Oh, we are well aware.

Pretty sure even a lot of the current President's voters are slowly coming to this same realization. I predict soon in casual conversation almost no one will have voted for this man.

It's funny watching these older movies and tv shows where the presidency was portrayed as being dignified and statesmanlike which now seems so laughably unrealistic.

It’s a travesty but I think “never going to come back from this” is a stretch. There is no immediate replacement for the position the US holds in global politics. China has no interest in being the guarantor of freedom of transit in international waterways, to pick one example.

It's not just this administration. The US helped create this court and pushed other countries to join, but never joined themselves and always threatened the court if they indicted or judged American people.

There's an US law that says the US will invade Belgium (edit: Netherlands) if the court wanted to investigate an American (???)

I remember Hillary Clinton, in the Obama administration, saying the US is an exceptional country that deserves exceptional conditions regarding this issue

It's frankly ridiculous

The US is an embarrassment to the Planet.

It's worse than an embarrassment - it is an indictment of democracy itself. It is difficult to imagine a people - on paper the richest, most educated and healthiest in the history of the world - intentionally choosing a real villain as their duly-elected leader. They elected a man whose outrages, corruptions, selfishness, malice and outright crimes are so egregious and obvious that the problem becomes organizing so long a list into a workable taxonomy. But he's not done this alone - SCOTUS is in his pocket and truly made him above the law. The Republicans have enabled him by staying silent and riding on his coattails - the most "principled" of them have retired. Media is consolidated and owned by the oligarchs he calls friends. He has a personal paramilitary force (ICE) roaming the streets, killing people, and who will be "observing" the mid-term elections.

The root of the problem is in the collective mind of Americans. We are the problem - we've been hacked to be both stupid and proud of that stupidity, to cease recognizing "character" or "virtue" as a signal, to cease caring about reality that doesn't support opinions that were installed on us, like malware, or anything really except entertainment. Because that's the ONE thing we do get out of all this - we get to be entertained. How funny when he says outlandish things like immigrants are eating the cats, eating the dogs! How hilarious (and macho!) when he brags about grabbing women. How wonderful it is to see the discomfiture of the libs when he parrots Nazi propaganda or when he encouraged the Proud Boys to storm the capital to overturn his loss, and then his lackeys claimed it either didn't happen or was a false flag. "Hang Mike Pence!" is what an obese, fentanyl- and TikTok-addicted mind thinks is doing something! And hey, you can say "retard" again without getting canceled.

I've got kids and I'm terrified for them.

its only this administration, its the whole Congress and Uniparty in DC

Most Americans agree with you at this point.

My largest problem with the statement is the utterly false claim that sanctions for the ICC have bipartisan support.

> You're never going to come back from this.

This seems like an overstatement. After all, Germany came back from Nazism.

I also think this is not a uniquely American problem. If anything, the US is a political bellwether. And I would note that Australian Rupert Murdoch for example has been funding right-wing propaganda in the US, as well as some other countries, for decades. (Donald Trump himself is known as a voracious consumer of right-wing media. He's in their target demographic.) In addition to donating massive amounts of money to US Republicans, South African Elon Musk has also taken an interest in other countries such as the UK. The Israel lobby is of course very powerful in the US. This is an international problem. As arguably the most powerful nation in the world, the US is a natural target for those who would abuse that power.

Parents spend considerable time teaching children to not get caught up in other people's opinions.

The International Criminal Court is a farce. How can you tell other sovereign nation what is a "crime" or what "is not a crime"? It has literally zero authority to decide such matters.

Dr. Pillay also chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory from 2021 to 2025.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2026/pillay/facts/

oh that matches. Current admin must feel guilty/wary of something. "Best defense is attack" type of reasoning. There is no reason otherwise.

That's neat but it's clearly not why the US imposed sanctions against the ICC, why would the US care? It's because they put out an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and some other high-ranking government officials. Neither the US or Israel is part of the ICC and yet they're attempting to threaten them with arrest/capture

Thank you for actually addressing the philosophical elephant in the room. There's way too much vitriol substituting rational thought when it comes to courts in general, doubly so for international courts. They are compacts and agreements, no matter what scale you're looking at, and there's a reason depictions of "Justice" as a lady hold scales and a sword. Neither one works without the other. The term "outlaw" used to mean outside the protection of the law, in both directions. What do these courts protect America from?

That being said, sanctioning them feels a bit odd. Might be some latent jingoism but I don't see a threat from the ICC being substantial to US citizens.

you can argue many things. This isn't arguing.

One can also argue that, exactly because there is the right to self-determination, there is a huge need for a inter-national and super-national organism to ensure that a right of some country doesn't jeopardise the rights of others.

Is the ICC the right organism? Maybe, maybe not; we can argue about that.

I thought the ultimate root of this situation is still 3rd Reich and the realization that, for the most part, the Nazis didn’t break any laws. They passed laws, legally, making all their horrid designs legal, then carried them out.

Which is a long way of saying, there’s a consensus that there are standards higher than national law we may want to uphold.

