. As always, I ask those who can afford to support a small global team of investigative reporters to please take out a subscription to Byline Supplement.
I also understand that if you are not able to do so at this moment, the good chaps at Byline allow me to send the column to Bette members upon request, as I noted above. Just zip a request to bettedangerous/gmail. New members will also find they are invited to unlock one report at the Byline site.
As promised here are additional quotes from disinformation analyst Alex Alvarova, which arrived after I filed my report.
In my view, Donald Trump has always been less a businessman or politician and more a full-time mafioso moonlighting as a public figure. The man never truly played the role of entrepreneur, statesman—or, frankly, human. Like many creatures of the underworld, he possesses an animal-grade instinct for danger.
Now, as his cognitive gears grind and sputter, his handlers are getting nervous and even his most devoted worshippers are beginning to recoil. And he knows exactly what it means when the capo di tutti capi starts looking too old, too slow, or too fragile. You can’t rule the family if the family starts wondering whether you still remember where the front door is. That’s the ultimate sin in his world.
He feels the day they dispose of him edging closer. And the generation rising behind him inside the Republican Party—as we’ve just witnessed—is wildly radical, openly antisemitic, and frighteningly eager for a fight. He senses, not incorrectly, that he may soon be tossed to the European wolves.—Alex Alvarova
Brilliant!
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