Defying the Nuremberg Principles
I.
In early January 2026, President Donald Trump sat for an interview with The New York Times. The conversation ranged across his administration’s recent military action in Venezuela, his stated intentions toward Colombia and Cuba, and his fixation on annexing Greenland. At one point, the interviewer pressed him on international law—specifically, whether his administration would be constrained by it.
“I don’t need international law,” Trump said. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
When pushed further, he offered a familiar evasion: “It depends what your definition of international law is.”
Then came the statement that clarifies everything that follows. Asked what, if not law, might constrain his pursuit of what he called “global supremacy,” Trump answered:
“My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” (People, January 9, 2026)
The remark was not a gaffe. It was a clarification, a statement of operating principle that makes explicit what scholars, analysts, and critics have long observed in Trump’s conduct and rhetoric. The only authority he accepts is his own.
This essay examines what that means—psychologically, constitutionally, and in terms of international law. Along the way, I will draw on a dramatic monologue I wrote and published on Shakespeare’s Monkey marking the New Year, a long poem that attempts to render the interior experience of a mind like Trump that operates without external limits.
It’s sometimes hard to know where a piece belongs. I know that Trumpian Resolutions belongs to Shakespeare’s Monkey. It is after all a poem, I think. The Monkey told me where to find it. But it also belongs here. In this case I have decided to weave the poem and the analysis together. The poem provides texture; the analysis provides structure. Together, they trace a line from exploitation of tribal loyalty to the explicit rejection of the Nuremberg principles.
II.
The poem opens at midnight on New Year’s Eve. The speaker is alone, composing in his head, preparing to address the nation on his cell phone—or rather, to perform his dominance over it.
Midnight.
The year cracks open like an egg I’ll fry and feed to the cats.
They’re outside cold and drunk, the ones who count backward, the ones who believe in countdowns and blastoffs three, two, one and then what?
Confetti? A kiss? A fresh start? Fat chance shitbird.
There are no fresh starts. There’s only the knife the throats you cut Happy New Year to all, including—
No. Wait.
Let me get my hands in it. Let me find the vein. Happy New Year to the Radical Left Scum—
Good. The dog knows his name. Scum comes when I call. Scum sits. Scum stays. Scum rolls over and shows its underbelly
I wanted the voice to be immediately recognizable. Over the years from my linguistic window I’ve studied Trump’s rhetoric and thought a lot about what he must be saying to himself as he wears his masks. The cadence, the insults, the performative cruelty—these are not invented. They are distilled. What the poem attempts is not satire but phenomenology. What does it feel like to inhabit a consciousness for which dominance is the only value, attention the only sustenance, and external limits simply do not register?
To understand why Trump’s “my own morality” statement matters, to understand the radically new rhetorical ground Trump has taken, we must first understand the moral framework within which his statements about his morality make sense.
III.
Political scientists and moral psychologists have noted that Trump’s base prioritizes values like authority, loyalty, and in-group protection over values like care, fairness, and universal principle. Moral foundations research suggests that different populations weight these values differently, and that political conservatives tend to emphasize the binding foundations—loyalty, authority, sanctity—while progressives emphasize the individualizing foundations—care and fairness.
When Trump asserts his personal judgment as the final arbiter of right action, his supporters and his critics hear two different things. Critics, operating from a care/fairness framework, hear autocracy. They hear a leader claiming to be above the law. Supporters, operating from an authority/loyalty framework, hear strength. Their leader is willing to take responsibility rather than hide behind bureaucrats, lawyers, or international institutions.
Trump appears to understand this duality intuitively the way a blues guitarist or harpist understands pentatonic scales. He speaks in a register that his base decodes as moral courage while his opponents decode as constitutional threat. He finds the tritones, the blue notes, the devil’s interval, that sends chills up and down the spines of the sane and the insane alike.
My poem captures this dynamic as a mechanism with uncomfortable precision, I think, at least that’s what I was going for, ratcheting up the uncomfortable until you have to shake your head and either laugh or cry or sit somewhere in between:
I’m the hand that feeds their anger, feeds and hits, and they can’t tell the difference anymore.
And later:
Trump, Trump, Trump— the sound of my name in ten thousand mouths, the roar that sounds like love if you don’t listen too close.
I don’t listen too close. I let it wash over me. I let it fill the place where something else should be.
The speaker of the monologue knows what the rallies provide. He also knows what they cannot provide. The adulation fills a void but does not satisfy it. The hunger intensifies the more it is fed.
This brings us to the psychological dimension of the “my own morality” claim.
IV.
Cognitive linguists, notably George Lakoff, have described Trump’s rhetoric as embodying a “strict father” worldview—a moral-cognitive frame in which the father figure’s authority is the foundation of order, and obedience to that authority is the highest virtue. In this model, the leader’s judgment is morality. Loyalty to the leader is not a departure from ethics; it is the ethical system itself.
But the poem complicates this reading. The father figure in the monologue is not a source of authority. He is a festering wound:
My father never said my name. Not like that. Not like it meant something. He said it like a debt, like something he was owed and would never collect.