I know ICC is later, and also US never joined, in a somewhat hypocritical compromise. But at least the purpose and motivation, IMO, are clean and noble.

USA does not seem to comply with its own treaties and agreements and now you are saying that since it is the most powerful country then it is entitled to it. Human rights won't matter only if USA says so but otherwise Americans can yell on top of their lungs that it is being violated elsewhere. That behavior simply means that USA has double standards and seeks to be above the laws and refuses to be accountable. But which laws and which accountability would that be if it can deny that there are laws that would incriminate them in wrong doing! That is by definition a Rouge state.

Yes, the CPI did manage to move out Microsoft / Google. I bet Apple is harder to escape.

Yes a judge a Canadian woman was not able to book a hotel since her credit card was cancelled. And other services as well anything needed a credit card to work.

https://www.npr.org/2026/10/01/nx-s1-5977815/trump-icc-sanct...

"You start to lose services from American companies, Amazon, Google, potentially Apple, whatever it may be," she told Morning Edition. "Completely randomly, though, you don't know when something's going to happen."

One of those moments came during an ordinary moment at home.

"I went home and Alexa wouldn't talk to me," she told NPR's Steve Inskeep.

Her credit cards, issued in the Netherlands and Canada, were canceled. She has managed to keep some bank accounts, but says her banking services are extremely limited and even small transfers can be blocked.

These reactions are reasonable and are largely due to the US sanctions imposed on European judges at the ICC.

Nicolas Guillou, the French judge, has had all his bank assets in the US frozen; he has been banned from all US digital services (Google, Apple, Visa, Mastercard), as have many of his familly just in case.

There are literally proven war criminals who are not treated in the same way.

Scope of the sanctions is unclear, but it seems unlikely to me. This appears more like "US companies can't do direct business with the ICC organization."

E.g., the ICC ditched Microsoft last year, likely foreseeing this type of action.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ommt2f/the_int...

Is that really a term?

Regardless - I think it's safe to assume this isn't happening in a vacuum - there are a number of world players who profit from the collapse of the U.S. And all this trouble started the moment they could use the internet to feed stupid Americans their stupid propaganda.

Is that what happened to europe?

This is not a perfect analogy: when I choose not to join a club, I have a reasonable expectation of that club not declaring me its member, and not fighting me for failing to follow the rules that the club established.

You do if they're bullying you for not joining.

There's probably a reason they write these at the 3rd- to 4th-grade level. Trump doesn't really talk much above that. I'm honestly not sure why.

No panic at all. The ICC is irrelevant to anyone here's day to day life.

- from California with love.

I'd say that the longstanding disagreement is used as a pretext today. Hence the need to stress twice the "bipartisan" nature of it, implying, the article suggests, the bipartisan support to this new move.

Isn't the concept of "bipartisan" anything suspicious today? Republicans turned away from most of the "movement conservative" principles in 2017. Rule of law personal responsibility, small local government, free markets, all either ignored or only paid lip service.

Previous bipartisan consensus thus means nothing. Bipartisan consensus now means everyone capitulated to Trump's whim of the day.

A lot of these weird actions actually build on long-simmering disagreements. Which is weird - like if a state governor got drunk and tried to shut down immigration enforcement.

Is this a legitimate policy decision? Maybe - but it sure reads like the ranting of a drunk.

A world in which official statements from the US State Department and a joke are indistinguishable.

> ...gets an immature charge out of trolling people.

That describes MAGA perfectly.

The picture is much clearer when you accept that they are never jokes.

"They're trolling" is simply a juvenile defense that provides the cult and its members with plausible deniability.

The world might be slightly better off if we'd all taken them seriously from the start, but taking clowns and the accompanying circus seriously is unintuitive to most.

The sanctions announcement coincided with a former ICC judge, Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her contributions to enlarging the scope and impact of international law. -- https://thehill.com/policy/international/6138693-rubio-impos...

Even worse!!

https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu

An Israeli citizen probably.

The Americans got upset first because the ICC wants to take action against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.

But now it just happens to be that their president didn't get the Nobel peace price. The person who did was a judge on the ICC.

It could be a complete coincidence, of course. I mean, if it isn't, it would reinforce the notion of the USA being a clown of a country, which I'm sure Americans would prevent.

> And Americans voted for this! Twice!

For many Americans, three times!

And for many Americans, never.

Also, bear in mind that the first time he won he lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points. We have a voting system that favors less populous states. In 2024 he won the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. He has never been very popular in this country. But his party controls all branches of government and he controls his party.

It turns out electing a stupid, vengeful narcissist and liar who is at death's door is not the way to go.

I have read here on this here HN, that "soft power" does not in fact exist, and therefore cannot be lost!

So, good news I guess. Everything is fine. Trump is the best president ever in the history of the world.

He will try but even the Supreme Court has shown they are willing to place limits on his power, ruling against him in some cases. So I don't think he has a pathway to bypassing the 22nd Amendment.

At the end of the day, the law is what people agree it is… And people don’t seem to be too interested in keeping the lunatic in check.

Putin would hope so because there's no other way.

He does not seem to care much for laws in general. Why change them when you can just ignore them? Much less work.