104 murders in 107 days

The Trump administration's assault on alleged drug boats has killed about one person per day since early September. These are murders, and basic humanity demands that we not get complacent about them.

Screen capture from a video Donald Trump posted to Truth Social

One of the more surreal phenomena of the last year is the way in which our fleeting news cycle and plodding legal system combine to distract us from this administration’s atrocities.

On the legal side, the federal courts operate on a “doctrine of regularity” that presumes the executive is always acting in good faith, even when it clearly isn’t. The courts end up negotiating balances between constitutional rights and government power based on a reality that doesn’t exist. Even when they do get it right, that can take weeks or months, leaving the administration to continue its harmful policies in the meantime.

Meanwhile, on the news side, we have only a day or two to be outraged at the latest horrific thing before we’re inured to it and analysts start breaking it down into its component parts. So instead of focusing on the insanity of snatching people off the street and sending them to an overseas torture prison, to give one example, discussion quickly turns to whether the prisoners can be brought back with a habeas petition or class action, which federal court has jurisdiction over them, how many of them really do have a violent criminal record, or the meaning of their tattoos. It isn’t that these things aren’t important. It’s that the rapid zooming in to a granular level shifts our focus away from the shocking inhumanity of what was done to these men in our name.

With that in mind, let’s look at the administration’s drug boat strikes off the coast of Latin America. Since the first strike in early September, the administration has carried out 27 more, killing approximately 104 people as of this writing.

There is no reality in which these strikes are legal, moral, or remotely consistent with a nation that claims to adhere to democratic principles. The strikes are lawless, reckless, and barbaric, and the administration’s shifting justifications are a morass of misdirection and legal shell games.

The strikes are also clear, unambiguous violations of domestic and international law, and if any other country did it to U.S. citizens — whether or not they were engaged in criminal activity — we’d be prepping for war. They also fit the definition of crimes against humanity. (They aren’t war crimes, however — only because we are not at war with the cartels. If we were, as Trump insists, then they would be war crimes, too.)

Yet within days of the first strike, the pundit class was already debating minutiae. Were these really drug boats? Were they really headed to the United States? What evidence did the administration have that these were drug smugglers?

After we learned that there was video of the military killing two survivors of one strike with a follow-up strike, we began debating the legality of the second strike, and jaw-dropping absurdities like whether two men desperately clinging to a piece of burning flotsam might have been scheming to “reenter the fight.”

The boat strikes — all of them, not just the strike on survivors — are a moral, ethical, and legal catastrophe. They are, first and foremost, a gave injustice to the victims and their families. But they also reflect how the Trump era has numbed us to our own humanity.

Let’s be clear: The people killed in these strikes aren’t leaders of drug cartels. They aren’t even mid-level distributors. As the New York Times, the A.P. and other publications have reported, many are impoverished people — fishermen, bus drivers, and other laborers who make a few hundred bucks to run some drugs from the coast to an island. They are desperate people taking advantage of the meager opportunity created by the black market for illicit substances, a market Americans have created with our disposable income, insatiable appetite, and perpetually stupid drug policy. Some may have been simply paying to catch a ride, ignorant of whatever contraband may have been on the boat.

Yet after showing some initial backbone, Republicans in the Congress have apparently already moved on. Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker declared this week that “there is no evidence of war crimes” a statement that is technically true, but only because we aren’t actually at war with the cartels.

This isn’t a close call; it’s a bright line in the sand. Moral countries don’t summarily execute people without due process, and moral people don’t support countries that do. So if nothing else, this issue has at least served as a proxy for basic human decency. And it has people with massive audiences publicly advertising their own moral rot.

I don’t know how to respond to this kind of cruelty. I wouldn’t wish that sort of suffering on anyone — not war criminals, not serial killers, not Stephen Miller. But wishing it upon unarmed private citizens you know nothing about is part of an ominous rise of right-wing nihilism.

Aspiring Republicans and right-wing pundits once demonstrated their ideological fervor by coming up with ridiculously excessive border defenses to keep immigrants out. Now they defend atrocities — not just extrajudicial executions, but exiling migrants to serve life sentences in slave labor prisons where they’re beaten, raped, and tortured, the separation of children from their parents, and stacking up immigrants in filthy detention facilities. There is a mass, yearning hunger on the right to see foreign people suffer.

