Strait Up War Crimes

The Easter Threat

On Easter morning, President Trump posted on Truth Social: "Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in... I believe the holiest of the Christian holidays." The message was so jarring that even the hosts initially thought it was a fake. By Monday, Trump was at a press conference threatening to destroy all of Iran's bridges and power plants by 8 PM Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed. When a New York Times reporter asked whether bombing civilian infrastructure would violate the Geneva Conventions, Trump responded by asking about the paper's declining circulation.

The administration is already trying to argue that such attacks would not constitute war crimes. A White House official told the Wall Street Journal that power plants are "legitimate military targets" because destroying them could foment civil unrest, complicating Tehran's path to a nuclear device. The hosts ran that justification by Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale, who said it would clearly be unlawful to destroy civilian infrastructure to foment unrest. As Tommy put it: "Explicitly threatening to bomb all of the power plants serving a country of 90 million people — that's about as clear cut of a war crime as I could think of."