Sunday, July 26, 2026
How Trump could undermine the midterms | US midterm elections 2026 | The Guardian
How Trump could undermine the midterms
"When Donald Trump commandeered primetime US television last Friday, he delivered a familiar, but still extraordinary, message. The president argued once again that the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, were illegitimate.
US elections are “vulnerable to being rigged and stolen”, Trump alleged, claiming that “the trust of the American people was lost” when he was defeated.
Historically, incumbent parties underperform in midterm elections and with the president’s popularity sagging – he has an approval rating of just 37% – Republicansappear on course to lose seats in the US Senate and House of Representatives, as well as in state and local elections, in November.
Trump’s latest intervention, in which he accused China of interfering with the 2020 election, is viewed by US voting rights activists as just the latest escalation of a bid by the White House to influence, and potentially alter, the results of the 2026 midterm elections.
“The number one threat facing American elections is the continued lies coming out of the White House,” said the Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, the official responsible for overseeing the state’s elections.
The president is fighting to persuade Congress to approve legislation, the Save Act, that would allow the US federal government greater control over elections. Trump has also called for the federal government to take direct control of elections in some states, falsely claiming that his defeats there in 2020 were illegitimate.
There’s just one snag. “We have an election system that is not run by the federal government,” said Ben Berwick, who leads Protect Democracy’s election law and litigation team. “It’s run by states and local jurisdictions.”
The president, he added, “really has no power over elections”. So what can Trump actually do?
Republicans in a handful of states have already scrambled, at Trump’s urging, to redraw their congressional maps in the wake of a landmark decision by the US supreme court – controlled by a conservative supermajority – that effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
Louisiana led the way, tearing up its old map of four Republican and two Democratic districts in favor of a new one, which will probably give Republicans five of the state’s six congressional seats. Such efforts are designed to shift the outcome of future elections.
And with threats to mail-in voting, sowing fears about voting machines, as well as a steady stream of unfounded allegations of election fraud, many fear Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to challenge results that don’t go his way in November.
The memory of the deadly 6 January attack on the US Capitol in 2021, fueled by Trump’s denial of his election defeat, looms large.
“It’s reckless that the president will continue to do what he’s doing, and that the folks around him will continue to let him do what he’s doing, and potentially trigger that sort of behavior that could cost lives,” added Fontes. “This is a powder keg out there, and there’s a lot of folks who just just want to get on with their lives, who just want to get on to solving their own problems.”
Mail-in ballots
Trump has repeatedly tried to restrict voting by mail, and likened it to cheating, despite doing so himself. It is a key focus of his administration’s efforts. In November, the administration could use the US Postal Service (USPS) to “control the flow of mail-in ballots, and potentially not send ballots to certain voters”, Berwick said.
Democratic voters are deemed more likely to cast their ballots by mail than Republicans: about one in four registered Democrats did so in 2024, according to the States United Democracy Center, alongside 1 in 5 registered Republicans.
Eight states and the District of Columbia rely almost exclusively on postal ballots. The USPS, at Trump’s direction, proposed a rule that would require states to turn over their voter roll information to the federal government, which would then tell states which voters were ineligible.
That proposal, enforced by an executive order in March, faces a wall of legal challenges and was ruled unconstitutional by a judge. Cases pursued by the civil rights group NAACP in Washington DC and the League of Women’s Voters in Massachusetts have challenged the plan in court.
Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, said the organization intervened to ensure the bid to restrict mail-in voting was “shut down” in time for state primary elections, taking place in the months ahead of November’s general election. “And so I think that was really important for us,” she said, “just to make sure that voters knew how that was going to work, and make sure that they understood what their rights were, and how they could execute their ballot effectively”.
Voting machines
At polling stations, Trump is also pointing to electronic voting machines, which he suggested in his 16 July TV address could be compromised by foreign actors. “China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files,” he said.
