Renee Good and Trump’s Age of Immunity

Summary

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, Justice, and the Courts

Episode: "Renee Good and Trump’s Age of Immunity"

Date: January 10, 2026
Host: Dahlia Lithwick
Co-host: Mark Joseph Stern
Guests: Brian Finucan, former attorney advisor, Office of Legal Advisor, U.S. State Department

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the chilling legal and political developments under President Trump’s second administration, focusing on the extrajudicial killing of Renee Nicole Good by a masked ICE agent in Minnesota and the U.S. military invasion of Venezuela to arrest its head of state. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern dissect the shifting boundaries of presidential power—especially the notion of presidential and agent immunity—while former State Department legal advisor Brian Finucan adds depth on the domestic and international legal chaos surrounding these events. The hosts grapple with how the law, legal accountability, and even social conscience are contorted by an increasingly autocratic executive.

---

Main Discussion Themes

• Expanding Claims of Executive Immunity and Power
• Erosion of Legal Accountability and Due Process
• Immediate Events: Killing of Renee Nicole Good; U.S. Invasion of Venezuela
• State vs. Federal Jurisdiction in Law Enforcement Violence
• Congressional and Judicial Responses (or lack thereof)
• The Decline of International Law in American Foreign Policy
• Societal and Historical Lessons on Power and Violence
• Weaponization of Law and the Peril to Liberal Democracy

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Killing of Renee Nicole Good (00:16–12:13)

• The episode opens with a grave recounting of two recent events—a U.S. military invasion of Venezuela and the killing of Renee Nicole Good, an unarmed Minnesota mother, by masked ICE agents.
• On the killing: The hosts describe the brutality and the subsequent federal cover-up, where bystanders tried to help but were blocked and state authorities’ investigations were immediately stymied.

Quote (Lithwick, 00:57):

“Both of these two things reflect a new, emboldened Trump administration that declares you guilty, destroys your life, and then tells people that what they saw with their own eyes never happened.”

• Trump’s claim: He told the New York Times his only limit as president is his conscience.

2. Legal Recourse for State and Local Prosecutors (05:05–07:14)

• Stern explains that while the Trump-controlled DOJ won’t prosecute, Minnesota state law may provide a narrow avenue for justice, despite federal attempts to block evidence and witnesses.
• The shooter can try to move the trial to federal court, but state charges can persist.

Quote (Stern, 05:05):

“The federal courts have given federal agents some immunity under the supremacy clause of the Constitution... But that immunity only applies when their actions were authorized under federal law and... necessary and proper. So when an officer violates federal law or acts unreasonably, unconstitutionally, unlawfully when carrying out their duties, they can face state charges. And in the past, they have.”

• Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty is reportedly pushing to convene a grand jury.

3. Trump’s Limitless Notion of Presidential Power (09:37–12:13)

• The hosts note Trump and allies’ repeated claims that his executive power has no boundaries—over domestic or foreign policy.
• The hosts contrast technical Supreme Court language (about "outer" and "inner perimeters" of immunity) with the gruesome physical reality of unchecked power.

Quote (Lithwick, 09:37):

“We are sitting in a moment in which we are hearing... the president can deport, he can bomb, he can arrest, he can enter into sovereign nations and take over Greenland. He can do whatever he wants.”

4. Skepticism About Legal Accountability (12:13–18:00)

• Stern argues that Trump’s legal advisers know their statements are false, but are pushing the law’s boundaries far beyond Nixon-era precedent.
• Judge Boasberg’s attempt to block deportations was rebuffed by the administration, citing the “mandate of the electorate,” and Congress is now trying to impeach him as retaliation.
• The “rule for the ages” crafted by the Supreme Court’s immunity decision culminates, the hosts argue, in bloodshed and loss of democratic norms.

Quote (Stern, 12:13):

“There will always be a limit to the legal argument that we present here. And we have to push back on a deeper, broader level and say in this country, no one, nobody can ever claim that they have some kind of freestanding authority to murder because they happen to be elected by the American people.”

5. The Universal Threat of Executive Violence (18:00–22:37)

• The conversation shifts to societal lessons: once a president can designate anyone an “enemy,” no one is safe, regardless of social status or background.
• The dangerous error is to assume state violence “can’t happen to me.”

Quote (Lithwick, 18:00):

“If the president can do this, the president can do it to me.”

• Stern expresses despair: "It's a lesson we have to keep learning over and over again somehow, right?” (20:16)

6. Collective Reality and Tribalization (22:37–23:26)

• Discussing Molly Olmsted’s work, the hosts note that society didn’t even need “deepfakes”—people already believe the version of events their political tribe offers, regardless of video evidence.

---

7. U.S. Invasion of Venezuela: Legality and Precedent (23:26–46:32)

Segment start: 23:26. Guest: Brian Finucan.

• Trump ordered the military invasion of Venezuela (“Don Row Doctrine” or “Access Hollywood Foreign Policy”) to apprehend Nicolas Maduro and his wife, without congressional consent or respect for international law (23:26).
• The episode draws parallels to earlier unauthorized interventions (e.g., Panama, 1989).

International Law Analysis (26:16–29:24)

• Under Article 2.4 of the UN Charter, the use or threat of force is broadly prohibited, except for explicit, narrow exceptions (e.g., UN Security Council approval, self-defense).
• The U.S. ambassador to the UN didn’t even attempt a legal defense, instead framing it merely as a law enforcement action.

Finucan:

“It was a flagrant violation of international law. Specifically, Article 2. 4 of the UN Charter, which prohibits both the use of force and the threat of the use of force.” (26:40)

Domestic Law and the Constitution (29:24–36:51)

• The Office of Legal Counsel’s William Barr (Panama, 1989) had argued that the President could override Article 2.4. Finucan dismantles this, noting the president has a constitutional duty (Take Care Clause) to abide by treaties.
• The Constitution vests war powers in Congress. Trump, like past presidents, ignores this, but “originalists” embrace a living constitutional approach here.

Finucan:

“The framers...made it hard to go to war. They required the collective decision making and deliberation of the people's elected representatives. They were not going to leave one of the most consequential decisions...to the whims of one man." (33:44)

The War Powers Resolution and Congressional Response (37:03–46:32)

• The War Powers Resolution was enacted to constrain the unilateral use of force but Congress’ will remains weak.
• The Senate passes a new war powers resolution (44:02)—a rare bipartisan signal of disapproval.
• Trump proposes ballooning the military budget for further interventions (45:22), testing Congress’ leverage over fund appropriations.

---

8. "If You’re Famous, They Let You Do It" Foreign Policy (46:32–54:08)

• The administration's approach to Venezuela is brazenly transactional—taking oil as war booty, justifying interventions through spurious or self-serving rationales.
• Finucan details reports that U.S. will siphon Venezuelan oil revenues into offshore accounts, an action that is “illegal both as a matter of international law and...U.S. Law.” (47:27)

---

9. Machismo, Tribalism, and the Collapse of Law (49:44–59:09)

• Right-wing commentators mock or dismiss international law as “fake and gay” (Matt Walsh). Finucan notes that “this is not strength. This is childishness...This is not a law imposed upon the United States by someone else. This is the United States's own creation.” (52:19)
• The administration weaponizes gender, sexuality, and cultural signifiers to vilify victims (e.g., focusing on Renee Goode’s pronouns and family in far-right media), broadening the list of those labeled as “domestic terrorists” and therefore as fair targets for violence.