Here’s another example, in which the guy who co-founded Palantir — the company that now knows more about you than just about anyone but your spouse — argues that Pete Hegseth is right to beat his chest in public each time he orders another summary execution of poor people in a boat:

There was a time when the far right mocked the idea that words and ideas were akin to violence. No more. Now, “schoolmarm”-ism wreaks violence and evil while actual violence and evil — the calculated, coldblooded murder of unarmed people on the high seas — is masculine, virtuous, and bold. Empathy for suffering people, we’re told, is “toxic” or “suicidal.”

From its owner on down, X is riddled with pronouncements that supporting immigration and diversity is akin to a genocide against white people. It’s not hard to understand where that sort of rhetoric leads. It leads to soulless decay like publicly pining for the de-limbing of drug runners, or cheering the arrest of grandmothers or yanking immigrant children from the arms of their mothers.

All of that said, we should still strive to ensure that facts win out and aspire for a shared reality. So in the interest of creating a record of what exactly ghouls like Megyn Kelly and Joe Lonsdale are defending, here’s a primer on the objective truth about these strikes.

Fentanyl isn’t produced in or trafficked through Venezuela. So these boats aren’t carrying fentanyl.

About 70 percent of drug overdoses in the U.S. involve fentanyl. If there’s a national emergency with respect to overdoses (and this claim is also questionable), it’s because of fentanyl. Trump initially claimed that the boats he was bombing were trafficking fentanyl. “You see these boats,” he said. “They’re stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.” This was a lie. The black market fentanyl available in the U.S. is manufactured in Mexico, with precursor ingredients from China. About 80 percent of it enters the country in cars driven by U.S. citizens returning across the border.

Venezuela does not produce fentanyl. It is not a hub for trafficking fentanyl. It is, at worst, part of the route some cocaine travels after its manufactured in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. But cocaine isn’t a major cause of overdose deaths, and to the extent that it contributes to overdoses, it’s typically cocaine that was laced with fentanyl. And the fentanyl is almost always added after the drug has entered the U.S. (There’s also emerging evidence that it’s added unintentionally — more the product of cross-contamination than a deliberate effort by drug dealers to kill off their customers.)

Moreover, most of the cocaine that goes through Venezuela ends up in Europe, not in the U.S. Only about eight percent of black market cocaine in the U.S. was trafficked through Venezuela. And if you want to claim that we’re merely helping our European allies by murdering small-time cocaine smugglers, well, Europe doesn’t agree. European leaders have denounced the strikes, and the campaign has prompted some to stop sharing intelligence with the U.S.

Drug overdoses are bad and we should try to prevent them. But they are not a “national emergency.”

Drug overdose deaths soared from 2002 to 2022, driven largely by opioids, particularly fentanyl. They finally peaked in 2022, dropped slightly in 2023, then dropped by an incredible 27 percent last year, with opioid overdoses in particular dropping by 34 percent. A near-historic decline in overdose deaths is not a national emergency that demands extra-constitutional presidential powers.

It’s always difficult to suss out what causes those types of swings, but public health researchers say that — in addition to public awareness of fentanyl-laced drugs, the proliferation of less-toxic fentanyl, and, unfortunately, the deaths of people most vulnerable to overdose — two policies contributed to the reduction: the expansion of drug addiction treatment covered by Medicaid, and the use of Nalaxone to reverse overdoses in progress.

Trump’s claim that overdose deaths are a national emergency is also hard to swallow given that he’s gutting the programs that are preventing them. Incredibly, he has even taken aim at Naloxone, gutting funding for distribution of the miracle drug that has saved the lives of tens of thousands of people mid-overdose. One study estimated that the drug saved 27,000 lives between 1996 and 2014 alone. It seems likely that, as both toxic fentanyl and Naloxone proliferated in the years since, the number of lives the drug saved per year only grew. Another study published in October estimated that every dollar invested in distribution of the drug returns about $3,200 in benefits.

In April, the administration put out a drug control strategy document stating that it would support policies like distributing fentanyl test strips and Nalaxone. Yet in an executive order issued in July, Trump vowed to end grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for programs aimed at, as he put out, “so-called ‘harm reduction.’” Those are the very programs that distribute Nalaxone and test strips.

