If You Won't Stop Trump, We Will
And we can.
Trump is a felon and should be put in a cell, not the White House. That sounds like a controversial take, and to many, it is highly politicised, but it isn’t. The evidence for this statement is overwhelming! He has been found guilty of defrauding the US and falsifying business records, yet he has avoided any tangible repercussions. He even had to push the Supreme Court to completely reinterpret the Constitution in an incredibly twisted and distorted way to grant him immunity from inciting the Jan 6th coup. Now that he is in power, he is pushing openly illegal actions, like genocide and impeding ICC jurisdiction. The US justice system has failed, and the entire world is paying the price. So, if you guys can’t arrest this elderly orange menace, we in the rest of the world will have to, and we have already taken the first steps to enable this process. Let me explain.
Okay, so why and how can we arrest a sitting US president?
Well, it starts with Israel. In late November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli PM Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The case the ICC has built up against Netanyahu and Gallant is damning. In fact, the evidence they have paints a textbook example of genocide, a crime the ICC was developed to convict.
Now, neither Israel nor the US has signed the Rome Statute, the binding legislation of the ICC, for reasons that should be evident to you by now. As such, the ICC has no jurisdiction in those countries. This warrant means that signatory countries, which comprise the vast majority of the world, have an obligation to arrest them if they were to visit their territory. The ICC’s warrants are well within its power and are backed by its state signatories.
But Trump wasn’t happy about this, as he sees these warrants as unjustly targeting and harming his ally (which is just flat-out false, as the ICC is also pursuing members of Hamas for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity). So, he has raised heavy sanctions against the chief ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan. These included freezing his US assets and banning him from the country. This is what could enable the ICC to arrest Trump.
Many human rights lawyers have pointed out that Trump’s actions against the ICC through Khan broke the Rome Statute’s Article 70, which forbids obstruction of justice. Because Trump’s sanctions impede Khan’s ability to carry out his duties, it clearly violates this.
Again, as the US isn’t a signatory of the Rome Statute, this doesn’t mean the ICC can arrest Trump in the US. However, they are well within their power to issue arrest warrants for him in signatory countries, such as Canada and all of Europe, for breaking Article 70. Indeed, top human rights lawyer Lady Kennedy has openly said we should “advise” the US government that they risk arrest warrants for Trump, to which the UK government agreed.
In other words, if Trump doesn’t back down, there is a likelihood the ICC will issue arrest warrants for him.
And that isn’t the only thing Trump could be arrested for. He is arguably pushing three genocides right now. The most prominent is his proposed redevelopment and genocide of Gaza. This is a crystal clear violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) and would mean the ICC had no option but to issue an arrest warrant for Trump and any members of his administration involved in the plot. The other two possible genocides are domestic to the US, with his planned actions against the LGBTQ community and migrants coming painfully close to the definition of genocide (read more here). Again, if he keeps pushing in this direction, it could easily trigger another arrest warrant.
There is a serious chance that soon, Trump will be confined to the US, unable to travel to major allies, as we adopt arrest warrants for him.
But will this actually happen? I would have historically said no. The world, including Europe, has a heavy tendency to kowtow to US hegemony and even bend their own laws to accommodate it. But Trump and Elon Musk have eroded that. The threat of tariffs and the US pulling out of defence obligations has pushed Europe, Canada, Australia, and their partners to consolidate their collective power away from the US. They are looking inward to build a better economy and committing more and more to their own collective defence. What’s more, as Musk and now the US government by proxy push extremist far-right nationalist parties in their allies, they have, in turn, legislated to protect their democracy, politics, media, and alike from such detrimental American billionaire influences. In other words, the Western world is starting to shed its ties to America. Because these are the nations that mainly control the ICC, this, in turn, makes an ICC Trump arrest warrant more and more likely as each day goes by.
So, yes, we can arrest Trump, and if things keep going the way they are, we likely will, and we will leave the US behind. Or, all of this can be avoided if the US finds a way to rein in its moronic clown of a leader.
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Sources: The Independent, The Times Of Israel, The White House, The Guardian, Will Lockett, Reuters, ICC