---

10. Weaponization of Law and the Limits of Legal Redress (55:45–59:58)

• Finucan and Stern warn that law is now a tool of executive retribution, used against enemies and ignored for friends.
• The burden falls on Congress and the people to resist:
  Finucan:

“The law is not constraining on this administration, at least in their view, but it is a tool to be weaponized against perceived opponents...The American public doesn’t have to accept that...If you think that we should live in a society ruled by law...you should let your elected representatives know.” (59:09)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Trump’s View of Power:
  “Donald Trump told the New York Times this week that the sole limit on the scope of his own executive authority was his conscience.” (00:57)
• Legal Realism:
  “There will always be a limit to the legal argument...And we have to push back on a deeper, broader level and say in this country, no one...can ever claim that they have some kind of freestanding authority to murder because they happen to be elected by the American people.” – Stern (12:13)
• On International Law:
  “This is not a law imposed upon the United States by someone else. This is the United States’s own creation. We agreed to these rules for very good reason.” – Finucan (52:19)
• Societal Complacency:
  “What makes me despair is that of course...everything you just said is correct, but it’s a lesson that we have to keep learning over and over again somehow, right?” – Stern (20:16)
• On the Weaponization of Law:
  “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law...” – Finucan (59:09)

---

Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:16–03:47: Introduction; events in Minnesota and Venezuela; set-up of the show’s legal questions
• 05:05–07:14: State prosecutor’s options; the limits of federal immunity
• 12:13–18:00: Legal logic versus extralegal authoritarianism; the Supreme Court’s role
• 18:00–23:26: Societal lessons, category errors, "First They Came" poem, and tribal politics
• 23:26–46:32: Interview with Brian Finucan on Venezuela, international/domestic law, and congressional powers
• 46:32–54:08: The Trump “take the oil” plan and the "Access Hollywood Foreign Policy"
• 49:44–53:09: Masculinity, performativity, and the right-wing’s disdain for international law
• 54:39–59:58: Parallels between foreign killings and domestic law enforcement violence; weaponization of legal definitions

---

Tone and Style

The hosts speak with urgency, despair, and grim humor, maintaining clarity while conveying the weight of each event. Mark Joseph Stern frequently adds emotional resonance, challenging listeners to push past legal technicalities toward larger truths about power and citizenship.

---

Summary

This episode of Amicus dissects the unprecedented expansion of executive power and the corresponding collapse of accountability—legally, politically, and morally—in the Trump administration’s latest violent domestic and international actions. The murder of Renee Nicole Good, the invasion of Venezuela, and the weaponization of "terrorism" labels illustrate how the presidency and its agents are, under current doctrine and practice, operating above the law—rendering redress nearly impossible except through public outcry and Congressional action. The discussions with legal experts stress how treaties, the Constitution, and international norms are brushed aside in favor of performative strength and tribal identity politics. The chilling core message: no one is safe when law is whatever the president says it is, and all the more reason for citizens and Congress to assert their constitutional roles before the rule of law vanishes entirely.

Transcript

[A]

This is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts, the law and the Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwig.

[B]

And I'm Mark Joseph Stern.

[A]

This last week has been bookmarked by two events that have left many of us feeling nothing short of breathless a military invasion of Venezuela, ostensibly to arrest its head of state and his wife on charges that lived someplace in the Venn diagram between the war on drugs, the war on terror, and a thirst for oil. And then there was a horrific killing by a masked ICE agent of a woman called Renee Nicole Good, an unarmed mother who lived in Minnesota. Both of these two things reflect a new, emboldened Trump administration that declares you guilty, destroys your life, and then tells people that what they saw with their own eyes never happened. Donald Trump told the New York Times this week that the sole limit on the scope of his own executive authority was his conscience.

[B]

Later on in the show, we're going to turn our attention to the law of President Trump's increasingly predatory foreign policy and military actions and the ways in which the boat strikes in the Caribbean and the US Attack on Venezuela were really precursors for what happened in Minneapolis this week. I'll be speaking with Brian Finucan, who served for a decade as an attorney advisor in the Office of Legal Advisor at the U.S. department of State under both Obama and Trump.

[A]

And our Slate plus members will also have access to our bonus episode following right after this one, discussing a surprise gift from conservatives to reproductive freedom in the state of Wyoming and Lindsey Halligan's latest humiliation in court. If you're not a Slate plus member, hang on till the end of this episode for details on how to join us. But first, it's hard to know where to start with the news from Minneapolis this past week. The stuffed animals in the glove compartment next to the bloodied airbag, the screams of murderers from desperate bystanders begging to be allowed to run to the aid of the woman who was slumped over the steering wheel. The masked men blocking them from doing so, the masked agent of the state walking away from shooting her point blank through the windshield. Or the costume performance of the secretary of Homeland Security explaining that a car on the way back from school drop off is a weapon and that the mother behind the wheel is the domestic terrorist in a scene where she is surrounded by armed masked men. When I don't know where to start, I always start with you, Mark Joseph Stern, co host and friend and conscience, when there is not one to be found and senior writer here at Slate.

[B]

Hi, Dalia. Thank you for Chatting this through with me, as devastating and horrible as it is, I feel like this is one of those situations where law only really brings us so far and we're already bumping up against that limit. But we should talk about it because there's a kind of, I don't know, a kind of disbelief that we could ever find redress or accountability here, a skepticism that the people in masks purporting to be ICE agents shooting innocent Americans could ever be brought to justice. I think there is a possibility that that could happen. I want to talk about why, and I also want to talk about where that skepticism comes from and why I understand it, too.

[A]

Yeah. And I think maybe I also, before we jump in, want to note that for an awful lot of people, I think both of included, this has just been painful in a way that sometimes I am not sure what is going to set me off. But this, whether or not folks watch the video, the reality of this and the brutality of this and the blatant lies around it and also the vilification of Renee Goode has been beyond even my ability to comprehend. And so, just for listeners, as Mark flags here, we are having a legal conversation. That's our job. But we know that folks are really struggling with this, and please know we are, too. So, Mark, I think everybody knows that Trump's DOJ certainly is not going to prosecute the agent who shot into the car and killed Renee Goode. I guess my initial question is, is there any chance at all that state or local prosecutors could still find a way charge him under federal law, or does he have some kind of absolute immunity to kill people that they claim to be protesters, as the Trump administration is now claiming?