Declassified files from US investigators show that China downloaded publicly-available election data in 2022. Those same investigators concluded that China did not interfere in the election.
Voting rights advocates believe Trump may have been telegraphing his intent to try to block the use of some voting machines in a late-day election gambit, invoking national security as a rationale.
“The thing that maybe worries me the most is what we saw in Fulton county and elsewhere,” Berwick said, referring to an FBI raid in January that resulted in the seizure of 2020 ballots and election material in Georgia. The administration “may try to do something similar in the immediate post-election period under the sort of pretext of investigating ineligible voting, or votes cast by ineligible voters”, he suggested, “in a way that, if done in the immediate post-election period, would be designed to disrupt the ability of states to count votes and certify elections”.
In the meantime, the White House has actively undermined safeguards to the election system. The Election Assistance Commission, a US federal agency designed to help states overcome technical challenges in election administration, which currently has nocommissioners. Trump fired the Democrat members, and allowed the Republicans to resign. More than a third of the staff of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was meanwhile cut by Trump’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”, the cost-cutting drive fleetingly led by Elon Musk, including the entire team looking at cybersecurity threats in elections.
“One cannot help but notice the irony of the administration’s purported interest in securing our election systems, and yet gutting the very agency responsible for that,” said Hannah Fried, co-founder and CEO of All Voting is Local.
Save Act
The Save Act, which is stalled in Congress, would require voters to present their passport or birth certificate to register to vote, and then to provide photo ID from a narrow list of valid identifications to vote in person. Campaigners argue such restrictions would disproportionately impact Black, Native, elderly and student voters.
The legislation would also sharply constrain voting by mail, too. And it would require states to turn over their voter rolls to the federal government.
Absent that legislation – which is constitutionally questionable – federal agencies under Trump may still try to pressure states to purge voter rolls using unreliable or unverified federal data sets. Courts have consistently blocked attempts by the federal government to force unvetted voter purges.
Some states – led by Republican officials – have already turned over voter rolls, when requested by the federal government.
Berwick highlighted the prospect of federal agencies like the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security seeking voter lists from states, “presumably to then send to states lists of voters they believe are ineligible, which are very likely to be inaccurate”.
While far-right figures like Steve Bannon, an ally and former adviser of Trump, have called for the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents or federal law enforcement at voting sites, and the president himself has explicitly raised the prospect, it is considered remote because federal law plainly outlaws the presence of troops or federal agents at polling places.
Voter intimidation has already manifested at early voting sites and drop boxes, said Stewart, of the League of Women Voters, who cited an incident in Arizona where armed contractors confronted voters. “The president in particular is pushing for increased ICE funding,” she said. “So you have to ask: for what?”
Stewart highlighted how her organization successfully sued to stop armed drop-box intimidation in 2022, securing a court order within 24 hours. The incident was a demonstration of “how quickly things like that can happen” she said, “but equally as quickly … how we can shut that down”.
Pins and needles
Trump’s increasingly inflammatory rhetoric is itself a threat to the integrity of the 2026 election, said Georgia state senator Saira Draper, a leading voting administration expert, who warned that narrative attacks are designed to undermine outcomes, regardless of who wins.
“By sowing distrust in elections, no matter what the outcome is, he continues on the division, whether his party wins or not into the next term,” said Draper, who suggested that such constant rhetoric turns followers into “foot soldiers for the cause”.
Some of those foot soldiers sit on county boards of elections, which are required to certify elections. And some are running for office, successfully winning the Republican nomination, like Alex Kolodin, who helped lead failed legal efforts to overturn Arizona’s 2020 and 2022 election results, who is now the Republican candidate for Arizonan secretary of state: its top elections official.
After the 2020 election, some Republican elections board members refused to certify fair elections, threatening to disrupt the process. A mass refusal could cast doubt on the results in conservative states that have taken a Democratic turn in a swing year.