Moreover, Trump’s cuts to Medicaid alone are expected to cut off addiction treatment for a million or more people. The cuts will also hobble research into emerging threats in the illicit drug market.

The administration has also cut funding for addiction and overdose prevention programs run through the DOJ, NIH, CDC, and other HHS programs.

The boat strikes won’t prevent overdose deaths. They’ll have almost no effect on overdoses at all.

Trump claimed after the first boat strike that each boat contains enough drugs to kill 25,000 Americans. This is a nonsensical figure pulled from thin air. If it were true, the 28 boat strikes carried out thus far would have “prevented” 700,000 overdose deaths. There are fewer than 100,000 total overdose deaths in the U.S. each year. Trump has also claimed that “300 million people died last year from drugs.” The entire U.S. population is 348 million. He later put the figure at 300,000, but even that is more than three times the actual figure.

The alleged drug boats weren’t likely headed to the U.S.

The first seven strikes, and eight of the first ten were in the Caribbean or western Atlantic Ocean. About 80 percent of the U.S. illicit drug supply that comes from Latin America comes from the Pacific side of the continent. Many of those boats were likely headed to Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean Islands. None of them could have made the trip from Venezuela to the U.S. without stopping multiple times to refuel. Whatever illicit drugs may have been on the boats would have likely changed hands several times and, again, likely ended up in Europe. Several boats were headed away from the U.S. mainland.

After critics began making this point, the administration appears to have shifted strategy. The last five strikes were all in the Pacific. As of now, 16 of the 28 strikes were in the Caribbean or western Atlantic Ocean. This, at the very least, demonstrates that the administration began these executions with no real strategy in mind.

The administration doesn’t know who or what was on the boats they destroyed.

Trump has yet to present any evidence that the boats were smuggling drugs. Some may have been. We just don’t know. The first boat had 11 people aboard. You know what you don’t do when you’re smuggling drugs on a small boat? You don’t put 11 people on that boat. That’s less room for the drugs. And it’s more people who know what you’re doing.

Of course, it’s possible that not all of those 11 people knew about the drugs. Perhaps the drug runners were hiding the drugs on a boat that was transporting people from Venezuela to Trinidad. That would make those extra people innocent. And then we killed them.

According to media reports, Admiral Frank Bradley told the House Intelligence Committee during a classified meeting that the U.S. military had identified all 11 people on the boat and concluded that it had the authority to kill them. This apparently was not persuasive. The next day, ranking member Rep. Jim Hines publicly rejected that narrative. “We might have known one or two, I don’t know, but we certainly didn’t know the identities of all 11. So nobody can characterize who all these people in any of these boats are.”

Media outlets have also reported that despite the administration’s public pronouncements, officials have admitted in classified briefings to Congress that they don’t know the identities of everyone aboard the boats.

Killing low-level boat runners will not harm or impede the drug cartels.

Here’s the thing about the people this administration is murdering: the cartels don’t care about them either. They’re subsistence-level fishermen and laborers trying to earn extra money. They’re easily replaceable. The Trump administration is killing them to project toughness and lethality, not to disrupt the supply chain for illicit drugs. We know this because for most of the cartels, the amount of cocaine destroyed in these strikes is a rounding error.

Even setting aside the moral and legal failings, this is also just really dumb strategy. No one with expertise in this sort of thing thinks this will do anything to put a dent in the illicit drug trade. When you kill drug runners you can’t leverage charges against them for information. You get no intelligence benefit. Moreover, the reckless policy has prompted other countries, including close allies, to stop sharing intelligence with the U.S. That’s all great news for the cartels.

This administration doesn’t care about innocence or due process.

According to whistleblower and former Trump DHS official Miles Taylor, Stephen Miller wanted to carry out these strikes during Trump’s first term. The idea was roundly rejected by saner people in the administration as reckless and illegal.

But we also know that one of Miller’s chief objectives in Trump’s second term has been to purge the federal government of those saner people. The administration’s repeated lies about the people it sent to CECOT, the people beaten, abused, and wrongly detained by immigration officials, and the people in these boats have made clear that the White House’s main priority is to inflict pain and suffering on immigrants, whether they came to the U.S. legally or not. And I’ve already discussed at length here how the mass deportation effort has gutted due process for migrants and people seeking asylum.