[B]

So he does not have absolute immunity as the federal government claims. State or local prosecutors cannot somehow bring charges under federal law. That avenue is closed when Trump controls the executive branch. They can, however, potentially bring charges under minutes Minnesota law. There's been a lot of kind of bluffing by the White House that that's impossible. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has said that, oh, Minnesota doesn't have jurisdiction, so, you know, we control the whole thing. That is not true. The federal courts have given federal agents some immunity under the supremacy clause of the Constitution when they allegedly commit crimes while carrying out their duties. But that immunity only applies when their actions were authorized under federal law and independently, that their actions were necessary and proper in fulfilling their federal duties. So when an officer violates federal law or acts unreasonably, unconstitutionally, unlawfully when carrying out their duties, they can face state charges. And in the past, they have. There is no legal impediment, certainly not an insurmountable impediment to state and local prosecutors bringing charges and forcing the shooter to face trial. Now the shooter can remove the trial to federal court. There is a statute that allows federal officers and federal agents in this situation to say, we don't want to be in state court, we're moving to federal court. But, and this is a wrinkle that a lot of folks miss. The state prosecutors still get to carry out their case. They just have to do it in federal court before a federal judge. But they can still still get a jury trial. They can still bring those charges under state law. Everything proceeds as it would have. The venue has just shifted to federal court. So that is weird because we're used to federal charges in federal court, state charges in state court. But there is a very real possibility that this case could lead to state charges that are tried by state prosecutors in federal court.

[A]

I think we need to talk for one minute, Mark, about the fact that this Justice Department, which always claims to be, you know, using the full force of its abilities to get to the bottom of things, has made it impossible for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate the shooting at all because the FBI has blocked access to evidence, to witnesses, to other information. What happens now?

[B]

Yeah, there is a real problem here. No doubt it would be a lot better if the FBI allowed state investigators to survey the scene. I mean, it seems from a lot of the foot that federal officers almost immediately tried to sort of tarnish and sully the crime scene to make it difficult for any kind of independent investigation to occur. And now we have the FBI and DHS telling the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which would perform this investigation at the state level, you can't access anything. We're not giving you evidence, witnesses, nothing. And that is according to Kristi Noem, because the state agency has no jurisdiction. Again, that is untrue. That is just false as a matter of black letter law. But just because the state now set we are blocked, we don't think we can proceed. It doesn't mean that the local district attorney can't move forward. And in fact, the Hennepin county attorney, Mary Moriarty, has a reputation for bringing tough charges against law enforcement officers who are accused of committing unjustified force. She's really good at this. This is sort of her stock and trade. And she has said that she believes her office has jurisdiction to charge the ICE agent who committed this shooting. Now, there haven't been any charges yet. Right. This is still in its early stages, but. But again, the Hennepin County District Attorney's office is looking into this and may well bring this case before a grand jury, secure an indictment, and force this officer to begin the process that could eventually lead to his imprisonment for murdering a woman. So it's not as if all avenues are closed off. It just is going to require a lot of creative and kind of hardball lawyering. But Mary Moriarty is exactly the prosecutor you would want in the driver's seat in a situation that requires that kind of hardball lawyering.

[A]

I want to look back for a minute at the ways in which the events of the last week, aggregated across the events of the last couple of months, keep making stronger and stronger and stronger claims to Donald Trump's absolutely limitless claims about his power to do anything, to determine international law, to determine domestic law, to decide when there's an emergency. I mean, there's no boundaries. And, you know, we are sitting in a reality, and I think that's why the two bookended events in Venezuela and in Minnesota sit so heavily on us, is because we are sitting in a moment in which we are hearing Jason Vance and Stephen Miller and Secretary Noem and the president all claim over and over and over again, some version of the president can deport, he can bomb, he can arrest, he can enter into sovereign nations and take over Greenland. He can do whatever he wants. And so nobody should be surprised in some sense at the resounding claim that, you know, his agents can kill people in cold blood and they're immune from any scrutiny. And I want to layer that against the conversation you and I had multiple times. But after the immunity case where the claim was this very hyper technical Supreme Court authored right notion of, in very, very bloodless terms, outer perimeters and inner perimeters and official duties, and, you know, what was conferred upon the President when he got immunity in a very, very specific instance. And layer that against the image of a family car splattered in the blood of a mother of three gunned down for no good reason, including the reasons being proffered in defense of the murder. In some ways, Mark, I feel like this is the answer to the question that has been plaguing us since we started talking about the immunity case, which is what does the law even mean when one man is given immunity and then he can go ahead and deploy it against his enemies, pardon criminals, he can withhold the law from his colleagues and cronies, and all of this gets made up on the fly, as he sees fit, and all without limits beyond, I guess, as he told the New York Times this week, the outer boundaries of his conscience. I mean, how do we even think about this as a matter of law when we are so past a matter of law? We are into full on Nixonian. If the President does it, it's never illegal.

[B]

You know, I think that people in our profession, lawyers more broadly, when we see horrible events like this play out and then we see the President's claim, you know, she was a domestic terrorist, I had the power to do whatever I want. Basically, we're going to block the Minnesota investigation. We're going to ensure that. That nobody ever faces justice. There's a temptation to kind of process it through legal reasoning, as I just did in our conversation, to say, no, that's not right, because, in fact, there's still state jurisdiction and there can still be charges by the county district attorney. And. And all of that is true, and I stand by it. But I do think that if you fail to look at the bigger picture, then you are partly missing the point, which is that the lawyers who are crafting some of these statements for Trump, like, they know that what they're saying is false. They know that at a minimum, it's pushing the boundaries of settled law way beyond anyone has ever pushed them from the Oval Office, at least since Richard Nixon, and probably worse than that. And so it does seem foolish at a certain point to keep arguing, you know, the legal logic when this all goes way beyond it. And perhaps like the first and clearest sign that we got from this administration that presenting a really great legal argument just was never going to cut it came back in March. Do you remember this? When Judge Boasberg had tried to block the first round of deportations under the Alien Enemies act, and he asked for information about those mass stations deportations, and the Justice Department said that his authority must yield to, quote, the mandate of the electorate. Because Trump's election in 2024 gave him a kind of sovereign power, not just as the head of the executive branch, but as the head of state and the embodiment, the personification of what the American people want. And so when anybody tries to stand in his way, they have to be ruthlessly pushed as. And I think that helps tell us why, just this past week, Congressional Republicans escalated their effort to impeach Judge Boasberg and remove him from the bench, because he dared to resist the, quote, mandate of the electorate and say, actually, laws still matter. Here we are almost a year later, I think we can still hold the two truths in our head that laws matter, but not to this administration, and that there will always be a limit to the legal argument that we present here. And we have to push back on a deeper, broader level and say in this country, no one, nobody can ever claim that they have some kind of freestanding authority to murder because they happen to be elected by the American people. Trump won the popular vote. He didn't win a majority. He still won the popular vote. That does not mean that he can send his goon squads in with masks covering their faces and assault rifles and just start shooting moms and motorists and anybody who they perceive as a threat, all flowing from some source of legitimacy that came from the 2024 election. That cannot be how it works, unfortunately, that is how the Supreme Court seemed to imply that it might work in the immunity decision. And I think that is the source of a lot of this extralegal logic, because, you know, I remember being in the courtroom when those arguments were held. I rem Neil Gorsuch saying, oh, I don't care about the details of Trump trying to steal the 2020 election. We're trying to write a rule for the ages. And how that rule for the ages cashes out. Is Renee Good getting shot in the head and her blood splattered over the stuffed animals of her child in her family car. That's how the rule for the ages ends up transforming our country into something that does not look like a liberal democracy and a place where Hispanics have to carry proof of citizenship and any protester can be executed for no, allegedly, according to this administration, with immunity. All of this flows from the President's own claim to represent the ultimate will of the people and to have total immunity for himself and his agents for any kind of criminal wrongdoing. When he started bombing the boats, we should have known that it would very quickly lead to him and his agents assassinating American citizens in the streets. There has to be a groundswell of opposition to this conception of the law, because if you really squint, you can see how they're trying to call this a new kind of law. It's monarchical. I mean, it's really authoritarian. It's the law as whatever the President claims is necessary and correct. As he told the New York Times, whatever he believes the country needs, that becomes legal. We have to condemn that at every single turn and say the Supreme Court got it wrong and refuse to buy into the kind of shared reality that the White House is demanding. We all buy into the claim That a woman simply driving her car is a domestic terrorist because she might have opposed ice. The claim that fishermen in boats hundreds of miles offshore were terrorists because they may or may not have been transporting drugs. All of this stuff we just have to immediately and loudly say, setting aside whatever SCOTUS might have written in its God awful immunity decision, this is wrong. We can demand accountability and this president is not within any kind of understanding of the law that we should consider consonant with a liberal democracy, with civil liberties for every person, regardless of whether the president goes on TV and says that they're a terrorist.