“This federal interference led by the president isn’t helping anybody,” said Fontes. “It’s not good for, in my view, any circumstance across the country, and it’s got everybody on pins and needles for no really good reason.
“I mean, what’s the really good reason why folks are afraid, that there’s something wrong with our elections? The only explanation is that Donald Trump can’t get over getting his butt kicked in 2020.”
Saturday, July 25, 2026
SKIP TO CONTENTSKIP TO SITE INDEX OPINION W.J. HENNIGAN A.I. Drones Are Coming. We Are Not Ready.
SKIP TO CONTENTSKIP TO SITE INDEX OPINION W.J. HENNIGAN A.I. Drones Are Coming. We Are Not Ready.
“The U.S. Air Force is testing A.I.-powered drones capable of autonomous flight and combat, aiming to integrate artificial intelligence into warfare. This development, part of a broader military shift towards autonomous weapons, raises ethical concerns about machine decision-making in life-or-death situations. While the Air Force emphasizes human oversight, critics worry about the potential for reduced accountability and increased risk of unintended consequences.
On a clear afternoon this month, high above the Mojave Desert, an A.I.-powered drone launched a missile in a test that could reshape modern warfare.
Since the dawn of the jet age, the U.S. military has used the isolation over this stretch of sand to push secret, experimental aircraft to their aerodynamic and technological limits. It’s doing the same today: fine-tuning machines capable of engaging in aerial combat with barely any human intervention. These drones’ flight is controlled not by a pilot, not by human remote control, but entirely by onboard software. It’s a historic advancement in drone technology that aims to incorporate artificial intelligence into everyday warfighting.
Today’s conflicts are increasingly defined by unmanned weapons, delivering destruction over battlefields in Ukraine, Iran and Sudan. But in almost all these cases, there is a human operator sitting somewhere, steering each robot toward its target.
The two types of next-generation drones being tested over Southern California today, built for the Air Force by Anduril and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, can fly entirely on their own. They make hundreds of split-second decisions to maneuver, evade and attack enemy targets, based upon countless hours of flight data and computer processing. A human is involved at just a few key moments in each flight: to program the drone’s mission, to start and stop the mission and to decide whether or not the drone should launch a weapon. Late last year, the companies’ drones flew for the first time. Anduril fired its first missile two weeks ago, and General Atomics says it is not far behind.
The Air Force program is part of a sweeping overhaul in how the American military prepares for war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in January that he intended to make the military “an ‘A.I. first’ warfighting force across all domains.” Throughout the Pentagon, Uncle Sam-style recruitment posters with Mr. Hegseth’s likeness declaring “I want YOU to use A.I.” are plastered on the walls. His department has requested $54.6 billion in next year’s budget for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG, a body recently set up to coordinate all autonomous weapons programs across U.S. forces.
The United States isn’t alone in this pursuit. Around the world, and particularly in China and Russia, an arms race is emerging to mass-produce autonomous, A.I.-operated war machines. President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared in 2017 that whoever leads in A.I. “will become the ruler of the world.” President Xi Jinping of China has poured billions of dollars into A.I. development for the country’s military. Prototypes of smaller, rudimentary A.I.-assisted weapons have already been reported in action in Ukraine, Libya, Azerbaijan and Gaza. In a few years, we could see swarms of self-guiding robots not only in the skies, but also at sea and on the ground.
As the world’s militaries race to weaponize artificial intelligence, the international community has failed to establish limits on its use. The United Nations has spent a decade deliberating how to restrict autonomous weapons — a rare instance of anticipating a global threat before it arrives. Yet these efforts have yielded no binding rules or codes of conduct.
Instead, global leaders are accelerating toward an era of automated warfare. The fear of body bags has been one of the greatest deterrents to conflict in history. Mass-produced, expendable robots do not carry the human or financial costs that have tempered the urge to go to war for centuries.
“Right now, we’re racing in the dark,” said Jack Shanahan, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and former director of the military’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. “No one is talking to one another about the technology their nations are developing, and there’s an incentive to rush it into the field. I do think, unfortunately, something may go horribly wrong before it gets better.”
