Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights and Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about holding Donald Trump accountable for the April 10, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Reuters (4/7/26)
Janine Jackson: You don’t have to have deep thoughts about the history of the Middle East to see that a president who publicly threatens to end a civilization should not be in charge of a lemonade stand.
Elite media have spent years telling us that if we object to the ground rules of grownup conversation—which include the idea that killing civilians in other sovereign countries is fine if current US leaders want them to change their leadership—well, then, we’re just not smart enough to be in that grownup conversation, because freedom, or something.
Americans are used to having our voices co-opted, misrepresented, to being told we’re “demanding” things we’ve never even been asked about, told we don’t care about prices, or else we do, depending on who’s selling what and why.
When leadership looks out of control, what kinds of power citizens actually have is among the most vital questions we can ask. But don’t look for major news media to host that conversation.
Chip Gibbons is a longtime activist and researcher. He’s policy director at the group Defending Rights and Dissent. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.
Chip Gibbons: Thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, although the topics we talk about are less pleasant.
JJ: Never, never pleasant, never pleasant.
Guardian (10/24/24)
CG: But it’s good to have CounterSpin out there, after all these years, for challenging the corporate media. I think I’ve told this before, but I started relying on you guys during Bush’s illegal war in Iraq. And yesterday I was at the Capitol to hear Dennis Kucinich, at an event organized by Ralph Nader, discussing impeaching the president for war crimes in the Middle East, and I wasn’t sure if it was 2006 or 2026.
JJ: Exactly. There’s a whole lot of deja vu going on right now.
Well, all right. Even if you don’t think that Trump has a personality disorder, or whatever—which it’s hard to know how you avoid thinking that kind of thought, with a person who just confabulates and makes things up out of whole cloth, and who talks about reducing prices by 500%, and who talks about war crimes as though that’s not a thing. Everyone has their own list of things that they’re like, “All right, this is beyond the pale.” This is being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of office,” isn’t it?
But until the last few days or the last week or so, we haven’t really seen news media taking impeachment seriously as an option; and that might be shifting now. But the thing is, it’s not just a rhetorical threat. It’s not a tool of punishment, per se. It’s a real tool that we can use because folks in the past thought we might need to use it. But I want to ask you, what would need to happen, and does the War Powers Act need to come first? What’s the process there?
Chip Gibbons: “War of aggression, UN charter, Nuremberg precedent: These are not foreign things being imposed on the US. These are part of our domestic legal system.”
CG: I think that’s a really complicated question. And I think that whatever we think of the Framers, I don’t think they quite envisioned a situation like this, in which the Congress is just totally cowardly, helpless and contemptible, and in league with the Executive Branch.
I mean, I would say the War Powers Act needs to come first, because you need to end this war right now. It is an unconstitutional war. Of course, even if it was constitutional, that would not make it lawful under international law; Trump has violated the United Nations Charter, which, under the US Constitution, because it was ratified by the Senate, has the weight of federal law. The war of aggression is, of course, the charge that the US and others brought against the Nazi high commander in Nuremberg. They were convicted of it.
So war of aggression, UN charter, Nuremberg precedent: These are not foreign things being imposed on the US. These are part of our domestic legal system. We just have not followed them for 80 some years.
And even if Trump’s war was somehow lawful under international law, it would not be moral. So ending this horrific war is the first step here, but we have a Congress that has so far refused to invoke the War Powers Act, even though Trump has engaged in one of the most blatantly unlawful, unconstitutional acts of many presidents.
I mean, every president breaks the War Powers Act. Every president bombs people without congressional authorization. And some of the legal authorizations cited by our friend (I say sarcastically) Barack Obama to bomb Libya without congressional approval have been cited by the Trump administration, both in term one to bomb Syria, and in this term to do all kinds of things.
But the scale of the war, the scale of the atrocities, the scale of the blowback is very intense with this one. It is just troubling, and you need to end the war right now.
Le Monde (9/27/24)
And on top of that, not only is the war illegal, Trump is actively boasting, not just of war crimes anymore, but now of potentially committing genocide. “An entire civilization will die, never to return.” That’s outside the realm of war crimes. That is into the realm of genocide. This is just like—I don’t know what it is. We are deliberately plotting to bomb power plants, bridges. At one point they were talking about bombing desalination plants. These are unquestionably war crimes.
And, of course, the US bombed the dikes during Vietnam, Clinton bombed the bridges in Yugoslavia. It’s not totally new, but there is something about the blood lust and openness about it that does feel very new. We are engaged in the campaign of assassinations. The CIA, of course, has a long history of assassinations, but the party who has pioneered this tactic has been Israel, our partners in this.
And, again, US foreign policy has been murderous. There was a My Lai every day in Vietnam. You and I remember the killings of civilians we learned about during the Winter Soldier Hearings in Iraq, that was the veterans talking. Reagan mining harbors in Nicaragua.
But this is very much an Israelification of American war fight. And we are employing the Gaza model on Iran, and it’s not to downplay the atrocities of past wars, but I spoke multiple times to Anthony Aguilar, who was a US soldier, who was then later in Gaza, becoming a whistleblower. And he was in some of the worst war zones in the world, where the US did awful things. And he said he never saw anything like Gaza.
FAIR.org (7/7/09)
I was talking to someone who has—I won’t say who—a background in intelligence, and yet they said assassinating the Ayatollah, that’s very much an Israeli thing. And of course we know that assassinating the Palestinian leadership and assassinating Lebanese leadership has been the Israeli strategy. So we are pursuing some of the most heinous crimes imaginable: killing children in schools, bombing power plants, threatening civilizations.