[A]

I've been thinking a lot about one of the tropes around Minnesota this week, and it's, wait a minute, you know, she's a mom just like me. You know, she's a parent just like me. She was at the school drop off just like me. And of course, you and I are old enough to remember not that long ago an appeals court judge talking about renditioning folks to seekot saying if they can do this right to somebody that they designate a gang member, they can do it to me. And I think for a lot of us that seemed like a stretch, right? You're a federal appeals court judge. Nobody's gonna rendition you to ccot. And I think the category error you're identifying, and we can leave it here today, but it's worth thinking about, isn't, oh, the victim this time reminds me of me, and therefore I'm horrified. It's that once you give the president the right to declare that people, based on his say so, are gang members, as they did in ccot, are domestic terrorists, as they're doing now in blue cities and blue states, are, you know, drug runners on fishing boats, once you have the power to designate entire classes of people, right, Somalis, Haitians, immigrants as enemies of the state, it can happen to you. And that's the category error we keep making. And I really, really want to lift that up as a way to think about why we are horrified at what happened to Renee Goode. And it's not simply because her life is familiar to us. It's that if somebod, somebody's life can be batted away and then the taking of her life can be batted away as she is, of a class of people that is subhuman and thus not deserving of the protections of the law or due process of law, or the presumption that being in your car isn't a capital offense, then we have to be really, really careful that the category error we are making isn't she reminds me of me. It's that if the president can do this, the president can do it to me.

[B]

I guess what makes me despair is that of course, everything you just said is correct, but it's a lesson that we have to keep learning over and over again somehow, right? It's a lesson that we learned during slavery, during Jim Crow, during the anti Chinese, anti Japanese immigration backlash, all of the xenophobia, nativism, right? The Korematsu horrors, Japanese internment, anti LGBTQ bigotry. And people just sort of rehearse that old poem about the Holocaust. First they came for them and I didn't speak out. You know, I think that we've reached the end of the usefulness of that poem, unfortunately, as powerful as it may have initially been. Because what we've seen is that people just have endless kind of excuses that they can make in their heads for why it won't be them. That even if they got read that poem in seventh grade, even if they think they've learned the lesson of why all these previous acts of bigotry and discrimination and abuses of office by the president and by the United States more broadly, even if they know all of that was wrong, they think, well, it's not going to be happening all over again, right? We live in a different time. We're more enlightened, we're better off, we get it, we've learned it, we can move on. We haven't learned it. We haven't learned it because there are still millions of people, it seems, who support the execution of Renee Goode for driving her car, who support the cold blooded murder, as far as the video suggests, of a mother and a person who maybe they could relate to on some level. There are a lot of moms out there who are maga, who voted for Donald Trump and who seem to support this murder. And so even now, they can't make the connection that if it could happen to that woman, it could happen to me. And I don't know how we fix that. That I really don't have an answer there. And that's why I completely respect and to some degree share skepticism that we can find our way out of this mess. Because somehow in 2026, we're still having to relearn all of these lessons. And until it happens to you, unfortunately for many people, there's just not going to be the appropriate fear that we have handed the power over to this president to kill almost anyone he wants.

[A]

I want to commend to folks, our colleague Molly Olmsted has a nice piece in Slate this week. That is a really good corrective on one point of this, which is we all thought that AI was going to be the problem, right? That we'd see deepfakes and doctored images and then we'd pick our tribes. And I think Molly's really smart and subtle point is that we don't even need deep fakes and doctored videos. We all saw the video, but we had already picked our tribe. And I think that's the point you're making about the Niemoller poem, Mark, and I think it's really worth sitting with whether that's where we want to be. We're going to take a short break, but when we get back, Mark, you're taking the reins to dig into that other seismic shift of this past week.

[B]

Yes, I'll be digging into the law of what President Trump is calling his Don Row doctrine. I hate even saying that out loud, but what our next guest calls Access Hollywood Foreign Policy. On January 3, the US military invaded Venezuela to arrest President Nicolas Maduro and his wife on federal charges of narco terrorism. Trump ordered the operation without congressional consent or any real pretense of complying with international law. He then floated a plan to run Venezuela while American oil companies extract its natural resources. Is and has expanded his targets for regime change. While threatening to seize Greenland if Denmark won't hand it over, Congress is, you guessed it, pretty much AWOL. We closed out 2025 warning that Trump had become a king like unitary executive with near total control over the federal government. The opening days of 2026 suggest that he isn't content to reign over the domestic sphere alone and has now set his sights on becoming the imperial executive, or put less delicately, a kind of gangster pirate emperor of the whole world. But as Dalia and I have said so many times on this show and elsewhere, the law still matters. To that end, I'm delighted to welcome Brian Finucan to amicus to talk through the international laws and US Federal laws that Trump is attempting to trample with his flashbang of expansionism. Brian is senior advisor to the international crisis and he spent a decade in the office of the legal advisor at the U.S. department of State. Brian, welcome.

[C]

Thanks for having me.

[B]

I want to start with what I think is a point of broad agreement, which is that Nicolas Maduro was a dictator and a criminal who illegitimately clung to office after losing an election and no advocate of democracy and human rights is sad to see him go. I feel like that's important to lay out. First because we're trying to hold two ideas at once here. Maduro was terrible. And also our own president can't simply use that fact to justify breaking the law himself, right?

[C]

That's right. There was widespread jubilation in Venezuela and amongst Venezuelans abroad who have had to flee abroad at the downfall of Nicolas Maduro. He clung to power in 2024 after an election in which he was widely viewed as having lost. But, yes, the frameworks of the Constitution had real fears about the US President going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. And so we were in a situation here where regardless of the fact of Nicolas Maduro's illegitimacy or thuggishness, it doesn't justify the use of military force against Venezuela, doesn't justify the usurpation of Congress's war powers.