It’s difficult to overstate how fundamentally drones have revolutionized modern conflict. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress handed the president unilateral authority to take military action against anyone and any nation he deemed responsible. Technology soon caught up with the mandate of nearly unconstrained presidential power. Successive commanders in chief opted for missile-firing remote-controlled drones as their weapon of choice in the new war on terror.
Humanitarian and civil rights groups have spent the intervening years criticizing combat drones for lowering the threshold of war, creating a means for pilots sitting in front of computer screens to kill people in faraway countries without putting Americans in harm’s way. Despite the outcry and untold thousands of civilians killed and injured, open-ended drone wars became politically acceptable to much of the American public after Sept. 11, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Nigeria and, most recently, Iran.
The Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, as the A.I. drone program is called, aims to have more than 150 robotic wingmen flying alongside manned fighter jets by the decade’s end. For now, the goal is for the drones to be able to fight other aircraft. But software engineers are already at work developing other types of missions that can be installed on the drones, just as you would swap one app for another on your smartphone. Soon, an autonomous drone could carry out bombing runs on ground targets, perform reconnaissance overflights, conduct electronic warfare to fry enemy air defenses or simply serve as a decoy to lure enemy fire away from planes with pilots in the cockpits. “This is stuff that’s never been done before,” said Jason Levin, a senior engineering executive at Anduril.
The Pentagon believes the technology will make war more efficient, cost-effective and decisive. Analysts inside and outside the government argue that any military that wields automation and A.I. will be able to identify enemy weaknesses, process intelligence data and share it among troops faster than any army of humans possibly could, giving that military the upper hand in combat over adversaries.
During the war in Iran, for instance, an A.I. program condensed the time it took to identify and strike a target from days to minutes, resulting in 1,000 targets hit within the conflict’s first 24 hours. It remains an open question whether A.I. was involved in the U.S. airstrike on a school that killed at least 175 people, many of them children. If it was, it would be the highest-profile case of civilian killings involving the technology.
Turning over the bloody business of warfighting to self-thinking machines comes with obvious risk. Algorithms can be wrong, be corrupted or result in unintended consequences. And machines, of course, aren’t capable of making ethical choices. A military officer deciding to strike a target typically has years of training and combat experience. What if an A.I.-controlled drone flying a future mission misidentifies a passenger jet as an enemy plane and targets it? Is the military responsible for that failure? Or the defense firm that coded the software?
For now, the drones are built to keep humans engaged at key junctures to avoid such catastrophes. This makes them “semiautonomous,” according to Col. Timothy Helfrich, who oversees the C.C.A. program for the Air Force. In their current design, the final decision to approve a missile launch will come down to a human pilot, whom Colonel Helfrich referred to as a “quarterback.” That person will also manage the mission in real time with the option to abort if anything goes awry. But many worry this won’t always be the case. As the technology improves and becomes more reliable, the military’s incentive to shorten the “kill chain” — finding, locking on to and striking targets on the battlefield — could one day outweigh the imperative to supervise the drones’ work during a time of war.
Colonel Helfrich and other U.S. military leaders are quick to dismiss the idea that the handoff of war to machines is inevitable, citing the Defense Department policy on autonomous weapons, known as Directive 3000.09, that requires the involvement of a human to “exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” But while the directive defines what an autonomous weapon is and states that a rigorous senior review process is necessary before one is deployed, for now, there’s nothing stopping the design, development and production of these fully automated weapons.
With so many blinking warning signs, why is the military pressing ahead on such a short timeline? The Air Force sees autonomous drones as a low-cost way to address an immediate problem: its dwindling number of fighter jets. The service now has about 5,000 aircraft — fewer than at any point in its 79-year history — many of which aren’t battle-ready. As Beijing continues to add new antiaircraft missile batteries, fighter jets and its own autonomous drones, the United States understands the need to quickly replace its vulnerable Cold War-era warplanes. If it can build a large fleet of robotic drones at a small fraction of the cost of current fighter jets, it can maintain its formidable presence across the globe for decades to come, the thinking goes.