I don’t think about my father.
And later, in a passage the speaker keeps circling back and cutting off:
My father thought I was too much. My father thought I was— I’m not thinking about my father.
And finally, the admission:
a son he couldn’t— couldn’t what? Love.
The word is love. I know the word. I just don’t—
Post.
The speaker is not embodying the strict father. He is trying to become the strict father he struggled with—to be the authority that validates, rather than the son perpetually seeking validation. The authoritarian psychology here is not confident paternal power. It is a nauseating, desperate attempt to fill a void by becoming the thing that was withheld from a pampered little boy growing up in strange circumstances as I understand it.
I want to be in the room when they make love. I want to be the face they see when they close their eyes. Is that too much?
V.
What happens when this psychology occupies the presidency?
Constitutional scholars have long debated a theory called “departmentalism”—the view that each branch of government has independent authority to interpret the Constitution, and that the Supreme Court’s interpretations are not automatically binding on the other branches. This theory has a respectable intellectual pedigree. Jefferson invoked it. Jackson invoked it. Lincoln, in limited contexts, invoked it.
But departmentalism, properly understood, requires constitutional reasoning. The president who defies a court order must explain why the Court exceeded its constitutional authority, i.e., the president must offer a legal argument, not an assertion of will.
During Trump’s first impeachment, his defense team offered something that looked like departmentalism, but was not. It was borderline insane in comical way. Alan Dershowitz argued that if the president believes his own reelection is in the national interest, then actions taken to secure that reelection cannot be impeachable because, well, they serve the national interest.
Very clever.
It is the collapse of the distinction between the office and the person holding it. It is “I burned the box. I am the box now” rendered in legal briefs.
The poem captures the endpoint of this logic:
I freed them from caring. I freed them from pretending that any of it matters, the laws, the norms, the stupid rules they made up to keep people like me in a box.
I burned the box. I am the box now.
And later:
the rules are whatever I say they are at 3 a.m. when no one’s watching except everyone, except the whole world with their phones open, waiting for me to tell them who to hate today.
This is not a worked-out theory of executive power. It is not theory at all. Analysts who have examined Trump’s statements consistently describe a personalized, situational morality that validates actions benefiting himself and his faction and condemns those that constrain him. The “my own morality” remark announces the absence of a constitutional position on presidential power. His judgment is sufficient because it is.
VI.
Which brings us to Greenland.
In the same period as the recent Times interview, Trump spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One about his desire to annex the territory, currently controlled by Denmark, a NATO ally. His reasoning was delicious, I thought, and I wanted those lines to be in my poem, but they are unfortunately grounded in reality. If he hadn’t actually said them, I could have made them up, and in my mind that makes this dramatic monologue pretty damned impressive for an amateur poet with an appreciation for Robert Browning and, of course, the Bard.
“It’s so strategic right now. Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it.”
He’s talking about a video game, not a coming apocalypse. But when asked why ownership was necessary—why a treaty or lease arrangement with an ally would not suffice—Trump answered:
“Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.” (People, January 9, 2026)
Notice the language. Not strategically necessary. Not legally justified. Not economically rational. Psychologically needed.The word choice is precise in its imprecision. He cannot articulate what “ownership” provides that alliance does not—”things and elements”—because the desire is not instrumental. It is appetite. Possession for the sake of possession.
My poem has already remarked this, and I bet you a cup of coffee we will see it and hear it repeated nauseatingly in Sartre’s sense in the coming months:
I have the best hair. I have the best— I have. That’s the point. I have and they don’t. I have and they’re dead or scared or wishing they were me.
And:
Resolution five: Erase more. Rename everything. The Trump Washington Monument. The Trump Lincoln Memorial. The Trump Reflecting Pool— no. Get rid of the pool. No reflections. Reflections show you what you look like when you’re not performing, and I’m always performing, and I need them to only see the version I allow.
The Trump White House. The Trump America. The Trump World. Why not? They already live there. They just don’t know the landlord’s name.
Greenland is not a policy objective. It is a monument. It is the Trump Greenland. It’s territory annexed not for what it provides but because it needs more golf courses.
VII.
Trump acknowledged in the interview that his administration would, in some sense, have to abide by international law. But the acknowledgment was immediately hollowed out: “It depends what your definition of international law is.”
This is textbook Trumpian definitional evasion—making the limit itself negotiable, subject to his interpretation, which is to say, subject to his judgment, which is to say, not a limit at all.
“I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.”
The second sentence is supposed to reassure. It does the opposite. It confirms that in his framework, the relevant question is not “what does the law permit?” but “what do I intend?” If he is not looking to hurt people, then law, state, local, national or international, is unnecessary. He doesn’t mean to set in motion the death of a young mother in Minneapolis. His intentions are the safeguard. His morality is the constraint. He’s not responsible when things take a bad turn. How could he be? That’s not what he wanted.