[B]

Turning to the legal quagmire that you just sort of teed up for us, there's two main sources of law that govern this operation, international law and domestic law. And as much as this administration may claim that international law isn't real, it actually is. So let's begin there. Did Trump's military incursion into Venezuela comply with international law?

[C]

Absolutely not. It was a flagrant violation of international law. Specifically, Article 2. 4 of the UN Charter, which prohibits both the use of force and the threat of the use of force. That is a treaty which the US Helped establish. The treaty which the US Is a party, and it binds the US Both as a matter of international law and we can get into it, is binding on the president as a matter of U.S. domestic law by virtue of the U.S. constitution.

[B]

Tell us a little bit more about Article 2. 4 to get our grounding, because I know that's extremely familiar for anyone who studies international law, for most Americans, probably sounds kind of foreign and random. It's not the First Amendment. It's not part of constitutional law. What led to it, and why is it so fundamental to the UN Charter?

[C]

I'll point people to a great resource on the history of Article 2. Four, the Internationalists, a book by my friend and mentor, Una Hathaway, professor at Yale Law School. But the basic background is the horrors of the two World wars and the Holocaust. Cost. And Article 24 establishes a general prohibition on the use of force, not just the outlined formal war, but the use of force between states. Okay. And this was to prevent a recurrence of the, you know, mass slaughter of tens of millions of people that the generations that had lived through the first and Second World wars had seen. Okay. And the US played a key role in codifying this prohibition on the use of force. Now, there are some narrow exceptions to this prohibition on the use of force. These include include military actions undertaken persuaded to authorization by the UN Security Council, like the 1991 Iraq War, Persian Gulf War, as well as actions taken in self defense. The right of self defense is preserved in arc 51 of the charter. In addition, military actions undertaken on the territory of another state with that state's consent are also regarded to be lawful. Okay, but those are narrow exceptions, General. Article 2. 4 establishes a broad prohibition on the use of force on the territory of other countries.

[B]

I think you're telling us two related things. First is this is not some backwater provision of the UN Charter. Like this is not some declaration from decades ago that everybody ignores. This is as foundational as it gets to international law. And then there's really no debate about whether Trump violated this foundational principle when he went into Venezuela to arrest Maduro. It's an open and shut case that Article 2. 4 was violated. The question is whether that matters. Is that right? Right.

[C]

Yeah. And I think it's really important to emphasize here that there was a meeting of the UN Security Council earlier this week on the US Invasion of Venezuela, and the US Ambassador to the United nations didn't even lay out a legal justification, didn't even argue that somehow the invasion was consistent with international law, was consistent with the UN Charter, instead merely characterizing the invasion as a law enforcement operation.

[B]

Right. So I guess that brings us to US Law, which I would hope everyone agrees is real, although I'm not sure that we all share that agreement at this point. In the immediate aftermath of Maduro's arrest, the administration suggested that it was following the precedent of George H. W. Bush going into Panama in 1989 to arrest its dictator, Emmanuel Noriega. The legal rationale for that operation was an opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel written by then Assistant Attorney General William Barr. And that opinion, among other things, argued that the President had no obligation to comply with the UN Charter, including Article 2. 4. Before we get to why that opinion is so wrong and your prescient work debunking it, can you just tell me, do I have Barr's conclusion correct, and what exactly was his reasoning to get there?

[C]

Yeah, that's the bottom line that the President can, quote, override Article2.4 of the UN Charter. The key plank of his reasoning is that the UN Charter, Article 2. 4, is non self executing, and therefore the President can override it. But that reasoning conflates two very different concepts. The first is whether TR treaties are self executing or non self executing. And to boil down that somewhat complicated subject, it really gets to whether treaties are directly enforceable by courts in the US Judicial system. Okay. Whether the treaty itself provides a rule of decision that a court can enforce, or whether a treaty requires implementing legislation that the court will then use to enforce it in the US Domestic legal system. Okay? That's the first issue. The second issue is whether a treaty, whether it's self executing or non self executing, binds the political branches, including the US President, by virtue of the Take Care clause in Article 2 of the U.S. constitution. And the Take Care Clause imposes a duty upon the president a constitutional obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. It is well established both on the history of the U.S. constitution, the past views of the executive branch, past views of the U.S. senate, and the positions taken with respect to the ratification of the UN Charter, the specific that the laws for persons to Take Care Clause include treaties to which the US Is a party.

[B]

It sounds like Barr sort of conflated two different ideas here. He said, well, the UN Charter, Article two, four, it's not self executing in the sense that the courts cannot enforce it within the United States. And that means that the president can also disregard or override it. But you're saying that is wrong because a, this is still law. It is a treaty that we ratified as a nation, and so the president has a constitutional duty to abide by it, even if the courts can't step in and force him to do so. I know that's kind of a fine distinction, but is that, is that basically where the illogic lies in Barr's reasoning?

[C]

It is. And I think it also hints at a broader problem with the way that this administration in particular approaches law. Law, that is, they draw a distinction between what may be laws on the books and what they can get away with.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And in terms of getting away with that, a court or the US Supreme Court will tell them to stop. And there's a whole range of statutes, constitutional provisions, as well as international laws which are not going to be judicially enforced for a variety of reasons, including related to standing, ripeness, mootness, political question doctrine. But nonetheless, those are laws. But the administration seems to take a different view of those.

[B]

And so this really follows from the broader theme of Trump's second administration so far, which is if we can't be forced to comply, then we don't have to comply. We can refuse to. And Nobody's gonna stop us, so it doesn't matter. And that was more or less what Bill Barr was arguing back in 1989.

[C]

Yes, he used somewhat more words to say that, but that was the bottom line of what Bill Barr was trying to it at.

[B]

Let's try to disentangle international law from domestic law to the extent that we can. You're saying, and of course this is correct, that, you know, this treaty is part of our law, but we also have our own constitutional law. And just for starters, let's rewind back to civics class. Can you remind us how our Constitution divides up war powers between the branches?

[C]

Yes. The framers of the Constitution consciously made a decision to give the the power to declare war and related war authorities to the U.S. congress. Okay. The frames of the Constitution wanted to make it hard to go to war. Therefore, they required the collective decision making and deliberation of the people's elected representatives. They were not going to leave one of the most consequential decisions the country could make over this expenditure of blood and treasure and geopolitical destabilization to the whims of one man. But unfortunately, that's what's happened. The decision to invade Venezuela was based on the whims and decisions of one man. Now, the US Executive branch has a long line of legal opinions which establish a very permissive and expansive doctrine of when the President may use military force unilaterally. But the US Congress had never endorsed that doctrine. The US Courts have never endorsed that doctrine. This operation, of course, was conducted without congressional authorization. And the sort of originalist view of when the President could act without congressional authorization to use military force, it was under very limited circumstances. It really limited to repelling a sudden attack upon the United States. Clearly, that was not the case here. There was no sudden attack upon the United States. There is no imminent threat of any such attack upon the United States. What you had is a purely discretionary military incursion into another country and, you know, decapitation of its government, which, you know, if the President wanted to go to war with Venezuela, he could have taken that to Congress to ask for authorization. He chose not to.

