Can Paper Stop Tyrants?
Trump, Iran, the Geneva Conventions, and the fantasy that words enforce themselves
We are here again.
Trump vomits out another unhinged threat, this time aimed at Iran, and immediately the same ritual begins. Someone invokes the Geneva Conventions. Someone else reaches for the 25th Amendment. People start searching for a clause, a mechanism, a procedure, some hidden emergency lever that will save the country from the people who are actively breaking it.
And the emptiness of that response is hard to miss.
Yes, the regime is authoritarian. Yes, Trump is plainly deranged. And whether he is personally capable of assembling a coherent fascist ideology is beside the point, because the people around him are. Stephen Miller does not need Trump to be intellectually consistent. He just needs him to be useful, to be in place.
What too many well-meaning people still refuse to confront is the most basic reality of power: words do not enforce themselves. Laws do not enforce themselves. Constitutions do not enforce themselves. Conventions do not enforce themselves.
People do. And that’s the most important lesson of Resistance History.
