Trump’s relation to his constituents is as transactional as any other: in exchange for their worship and loyalty, he gives them what they want. This is the beating heart of Trumpism.

Trump’s dramatic shredding of the JCPOA – the Iran Nuclear Deal – thrilled another set of constituents: the anti-Iranians. Their politics align closely with his nationalist Islamophobia.

Trump both violated and decimated the nuclear deal by unilaterally deciding to wreck Iran’s economy and generate unrest that would lead to collapse. Instead, the economy survived and the regime contained the civil unrest by killing hundreds of demonstrators, while the streets ran with blood. So the anti-Iranians wanted more: a real show of force.

Symbolic drama

Until now, Trump has resisted such pressure. While Trump has been willing to unleash the hound dogs of ICE on migrant families and communities across the nation – enjoining them to ever more ferocity and inhumanity – he has avoided international violence. It is the logic of the bully, all too willing to damage those weaker than himself, but fearful of a real fight.

The overrunning of the embassy in Baghdad, however, changed all that. It is all too easy to imagine the impact such images would have on a territorial creature such as Trump. His entire presidency has been staked on building impenetrable walls and travel bans to hold off the fearful hordes of the world.

To then see Muslims overtaking the embassy grounds and chanting on its roof – while American diplomats and staff cower in safe rooms and flee – can only have been grotesque and unbearable to Trump.

Mike Pompeo, obsessed with Iran (he opened a special Iran center at the CIA when he was the director) saw his chance. He had discussed an attack on Soleimani with Trump before, pushing this for the past year. Now he told Trump exactly what he could do and to whom, coordinating closely with Secretary of Defense Mark Esper (a classmate from West Point who shares Pompeo’s anti-Iran fervor).

Trump’s tendency to personalize politics – invariably reducing international relations to interpersonal feuds and bonding – would have made him extremely susceptible to agreeing to the murder. If the Iranian regime could not be eradicated, pulverizing its second-most-powerful figure would be deliciously rewarding and appeal directly to Trump’s hunger for symbolic drama.

Yet the raw, shocking blatancy of the assassination – a declaration of war in the form of bodies blown to bits across the landscape without warning – confronts us directly with the libidinal brutality of the Trump presidency at the level of blood and guts, lawless killing, and swaggering power.

It shifts Trump’s international political register from the realm of twitter, economics, negotiations, law, and military deployments to that of performative butchery – the specialization of the likes of Daesh.

As with Daesh and al Qaeda, however, Trump’s grotesque public violence does not mark an absence of strategy: quite the opposite.

Violated norms

Like 9/11, the killing of Soleimani is a staged event, whose impact far outstrips the organizational and strategic effects of suddenly removing the head of Iran’s Quds Force. It does this precisely by violating the norms, rules and ethics we had thought were in place.

Encapsulated in a raft of international laws and guidelines that include the Nuremberg Principles, the International Criminal Court and Human Rights Law, these should have safeguarded against such public murder by an American president. Instead, Trump is claiming the right to act without regard to the law by making himself the legitimator of his own violence.

While Pompeo claims Soleimani was preparing an imminent attack on Americans, there is no evidence for this. Incidental information – Soleimani was on his way to discuss a Saudi proposal with the Iraqi prime minister – discredits this further.

Trump’s impunity to kill as he decides is as much the message – to Iran, to the world and to his own constituents – as the specific, targeted punishment of a hated enemy. “Make America Great Again” in effect has become “Make America Kill Again.”

One of the ironies of this is that Pompeo himself warned of it during Trump’s presidential campaign (as reported in a great New Yorker article by Susan B. Glasser). Initially a supporter of Marco Rubio, Pompeo told a Kansas audience during the primaries of his disgust at Trump (as Trump listened in the wings):

“You know, Donald Trump the other day said that ‘If he tells a soldier to commit a war crime, the soldier will just go do it.’ [booing from the audience] ‘They’ll do as I tell them to do’.”

Pompeo continued, “American soldiers don’t swear an allegiance to President Trump or any other President. They take an oath to defend our Constitution … Marco Rubio will never demean our soldiers by saying that he will order them to do things that are inconsistent with our Constitution.”

Having by the strangest twists of fate become Trump’s Secretary of State, Pompeo has transformed not only his feelings about Trump but also his squeamishness about personal loyalty and war crimes.

Profoundly aware of the premium Trump places on loyalty, he has become so obsequious that a former American ambassador once described him as being “like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” In the heat of the fusion and with the power of American military might at his (president’s) finger tips, Pompeo has lost all sight of what constitutes a war crime.

Obama’s precedent

Yet US international criminality is unbeholden to person or party. It is an equal-opportunity policy and ideology, just as alluring to those who preceded Trump and Pompeo as it now is to the Republicans. Indeed it was Barack Obama who made targeted assassinations as American as apple pie.

Following the bloodbath of Vietnam and scandals of Nixon, Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan prohibited assassinations by Executive Order in the 1970s and 80s. After 9/11, assassination returned under George W. Bush, but relatively hesitantly. Barack Obama then threw ethics and caution to the wind, dramatically expanding and fully implementing such assassinations as a core component of foreign policy.

By 2012, the Obama administration had normalized “Terror Tuesdays.” During this weekly ritual, 100 members of the national security apparatus vetted terrorist suspects to recommend to the President as next in line to be killed by drones. With no input or oversight of the process by Congress or the Judiciary, Obama would review their recommendations and personally make the final decision of which suspects to kill by drone. Cumulatively, these kills would include hundreds of civilian adults and children who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.