The nearly $1 billion that the Air Force wants for the C.C.A. program next fiscal year is a pittance compared with the cost of high-end fighter jets, which war planners see as continuing to play a prominent role in retaining military dominance. The Air Force wants to integrate at least 1,000 autonomous drones, at an estimated cost of around $25 million to $30 million apiece, into its operations, with the first handful produced next year.
One of the firms making drones for the program, General Atomics, based in Poway, Calif., has been selling drones to the U.S. military for decades. On a sweltering morning in July, its YFQ-42A Dark Merlin drone sat under a sand-colored shelter blotting out the Southern California sun. Beads of sweat dotted the brows of the General Atomics and Air Force maintenance crews at the remote airfield near Palmdale, Calif., as the temperature inched toward 100 degrees.
It’s not often you see military personnel working shoulder to shoulder with defense contractors on prototypes, but it’s one of the exceptions the Air Force is making on this project as it rushes to get the drones in the air. The quicker humans trust the machines, the quicker they can be assimilated into the battlefield. “The Air Force needs to have 100 percent assurance in the aircraft if they’re going to allow pilots’ lives to depend on it,” said Mike Atwood, head of advanced programs in General Atomics’ aeronautical unit.
Just a half-hour drive away across an expanse of high desert, at the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, lies the Victorville airport. Here, technicians were tinkering with the other drone in the program, the YFQ-44A Fury, built by Anduril. The software-centric upstart based in Costa Mesa, Calif., is eager to add the combat drone program to its growing list of lucrative Pentagon contracts. In May 2025, it partnered with Meta to build virtual reality devices for the U.S. Army. Two months later, it won a $100 million contract to build the Army’s command-and-control software. But it seeks a larger production contract from the military.
In a gamble rarely seen in the defense industry, the company has already constructed a one-million-square-foot production factory outside Columbus, Ohio, to mass-produce the YFQ-44A — with just a handful of confirmed U.S. military orders — in hopes that the company will either win a bigger Air Force contract or sell the drones to other governments. The if-we-build-it-they-will-come attitude runs counter to the ethos of larger weapons manufacturers, which typically shy away from investing without a guarantee of financial returns. “We want to move fast, and so does the Air Force,” said Mr. Levin, Anduril’s engineering executive. “We’re all willing to accept some risk if it means we’re making up for time on the schedule.”
The pressure to race ahead is palpable. China displayed several autonomous drones at a military parade in September, while Russia and Ukraine have actively fielded A.I.-assisted drones during the years they’ve been at war. France, Germany and Spain are moving ahead on their own robotic wingman programs amid President Trump’s repeated public upbraiding of NATO. India, Israel, Australia and other nations already have A.I. military programs, as will many more nations that can afford them.
The looming challenge for the United States is how to fast-track this technology while balancing the safety and ethical issues with other nations. All weapons are subject to existing prohibitions and restrictions under international humanitarian law. But autonomous weapons raise novel concerns. Humanitarian groups say it’s morally bankrupt to hand over lethal action to machines, no matter how advanced. Can technology reliably differentiate adults from children, or soldiers with guns from TV journalists with camera equipment, or a truckload of fighters from a truckload of war-injured? Can it ascertain if someone is surrendering?
Questions like these prompted the International Committee of the Red Cross to call for new, binding prohibitions and restrictions on the development and use of these systems, calling it “an urgent humanitarian and legal priority.” That message has found a growing audience. In November, 156 countries signed a U.N. General Assembly resolution expressing deep concern over the risks of A.I.-enabled weapons, believing they could lead to unpredictable escalations of conflict. Not surprisingly, the United States, China and Russia were among the minority of countries that declined to support the resolution. On July 6, at the first Global Dialogue on A.I. Governance in Geneva, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said: “Our institutions were built to govern machines that follow commands. They are not ready for machines that decide. And some lines, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed.”