So ending the war is the first step, but it isn’t enough to end it. We have to actually hold someone accountable. I remember the lame duck period during Bush and Obama, talking to a Vietnam veteran who said, “Worst mistake my generation did was not holding McNamara, the Johnson secretary of Defense, accountable for Vietnam. We have to hold Bush accountable or this will happen again.”
And if we do not see Trump and Netanyahu imprisoned or impeached, I don’t know what we’re doing. It’s a long shot, but you cannot get away with what we’re doing. The world is only going to get darker, bleaker, more ugly, more violent if people can get away with this.
JJ: I would have you go on, I appreciate it. I would just say that in terms of when we look for accountability, because it seems like everyone fails upward in US foreign policy, you can miscalculate, you can get things wrong, you can lead to horrendous devastation. And somehow you’re still the expert that we go to the next time. And I would only say that that extends also to pundits and to media experts who can sit around and stroke their chins and predict things that the opposite happens, and yet they’re still the experts that we’re going to hear from the next time around. There is no measurable accountability in terms of changing things so that things don’t happen again.
Economist (11/16/19)
CG: I’m old enough to remember all the “Noam Chomsky was right in Vietnam, but he’s wrong on Iraq” articles, only to live through the “Noam Chomsky was right about Iraq, but wrong about this thing” articles. It wasn’t just him, others as well. Or there’s always like the Economist always says it’s not a coup this time, even though it was last time. So during the Allende coup, “that’s not a coup,” and 30 years later, they’d admit it’s a coup, but Bolivia’s not a coup, right? I mean, somehow the people who are always wrong are still always right, even if they admit their critics were right the last time, but this time they’re not. It’s very, very weird.
Although, I don’t know, is anybody outside the Fox News sphere optimistic about this war? This feels fundamentally different than some past US military crimes, in that other than Elon Musk’s X, where I’m exposed to the most insane opinions from people who I’m sure are totally, totally real, I don’t see anything like I saw during the Iraq War drive.
Then I was living amongst Christian fundamentalists. Now I live in a neighborhood where there’s all these “no war” signs up. So, I mean, I have moved.
Ipsos (3/31/26)
But I’m not seeing the level of support for this that you have in past wars. It feels like real end-term US empire stuff, in that the government is dramatically disconnected from the people.
And even the media isn’t…. I mean, they’re awful, but I don’t think they’re doing as awful a job as they used to. But you’ve studied the media more than I do. Maybe I’m off.
JJ: Well, they’re just more just middling around. What I would say is maybe you’re not seeing the same vociferous support, but you are seeing, as I discussed with our earlier guest, a kind of gentle consensus that, “Yeah, this is messed up, but you know, we got to do it, because that regime needs to change. The Iranian regime needs to change.” And so even though there is concern about violence, there’s concern about mistakes being made, I don’t see the voice that would say: “These are war crimes. This has to stop. We need to do whatever it needs to stop.” There is kind of like a, “Yeah, but this is power being power, and so let’s just see how it plays out” is more of the vibe.
CG: I totally agree with that. I do. I just think being middling, as opposed to vociferous, is such a low bar. But it indicates that we are a dying empire, that it’s getting harder and harder to defend. And you have a madman, just a mile, half-mile from where I’m standing right now, who wants to kill an entire civilization, because that’s a great negotiating tactic.
I keep seeing on Elon Musk’s Twitter, from people who I assume are totally real, that I just don’t understand his excellent negotiation that he used in his business. How many bankruptcies did he have in business, Janine?
JJ: No, no, but “Art of the Deal.” Art of the Deal, Chip.
CG: I’m not sure. I’m starting to learn, if this is how he negotiates, why he kept having companies go bankrupt.
Defending Rights & Dissent (4/6/26)
JJ: Yeah. Well, listen, we can’t do everything today, but what I wanted to kind of start up with you is just the conversation that we don’t have to only sit passively by in horror, that it’s worth learning about what levers of power we have. And we can be frustrated with them. They need to be stronger. We need to build new ones. But just in closing, the idea that all we can do is watch this on TV, we can’t sit with that, no?
CG: I know people are really sick of hearing “talk to your member of Congress,” especially how awful the Congress is, but each of these War Powers votes we’re having, we’re getting closer and closer. And I do think just a handful of Republican defections, which I think we may able to get with public pressure, I do think we could invoke the War Powers Act, but if the pressure’s really there.
And I think that Trump is clearly losing the plot. A majority of Americans disapprove of Israel. If you’re a semi-skilled politician, and you believe there’s anything resembling democracy left in the United States—which maybe there are no semi-skilled politicians, and maybe they don’t believe there’s any democracy left—you are looking at this and you are sweating. So keep the pressure up, and let’s try to get this War Powers Act invoked. And then let’s talk about impeaching him and putting him in prison.
JJ: Absolutely.
We’ve been speaking with activist and writer Chip Gibbons from Defending Rights and Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org. There’s lots of work to see there.
Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for speaking with CounterSpin today.
CG: Thank you.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Janine Jackson | Radio Free (2026-04-16T16:08:18+00:00) ‘The World Is Only Going to Get Darker if People Get Away With This’: CounterSpin interview with Chip Gibbons on holding Trump accountable. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2026/04/16/the-world-is-only-going-to-get-darker-if-people-get-away-with-this-counterspin-interview-with-chip-gibbons-on-holding-trump-accountable/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.