The Bully Pulpit Reveals Trump’s Bullying the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Palestine

President Theodore Roosevelt often referred to the term “bully pulpit” to mean he would use the country’s highest office to present his program. “Bully,” at the time, was positive, as in wonderful or sublime. President Trump and his subordinates have revealed during their time occupying the nation’s highest pulpit that they are bullies in the modern sense of the term, using force or comments to abuse or dominate others. Trump and Company’s bullying examples are numerous, but the administration’s actions against Francesca Albanese are particularly outrageous, bullying at its worst. 

Francesca Albanese serves as the United Nations special rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. She is not a U.N. official, but an independent, eminent Italian legal scholar, an expert on human rights as well as the first female to hold that position. She was appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2022. Previous special rapporteurs were such renowned figures as Richard Falk, Michael Lynk, and John Dugard.  

How has Francesca Albanese been bullied? Last week, the Trump administration announced that it would impose sanctions on Albanese. “Today I am imposing sanctions on U.N. Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt International Criminal Court action against US and Israeli officials, companies, and executives,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X. “We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.” He also mentioned that the sanctions were part of a larger U.S. effort to marginalize the International Criminal Court (ICC) which had issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister. “We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense,” Rubio wrote. 

(The sanctions allow the United States to freeze Albanese’s assets within the U.S.  and prohibit her and her family from entering the U.S. The Albanese sanctions are similar to those imposed by the U.S. on four ICC judges. The Trump administration also imposed sanctions on the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan.)

What had Albanese done to merit the bullying sanctions? In a speech to the Human Rights Council on July 3, 2025, Albanese said that Israel was “responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history.” She has long condemned Israel’s actions. In November 2024, she and 30 U.N. experts declared that their investigations “convincingly confirmed” Israel’s genocide, referring to an International Court of Justice’s ruling on Israel’s plausible genocide. 

The sanctions against Albanese followed her July 3, 2025, report “From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide” to the Human Rights Council. The report describes how companies have “profited from the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid, and now genocide.” She named over 40 companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Blackrock, IBM, Glencore, and HD Hyundai; claiming their involvement in what she called “the transformation of Israel’s economy of occupation to an economy of genocide.”

“Too many influential corporate entities remain inextricably financially bound to Israel’s apartheid and militarism,” she wrote. “[Israel’s] forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech – providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability – while investors and private and public institutions profit freely,” the report said. 

As an example of corporate profits, the special rapporteur noted that “In the past 21 months, while Israel’s genocide has devastated Palestinian lives and landscapes, the Tel Aviv stock exchange soared by 213 percent (USD), amassing $225.7 billion in market gains—including $67.8 billion in the past month alone. For some, genocide is profitable.” 

As for the historic role of corporations in Israel’s illegal policies, she stated; “For decades, Israel’s repression of Palestinian people has been scaffolded by corporations, fully aware of and yet indifferent to, decades of human rights violations and international crimes.” Recommending that companies disengage from Israel, the report says that “The serious, structural and sustained nature of Israel’s crimes and violations triggered a prima facie responsibility to disengage — one that many corporations ignored.”

Can companies or countries be neutral? “[C]orporations cannot claim neutrality: they are either part of the machinery of displacement—or part of dismantling it,” she wrote. As for neutral countries, Albanese has had difficulties in Switzerland. Albanese has accused the Swiss-based mining and trading company Glencore of being the main exporter of coal for electricity in Israel and called on the company to stop doing business with Israel. In addition, a panel discussion with Albanese and a representative of Amnesty International was cancelled at the University of Bern and moved to a private location. “The university cancelled its commitment at short notice on the grounds that a balance could not be guaranteed,” Swissinfo reported. 

While the July report dramatically shows the interface between business and human rights violations, it also indicated that the 40 or so companies mentioned are “just the tip of the iceberg.” 

By pointing to the relationship between business and human rights violations, Albanese’s report goes further than traditional civil and political human rights violations. The report outlines, in graphic terms, the economic complicity in which companies enable Israel’s genocide to continue. By highlighting economic profits during a genocide, the special rapporteur has deepened the notion of accountability and challenged companies doing business with Israel. As she wrote; “Ending this genocide requires not only outrage but rupture, reckoning, and the courage to dismantle what enables it.” 

As for reactions to the sanctions: Israel’s mission in Geneva told Reuters that the report was “legally groundless, defamatory and a flagrant abuse of her office.” Several of the companies cited have also condemned the report. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s spokesman said, “The use of unilateral sanctions against special rapporteurs or any other UN expert or official is unacceptable.”

As for Albanese’s response to the sanctions: In an interview with Al Jazeera, she said that the sanctions reminded her of “Mafia intimidating techniques.” And are obvious bullying, neither sublime nor wonderful. 

Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential bully pulpit has become a mere presidential pulpit used by a bully and his underlings who have no sense of legal, moral or ethical norms. 

Correction:  In my last post, I wrote that Saddam Hussein had crossed President Obama’s red line about using chemical weapons. Thanks to an attentive reader, I should have written: “President Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would cross a ‘red line for us.’ The red line was crossed. There was no U.S. response.”

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