My poem renders the interiority of that confidence. It derives from Heaven itself:
God looked down and saw the world and said ‘I need a man who doesn’t give a shit’ and here I am. The Guardian of the Kingdom.
I’ll put it on a hat. I’ll put it on a coin. I’ll make them mint a coin with my face on one side and God’s on the other and you won’t be able to tell which is which.
VIII.
Which brings us, finally, to Nuremberg, to international laws and agreements.
The Nuremberg principles, developed after World War II and later affirmed by the United Nations, established that individuals have international duties that transcend the national obligations imposed by their own states. Principle III states explicitly that acting as head of State or responsible government official does not relieve a person of responsibility for crimes under international law.
These principles were developed to reject, permanently and unequivocally, the argument that leaders’ own moral or political judgments—or their domestic legal authority by implication—could excuse internationally wrongful acts.
“My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
This perspective rejects the premise underlying Nuremberg itself. The entire post-war international order was built on the recognition that leaders who claim their personal judgment as the only relevant authority are precisely the leaders who must be constrained. Nuremberg said your duties transcend the nation.
Trump’s statement says there are no duties that transcend me.
As he spoke these words, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had already been seized by U.S. forces and brought to American soil to stand trial. Trump had declared that “the United States is now in charge of running” Venezuela. Colombia’s president had said publicly, “We are in danger. Because the threat is real. It was made by Trump.” (People, January 9, 2026)
IX.
My poem ends where it must—with the speaker’s final self-deification:
The new year will be the greatest year in the history of years. Because I say so. Because I am so. Because I AM.
Let them choke on that. Let them read I AM and think of burning bushes, think of Moses, think of every story they told themselves to get through the dark.
I’m the story now. I’m the burning bush. I burn and I don’t go out.
And:
Let there be Trump. And there was Trump. And let there be nothing else. And there was nothing else. And I saw that it was good. And I saw that it was very good. And I rested—
No. Not yet.
One more post. One more year. One more century of me.
Amen.
The Genesis echo is deliberate. The speaker has moved from “my judgment is final” to “I am the source of all judgment.” From “the law doesn’t constrain me” to “I am what determines what law means.” From president to demiurge in the Gnostic traditions.
It would be easy to dismiss the monologue’s ending as hyperbole, as poetic exaggeration for effect. I do that some in my poetry, I admit, sometimes stupidly but occasionally very satisfyingly, I think, and defensible on aesthetic grounds. But consider the actual words spoken by President Trump and recorded in history: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
What is that, if not the claim that the self is the only source of binding authority? What is that, if not the assertion that no external standard—ontological, legal, ethical, constitutional, international, cosmological—has legitimate claim to constrain him? Now if I said that and believed it, I would be certifiably insane. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest. But I can write my poem and keep on the right side of the street.
The Nuremberg principles exist because the twentieth century taught us what happens when leaders make this claim. They exist because millions died while leaders insisted that their judgment was sound, their intentions were good, their nations’ interests were paramount.
“I don’t need international law.”
Hm.
X.
There is a passage near the end of the poem that still catches in my throat. It expresses the paradox, the ambiguity, the humiliation I see in being an American during Trump’s regime. I don’t remember ever being as afraid of the world as I am today, precisely because we have a megalomaniac in the Oval Office. Is his impulse to a White supremacist domination of the world a piece of the same impulse that animated the Founders? Can we free our society of it?
I don’t remember ever not being afraid of the world so big so full of people who didn’t know I was the most important thing in it.
I taught them. I’m still teaching them. I’ll teach them until I die and then I’ll teach them from the grave, from the monument, from the coin, from the face they can’t stop seeing when they close their eyes and pray for peace and hear my voice instead, saying: There is no peace. There’s only me.
The psychology is pitiable. The morality is catastrophic.
A man who has never not been afraid of being a little guy, of playing his own small part in history like an ordinary mortal, George Bailey, who has spent his entire life demanding that the world recognize his importance, who now commands the most powerful military on earth and has declared that the only thing constraining him is his own mind.
The Nuremberg principles were not written for normal leaders operating within normal constraints. They were written for the leader who believes his judgment is sufficient, his intentions are pure, and his authority is unlimited.
They were not written by Alan Dershowitz.
“My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
The international legal order has an answer to that claim. It was forged in the ashes of atomic bombs. It says: No. Your morality is not sufficient. Your mind is not the limit. There are duties that transcend you, obligations that bind you, laws that constrain you regardless of your intentions or your office or your nation’s power.
Whether that answer still holds—whether the political consensus that gives it force has eroded beyond recovery—is the question of our moment.
The poem’s speaker is certain he has already won:
Before doesn’t exist. I erased before. I’m the only history now.
Until then, I plan on writing more Trump-inspired poetry. I have more Trumpish verse on the Monkey. Writing poetry and playing Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and John Prine tunes on my guitar have kept me happy pretty much forever, at least the forever that I remember.
We will learn, soon enough, whether Trump hits pay dirt for his psyche and jackboots show up at my door.