[B]

I want to highlight something you said at the start there, which is that the framers wanted to make it hard to go to war. That is not something you would guess from the way that the executive branch has talked about military action for many, many decades, from the way that, frankly, the Supreme Court has talked about armed hostilities, especially during the war on terror. And those decisions, you get this sense from A lot of putative legal experts and politicians that the framers wanted to make it super easy for the President to be agile and nimble and energetic in defending national interests however he saw fit. And you're saying like, that's just not right because the framers wanted to vest this power in Congress and allow Congress to essentially prevent the President from launching new hostilities until there was authorization in some kind of explicit form from the legislative branch.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, the basic idea is that it would require the collective decision making, public debate, deliberation by the people's representatives. And yes, it would be a check on imprudent or rash recourses to military force, given the stakes involved. And I think it's worth emphasizing this sort of irony of, of constitutional interpretation here is, you know, many of those sort of the ride of the political spectrum who are generally would describe themselves as originalists, they do not take an originalist approach to interpreting war powers.

[B]

Shocker.

[C]

They rely on more of a living constitutional approach, or look at, you know, past executive branch practice and sort of count that as either a gloss on the Constitution or a sort of sort of precedence that can be relied upon. And you see that with respect to the recent invocations of the 1989 Panama invasion. But this is definitely not an originalist approach to the U.S. constitution.

[B]

And so just to be clear, President Trump did not get authorization from Congress to go into Venezuela, is that right?

[C]

There was no congressional authorization to invade Venezuela. And administration has not pretended there is.

[B]

Okay, so the administration is now purporting to comply with the War Powers Act. Can you walk us through briefly what that law is and how it marks some kind of effort by Congress to claw back some of these war making powers that have been surrendered to the exact executive.

[C]

Yeah, so the War powers Resolution in 1973 represents an effort by Congress, and so the waning days of the Vietnam War and related conflicts in Southeast Asia to reassert its prerogatives in war and peace. And specifically, it was a reaction to military incursions and bombings in Cambodia, which took many in Congress by surprise and which later on were undertaken without congressional authorization in the face of congressional opposition condition. And the War Powers Resolution establishes limits on how long the President can use military force without congressional authorization, as well as reporting requirements. Congress didn't want to be blindsided anymore by secret wars, didn't want to be surprised at the wake up one morning and find out the US had been bombing Cambodia. And so there are reporting requirements imposed by the resolution whenever US Armed forces are introduced into, quote, hostilities, or when combat equipped armed forces are sent into a country or their numbers substantially low, large. And so what we had earlier this week is a report that has to be filed within 48 hours of US armed forces being introduced into, quote, hostilities. And this pertains, of course, to the invasion of Venezuela on last Friday night and early Saturday morning. It's a very unusual document. When I worked at the State Department, I helped prepare these under both Presidents Obama and President Trump in his first term. This is a document that is very long on bluster about promoting the political narratives that Maduro is a terrorist involved in drug trafficking leans heavily in characterizing the operation as a law enforcement operation. The actual legal justification is fairly terse. You know, it talks about the president's responsibility to protect US Citizens to take. And ironically, the responsibility to take care of the laws are faithfully executed. We can talk, you know, furtherwise in irony as well as the constitutional authority as commander in chief and chief executive executive. Notably, there's no international law justification. And that actually is striking because that's different from the report that the Bush administration filed for the 89 invasion of Panama, which did include an international law justification. Did make an argument that it was somehow consistent with the UN Charter. Also, conspicuously absence is any mention of taking the oil as a rationale. There's a lot of stuff about drug trafficking, the illegitimacy of Maduro, allegations of terrorism, ties to terrorism, Trinidad, all that, but nothing so much about taking oil, which was the dominant theme of President Trump's press conference after the operation.

[B]

Let's drill down on the irony of invoking the Take care clause here, because I do think in a way that's sort of the skeleton key to this whole situation. Trump is saying he has a constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the laws. And so here he had to fulfill that by arresting Maduro. Because Maduro had been indicted, right? Because he had been indicted on federal charges of narco terrorism. And that was the overarching legal claim. Do I have that right?

[C]

That seems to be the argument. They haven't spelled it out explicitly, but that seems to be what they're gesturing to by invoking the Take care clause. This is a law enforcement operation. We were going to enforce this indictment against Maduro and his wife. Therefore, we had authority to go into Venezuela.

[B]

And yet at the same time, the president is disclaiming any obligation to comply with Article2.4 of the UN Charter, which is just as much part of our law as you have laid out for us as Any other sort of statute or constitutional authority that allows Trump to send in law enforcement to arrest Maduro. So he's saying, I have an obligation to faithfully execute the laws by arresting this guy, but then I don't have an obligation to faithfully execute this other law because I don't like it and I don't think it's real.

[C]

That seems to be the gist of it. I mean, I think this administration has shown a journal contempt for international law. I mean, both based on my own conversations, at least. In the early months of this administration, senior officials at the State Department were striking any references from international law in official documents. Key figures in this administration, Secretary of Defense, have a long history of disparaging the law of war, military lawyers, and championing alleged war criminals. And just this week, the administration pulled the United States out of the International Law Commission, a UN Body that plays a role in codifying draft treaties. Treaties. And so, no, this administration has generally shown contempt for international law. So in some ways, it's not surprising, but it should nonetheless be shocking. Okay. This is a constitutional obligation. The Take Care clause is not just a source of authority that the president may cite. It's also a source of substantive constraints. Okay. Obligations and duties. And this president is ignoring those duties.

[B]

We're going to take a short break. Reggie. I just sold my car online.

[C]

Let's go, Grandpa. Wait, you did?

[B]

Yep, on Carvana.

[C]

Just put in the license plate, answered a few questions, got an offer in minutes.

[B]

Easier than setting up that new digital picture frame.

[C]

You don't say. Yeah, they're even picking it up tomorrow.

[B]

Talk about fast.

[C]

Wow. Way to go. So, about that picture frame.

[B]

Ah, forget about it. Until Carvana makes one, I'm not interested. Car selling made easy on Carvana. Pick up these nails apply. Let's return now to my conversation with Brian Finucan. I want to get to this broader hostility toward international law. I think it tells us a lot. But before I do, I just want to sort of maybe have an elegy for the system that the framers tried to set up. Donald Trump is not the first president to launch a military action without congressional consent. He's not going to be the last. We all know this is how it works now. Now, do you think that that's just how our broken system is going to limp along for the foreseeable future? The president sends in the military without congressional approval, and nobody seriously tries to stop him because the commander in chief of a mega power like the United States just gets to do what he wants. Is Is that where we are as a nation?

[C]

Well, I'll just say that defeatism is self fulfilling. As we speak now, the U.S. senate is having a vote on another war Powers Resolution to block further military action in Venezuela. Whalan. So there are members of Congress who take their constitutional responsibilities seriously in the space, yet, you know, thus far there have been enough of them. However, okay, there's been near unanimous Democratic support for resolutions to block military action in Venezuela, to block further boat bombings in the Caribbean and the Pacific, but they've only got a handful of GOP members in either the House or the Senate to join them. Hopefully there'll be more now, given that the President is threatening additional military action action in Venezuela. But I do think this is not utterly novel. There have been other presidents who've undertaken military actions without prior congressional authorization. It points to the fact that the War Powers Resolution has not been extremely effective. Congress needs to overhaul that 1973 law, give it teeth, and more generally reassert their prerogatives with respect to war and peace.