Militaries have advanced the technology so quickly that it seems unlikely that an outright abolition of autonomous A.I. weapons is achievable. However, there are practical paths to create international red lines that will make them safer — for instance, barring such systems from independently selecting and firing on human targets. Another sensible mandate would be to ensure militaries have a human in the loop in any lethal operation to stop it if and when things go haywire. A third would be a prohibition on using the systems for any strike that puts civilians or critical civilian infrastructure at risk.
Something must be done. The Trump administration has worked to roll back Biden-era guidelines for safety controls on A.I. development and use in the military. In February, it threatened to bar the tech start-up Anthropic from working with the military because the firm wouldn’t allow the Pentagon to have uncontrolled access to its A.I. software, specifically to control autonomous weapons. In June, Mr. Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum that both seeks to accelerate A.I. adoption in federal agencies and orders the Defense Department to update its policy on autonomous weapons.
In Washington, there is growing recognition that the United States is as vulnerable to this budding technology as every other country. A bill introduced last month by Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona would turn the language of the Defense Department’s 3000.09 policy — which is a department guideline and subject to change — into federal law. Another bill introduced in June by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York would not only require human oversight on conventional weapons that use A.I., but also ensure nuclear command and control did as well.
Congress should pass both, and the Trump administration should join the U.N. secretary general and the International Committee of the Red Cross in their calls for a new international treaty to be concluded by year’s end on autonomous weapons systems.
We’re not far from the day when one state’s autonomous weapons will be capable of shooting at its adversary’s autonomous weapons. And once that possibility exists, there is a very real risk that it could happen by mistake, or by misunderstanding. As in the doomsday nuclear scenarios of the Cold War, the world could find itself in an escalatory exchange that could quickly spiral out of control — but this time with limited human oversight.
The age of A.I. is already here. It’s up to humans to address how and when it can be used before machines dominate the battlefield.
W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.“
Friday, July 24, 2026
Trump says he will dismantle the ICC ‘brick by brick’. It could be his most chilling move of all | Steve Bloomfield | The Guardian
Trump says he will dismantle the ICC ‘brick by brick’. It could be his most chilling move of all Steve Bloomfield
"Barely a month appears to go by without Donald Trump making a fresh attempt to destroy the international rules-based order. The US has pulled funding from dozens of international institutions, shut down and withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. Nato may survive on paper, but Trump has made clear that he has little interest in coming to the aid of any ally that is attacked. The Board of Peace is clearly an attempt to sideline the United Nations.
But the state department’s announcement last week that it wishes to dismantle the international criminal court “brick by brick” could be Trump’s most frightening move of all.
This is not an idle social media post sent out late at night; there is no chance that the next person to speak to Trump might change his mind. It is now official US policy to destroy the ICC, and the administration is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to do so.
Nations that do not fall into line will be punished. The state department has promised “increased scrutiny of nations that refuse to reject the ICC’s false authority while relying on US assistance”, particularly targeting those countries that “enjoy the benefits of the US security umbrella”. That will include the UK, a country that contributes just over £15m a year to the ICC, making it the fourth largest donor after Japan, Germany and France.
Travel and sanctions bans have already been imposed on judges and senior officials; now more will be targeted. As one of those previously threatened with sanctions told me, it can result in individuals being completely cut off from modern life. Personal bank accounts are shut down, while a whole host of US apps and websites, from Uber to booking.com, are off-limits. Email accounts can be blocked – Microsoft and Google are US companies. For the court itself, it means backing up evidence previously held on Microsoft systems.
The state department campaign also includes working with other nations that are not part of the ICC, suggesting that the US could ally itself with Russia and China.