[B]

And the Senate did just pass the War Powers Resolution?

[C]

It did, yes. So it looks like Young, Murkowski, Collins, Paul and Hawley were the I votes. Well, this is an important step for Congress to reclaim its constituents prerogatives on war and peace. An importantly important bipartisan political signal from the US Senate to the White House with respect to potential further military action in Venezuela. And I hope the the House follows suit. I mean, I think we're seeing some potentially, you know, optimistic signs here. At the end of last year, Congress managed to repeal the two Iraq war authorizations, the 91 and 2002 AUMFs. And we've seen just a flurry of resolutions in the last year opposing unauthorized military action by this administration. So I think Congress is rebuilding its muscle memory. But that says it's not true of all members, unfortunately, or perhaps even a majority of members. And so there's more work to be done in that space. I mean, in the war powers space, we often talk about the power of the purse being the ultimate war power. So in addition to these resolutions to block further hostilities in Venezuela or elsewhere, Congress could defund them. Right. The road to achieving that may be long and difficult, but that is in principle an available tool. But it will take more political will in Congress, and it will take more members of Congress to take their constitutional duties, take the constitutional responsibility seriously.

[B]

We have Trump now saying on Truth Social that he somehow intends to increase the military budget to 1.5 trillion, hundreds of billions more than what Congress appropriated. Do you see that as a kind of starting point for where this battle might begin, where the battle lines might be drawn, that Congress needs to stand up and say, no, we are not going to give you all this extra money for illegal operations overseas. And also we are not going to let you try to impound or plunder other sources of funding in order to advance the national interest, as you alone see it, without any input from Congress.

[C]

Well, I mean, I think the reference to impoundments is important here because, of course, the president has been trying to usurp Congress's power of the purse for many months now, both with impoundments and by unilaterally laying taxes through tariffs. Right. As you know, that's being challenged before the U.S. supreme Court. I don't know what's going to actually happen with this proposal to increase the defense budget by half a trillion. I will say that if the president wants to invade much of the Western Hemisphere, as he keeps threatening to, probably will require additional money for the US Military, military, I think this is unlikely to come about. But who knows?

[B]

Let's maybe file this next thing under what the Knight First Amendment Institute's Jameel Jaffer called the if you're famous, they let you do it foreign policy. You mentioned oil. Not a matter brought up in the report to Congress, but certainly a matter that Trump has harped on again and again. And apparently PBS NewsHour's Lisa Desjardins has reported that the administration intends to park the money that it extracts from Venezuela's oil revenues in an offshore account controlled by the United States. And by offshore, we mean outside of Venezuela and also outside of the United States and presumably outside the purview of the U.S. treasury. So very fishy system. And this offshore account will demand that Venezuela use its oil revenues to buy only US Products and services. Still in its early stages, still early reports. I'm not sure I can count all the ways that this is illegal. Can you just give us a summary?

[C]

Well, it's funny, I've also referred to the Access Hollywood theory of foreign policy. See. But so I think it really does remain to be seen what's actually going to happen here. I mean, I don't think we've seen confirmation that the Venezuelan government is on board with this scheme. But I think as a threshold matter, I want to emphasize that Article 24 of the UN Charter prohibits both the use of force and the threat of the use of force. So to the extent that the Trump administration is trying to coerce the Venezuelan government with the threat of further military action, the threat of additional airstrikes, the threat of threat of US Boots on the ground, the threat of another decapitation raid against the government. That's all legal, right? It's illegal, both as a matter of international law and under the take care clause, illegal as a matter of US Law. Now, what domestic law issues this sort of scheme might implicate, I think it's really going to depend on how it's implemented. The administration has it spelled out, the sort of legal logic here. But again, this is not the rationale that the administration presented in its war powers in port for using military force in Venezuela. I think there's likely to be a lot of practical progress problems in the implementation of all this. And I also think it touches on a long running theme in this president's approach to foreign policy. Years ago, he critiqued the second Bush administration's approach to Iraq, not for invading the country, but for its failure to take the oil. And when I was in the first Trump administration, the president was convinced at one point to maintain US Troops in eastern Syria to, quote, keep the oil. And so I really think this points to figures both within the administration, outside the administration, playing the keep the oil card in order to convince President Trump to launch this military incursion into Venezuela.

[B]

So you think he was perhaps on the fence about it, not super sold, and then some figures of the administration realized, you know, what if we just pitch this as an oil grab, then we can get him on board.

[C]

Yeah, I think that was definitely a card they played. I think we've seen the administration cycle through a number of rationales for this. Some of them are actually in the war power support. But like, you know, the supposed terrorism connection, labeling Nicolas Maduro as a narco terrorist, the supposed drug connection, the false allegations of fentanyl coming from Venezuela to the United States. And I think this marketing was as much for the benefit of President TRUMP as the U.S. public trying to convince President Trump to undertake this military incursion, this action against Maduro, that he might otherwise have been reluctant to do so, and they ultimately succeeded.

[B]

Let's come back to the overarching point that the Trump administration doesn't think international law is real. You shared a post this week by the right wing provocateur Matt Walsh declaring that, quote, international law is fake and gay, and you wrote international law is gay does seem to be the general attitude of this administration. I know that was kind of a joke. But it also aligns with something that our friend, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out, which is that the administration seems to think blowing up the rules based international order is like the ultimate expression of masculinity. Do you agree that there's a kind of performative straight guy machismo at work here where tearing up international law becomes something akin to a bragging right in the manosphere?

[C]

There's a certain element of trying to own the libs by burning down the US built international legal order here. And I think a lot of this, you know, both on the legal side, but also more just generally is performative. Right? This president enjoys performing military action, military spectacle, and we saw the way that he boasted about this on social media, the way he characterized this as just another in the greatest hits during his press conference on Saturday following the military incursion. He put this up there with the Soleimani strike, the Baghdadi strike, the attack on Iran over the summer. But yeah, I think that attitude expressed by that right wing commentator does seem to be consistent with this administration's approach to international law. This sort of trollish petulant contempt for it and general disdain. But I would say that may be especially true for international law, but I think that holds true for other areas of law, at least areas of law where they're unlikely to get a defend of Supreme Court judgment against them.

[B]

That's so incredibly depressing to contemplate because it's always a trap when you sense that the libs are being owned. Always difficult to avoid sort of jumping in to rebuke or rebut the, the outrageous act without feeling like you've been baited and successfully sort of tricked into fulfilling the narrative that the administration has set up. That's what sort of played out here. The Trump administration goes into Venezuela arrest Maduro, Democrats are mad. The Trump administration and all of these right wing commentators turn around and show that that proves Democrats are weak and that international law is weak and fake. And the whole thing becomes this kind of circular logic whereby anyone who pretends to even support international law must be discredited because their views are rooted in feminine gay weakness.