Make no mistake, this is an existential crisis not just for the ICC but the very idea of international justice. The most powerful nation on Earth and the supposed leader of the democratic west is aligning itself with dictators and autocrats to prevent those accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes from ever facing justice.
The US has had a complicated history with international justice. It was integral in the establishment of the post-second world war Nuremberg trials but was reluctant to ratify the genocide convention, only doing so in 1988, four decades after it was passed by the UN general assembly.
The issue was always one of self-preservation, rather than principle. For generations of US politicians, mainly Republicans but including some Democrats, the very idea that judges in other countries could hold American citizens to account was a non-starter. Until now, successive US presidents have generally accepted the idea of international justice even if, hypocritically, they did not want it to apply to them.
The US refused to sign the Rome statute that created the ICC in 2002, but it did not use its power to prevent its birth. In 2005, at the height of the Darfur genocide, it allowed the UN security council to pass a resolution authorising the ICC to investigate, and if necessary prosecute, those accused of war crimes in Sudan. Under Joe Biden’s presidency, it also encouraged the ICC to prosecute Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine.
For Trump, though, the ICC has always been a threat. He imposed sanctions on court officials during his first term, following an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by US troops in Afghanistan.
The campaign against the court ratcheted up after his return to office last year. The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, had issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing him of committing war crimes in Gaza. In response, Trump imposed fresh sanctions on ICC officials including Khan.
The threats to the ICC are not just coming from its enemies – many of them are self-inflicted. Two women, one a staffer at the ICC, have accused Khan of sexual abuse. The executive committee of the ICC’s governing body last month voted to suspend Khan, who denies any wrongdoing, after concluding that he had committed serious misconduct. The court’s 125 member states will, this Friday, vote on whether to remove him from office.
Staff in The Hague say the ICC has become an increasingly high-pressure place to work, with one former senior official describing the atmosphere as toxic.
There are also concerns from international law and human rights experts over its record. It has botched many of its big cases, including against Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, two opposing politicians who were both accused of fomenting Kenya’s post-election violence in 2007-8. As the ICC dithered, witnesses disappeared and the two men joined forces to run for election. Their election as president and vice-president in 2012 eventually led to the case collapsing.
The question now is what the “rest of the west” will do in response to Trump’s attacks. The court’s biggest donors need to stay strong and not give in to intimidation. It will be an early test for Ed Miliband, who said upon his appointment as foreign secretary on Monday that “we face a time of greater instability and threat to international law … than at any time since the second world war”.
The ICC’s imperfections undoubtedly make it a harder institution to defend. Those weaknesses can be magnified and targeted, making the court’s natural defenders reluctant to man the barricades.
Yet that is exactly what needs to happen. Even when it is badly run or cases are poorly constructed, the ICC’s very existence can have an impact. Netanyahu and Putin will for ever be referred to as men indicted for war crimes. Their worlds have shrunk thanks to the threat of arrest. The Philippines’ former president, Rodrigo Duterte, is on trial, accused of crimes against humanity during his “war on drugs”.
This is why Trump is so determined to shut it down, argues Luis Moreno Ocampo, the court’s first chief prosecutor. “Trump knows he could be a target after he leaves office,” he told me. “The ICC is a huge obstacle for him.”
And that’s another reason why it’s so important the ICC is saved. Actions need to have consequences. After the midterm elections in the US, a Democrat-led Congress is likely to hold hearings and open investigations into a whole host of Trump’s actions, from his murky dealings to his use of paramilitaries against his own citizens.
But the rest of the world needs to hold him accountable too – whether it’s for bombing boats in the Caribbean, striking a school in Iran or indeed any fresh horror he commits in the next two and a half years. Just as Putin and Netanyahu will live out the rest of their days knowing the threat of arrest could lie just around the corner, Trump fears this might be his fate. He cannot be allowed to escape it.
Steve Bloomfield is the former international editor of the Observer and a previous winner of the Orwell prize"
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