[C]

I mean, that does seem to be the attitude at play here. One way that I respond to that is that this is not strength. This is childishness. You're behaving as children. This is not a law imposed upon the United States by someone else. This is the United States's own creation. Okay? We agree to these rules for very good reason. Okay? The horrors of two world wars, the horrors of the Holocaust were up high there on the list of motivating factors.

[B]

And by the way, these rules served us very well because as part of sort of creating and setting them up, we established ourselves as the global leader and gave ourselves as a nation a lot of special rights and privileges which were inexplicably sort of trading away by tearing down the whole system in favor of a sort of boastful machismo that plays well on TV and might help in the midterms, but ultimately leads to the destruction of any semblance of an international rules based order.

[C]

That's right. I mean we established this international legal order because it was in the US national interest to do so. Right. We benefit from it disproportionately. Okay. And the US has been a pillar of that, an imperfect one, certainly an essential pillar of that for the last 80 years. And I also want to emphasize something else. Okay. Even if those sorts of arguments are unavailing to this administration, it's worth stressing that the President himself has stopped himself since at least 1988 80s to be an expert and proponent of nuclear non proliferation. Okay, well you know what's going to spur additional nuclear proliferation? Threatening other countries with invasion, annexation, territorial conquest, and combining that with undermining U.S. defense alliances, particularly by threatening U.S. nATO allies. And so if the President himself is actually interested in preventing further nuclear proliferation, or for that matter still interested in Nobel Peace Prize, it was being his own narrow set of interest to desist from threats of further military action, much less actually using force unlawfully.

[B]

You mentioned his threats to our NATO allies. I assume you're alluding to his desire to seize Greenland from Denmark by any means necessary.

[C]

Yes. It is difficult to say how much this is bluster, how serious it is. The President has been going on about Greenland since his first term, at least at various points. Senior figures in both his first term and his second term have been managed to direct that fixation in less harmful directions. But the bluster alone is damaging to US bilateral relations with Denmark and damaging to the NATO alliance.

[B]

So I think this sort of gender based own the libs dimension that we've been discussing braids into some emerging commentary about Renee Nicole Goode, the 37 year old woman, mother, poet, US citizen who was shot and killed in her car by an ICE officer on Wednesday in Minneapolis. On Fox News, Jesse Watters took pains to mention that Good had pronouns in her bio and leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage. Yeah, I'm not sure what those things have to do with thresholds for the use of deadly force, but I hear it, in this key of anything that's not a MAGA model of masculine dominance is fair game. Anyone who doesn't subscribe to the MAGA worldview do is fair game perhaps to be murdered. Also, as you pointed out on Blue sky, it seems like this is turning the culture war of which this Trump administration is so fond into an actual war on American citizens.

[C]

I mean, yes, the killing of this young mother is horrifying, heartbreaking, and sickening. I think that the administration's response is very revealing, reeling, you know, smearing her without any basis of acts of domestic terrorism. And I think this ties into the administration's approach to smear or characterize a broad range of perceived foes as terrorists and repurposing and redirecting the war on terror, framing and including against, you know, alleged narcos, as we've seen with the boat bombing scheme, against immigrants, as we see with shipping people off Venezuela, men off to sicot prison in El Salvador to be abuse. And now against perceived domestic political opponents. Right. Just labeling people terrorists in order to justify the use of force against them, in this case, the use of lethal force. And so I think that seems to be extremely concerning for Americans with the boat bombing scheme. The administration asserted that the president had a license to kill people, essentially based on his own say so, from labeling them terrorists. And the question is now whether that prerogative, that license to kill is going to be wielded domestically as well.

[B]

Yeah. And perhaps in retrospect, as soon as the president claimed a license to kill fishermen in international waters, it was only a matter of. Of time before he claimed a license to kill American citizens on American streets. Right.

[C]

That was the concern. That was one of the things that initially struck me is that, you know, where this might lead, and the fact that the administration is now smearing this poor woman with claims of domestic terrorism suggests that it's where it might indeed lead.

[B]

Right. And you're drawing this link between the men on the boats and Renee Good, both smeared as a terrorist to justify their murders. I wonder if what happens next is that anyone who speaks openly and candidly about the killing of Renee Goode is also smeared as, at a minimum, trying to incite violence against ICE or incite violence against the administration, and if protesters and those who speak out will also soon be sort of tarnished as terrorists themselves, who then become fair game for use of lethal force. Is that too dramatic a vision that I'm having here?

[C]

No, I would not be surprised by that. I mean, we see other elements of the attempts to paint, perceive domestic violence, political opponents as terrorists. The whole antifa business, trying to label antifa as a terrorist organization. Antifa, of course, isn't even an organization, but also referring to other domestic political opponents or perceived opponents as terrorist synthesizers. So, yes, I think that the attempts to smear a broader and broader swath of the American public as quote, unquote terrorists, I think is likely to continue.

[B]

I guess this takes us all the way down the rabbit hole to a more surreal question about how this particular political brand of toxic masculinity that the Trump administration is modeling can invert the rule of law. I mean, if. If breaking international law and also using unjustified lethal force on American streets are all signs of strength rather than recklessness. Right? Like if a woman with stuffed animals in her car can become a domestic terrorist like that and be fair game for being gunned down. And those who gun her down are the real heroes at this point. Point down the rabbit hole, does law stop functioning as a limit and start functioning as something to be deliberately and proudly violated? It seems like we're at a point where it's not just the Trump administration pretending they didn't break the law, but saying, yeah, we did this. So what?

[C]

That's certainly an element of it. I think that sort of flex also think you have the dynamic of for my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law, you see that with these bogus attempts to prosecute perceived pleasure political enemies. And so the law is not constraining on this administration, at least in their view, but it is a tool to be weaponized against perceived opponents. Now, the American public doesn't have to accept that, okay? This is already public. And the question is, do we want to keep it? If you think that we should live in a society ruled by law, a society in which the government is subject to the Constitution, you should let your elected representatives know that and they have a constitutional responsibility themselves to respond to this. It is up to the other political branch to respond to the lawlessness and abuses of the executive and the people. You know, citizenry ought to insist upon that.

[B]

Brian Finucan is senior advisor to the International Crisis Group and he spent a decade in the office of the Legal advisor at the U.S. department of State. That's all for this episode. Thanks so much for listening and, and.

[A]

Thank you so much for your letters and your questions. Keep them coming.

[B]

We are reachable by [e-mail] youm can find us at facebook.com amicuspodcast you can leave a comment if you're listening on Spotify or on YouTube, or rate us and review us on Apple Podcasts.

[A]

And on today's Amicus plus bonus episode, Mark and I are gonna sit down and talk about next week's trans athletes arguments at the Supreme Court, the self own for anti abortion advocates in Wyoming, and your favorite insurance lawyer turned crack prosecutor and mine, more legal adventures of Lindsay Halligan. You can subscribe to Slate plus directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or you can visit slate.com amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. That episode is available for you to listen to right now. We'll see you there.

[B]

Sara Burningham is Amicus senior producer. Our producer is Patrick Fort, Hilary Fry is Slate's editor in chief, Susan Matthews is executive editor, Mia Lobel is executive producer of Slate Podcasts, and Ben Richmond is our senior director of operations. And I'll be back with another episode of Amicus next week.