In any case, here’s the president cracking a joke about how the United States’ indiscriminate assassination campaign is making fishermen terrified to go on the water, where they earn their living.

And here’s the vice president making the same joke:

Drug smuggling is not a capital crime.

Donald Trump has been pretty open about his desire to execute drug dealers. He has praised former Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte specifically for his policy of extrajudicially executing suspected drug offenders. Duterte is now being tried for crimes against humanity because of those executions. Trump has also praised countries like China and Singapore, where drug offenders can be executed, and said we should have a similar policy in the U.S.

But at least for now, drug smuggling is not a capital crime in the United States. Our law does not allow the government to execute people for smuggling drugs even when they’ve been tried and convicted with overwhelming evidence. Over the years, we have regularly arrested people for drug smuggling in other countries, extradited them to the U.S., and tried them here. That’s what the law requires.

Trump seems to have simply decided that’s too much trouble. As he puts it in the video below, “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be like, dead.”

We are not at war with the drug cartels.

The administration first claimed that these strikes were acts of self-defense. When the videos they posted to social media showed that clearly wasn’t true — that these people were unarmed — they shifted, and now claim that the drug cartels are waging a form of war on the U.S., and that the drugs on these boats are their weapon. Trump has tried to bolster this claim by declaring the cartels to be “narco-terrorists,” a meaningless, made-up phrase with no basis in law.

In fact, none of this has any legal weight whatsoever. The president can’t simply unilaterally claim that we are at war with some amorphous entity in order to justify circumventing constitutional restraints on his power. (I should clarify: He can’t do this legally. But if no one stops him, he can certainly get away with it.)

Drug cartels are black market businesses, not terrorists. Yes, they deploy violence to protect their business, and their tactics can be ruthless and inhumane. But they use violence to make money and protect turf, not to advance a cause, which is the definition of terrorism.

In some countries, cartels have assassinated politicians, judges, and journalists who threaten their bottom line. That could at least plausibly be called terrorism. But there’s no evidence that they’ve done anything like that in the U.S. The United States is their market.

But even if they were legitimate “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” under U.S. law, that would not authorize the boat strikes. That designation allows the government to take some punitive actions against those groups and the people who support them. It does not authorize the government to kill them.

If we were at war with drug cartels, the boat strikes would violate the rules of armed conflict.

Executing the survivors of a shipwreck violates both domestic and international rules of war. That’s true even if the survivors are enemy combatants, and even if the wreck itself was the result of a legitimate combat strike.

In fact, in the U.S. Code of Military Justice, executing the survivors of a shipwreck is mentioned as the prototypical example of an illegal order that service members are obligated to refuse.

After World War II, the United States charged, tried, convicted, and in some cases executed German and Japanese soldiers for killing allied survivors of shipwrecks. One would think we did so in the interest of basic humanity. But we also have rules like this specifically to protect U.S. troops — or now I guess U.S. citizens — in a similarly helpless position.

Even as he executes low-level drug runners, Trump continues to pardon high-level drug distributors.

The main reason to be dubious of Trump’s claim that he needs to murder people to save us all from drugs is that he keeps pardoning major drug distributors. Recipients of those pardons include former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who, according to the DOJ, helped smuggle over 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Trump granted him a full pardon, apparently at the urging of Roger Stone and wealthy members of Mar-a-Lago. Hernandez was released just days into his 45-year sentence.

When asked about the pardon, Trump initially claimed to know nothing about it (quite the defense, given his idiotic criticism of Biden’s “auto-pen” pardons). Trump then said it was unfair to hold a president accountable for drug dealing done in his country, which would be a fine argument except that (a) Hernandez was convicted of both conspiring in and enriching himself from the drug trade that passed through his country, and (b) this is precisely the accusation Trump has levied against Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and to a lesser extent, Colombian president Gustavo Petro.

Trump then claimed that the prosecution of Hernandez was a “Biden set-up,” a bizarre assertion given that one of the lead prosecutors on the case against Hernadez’s brother, which led to the case against him was . . . Emil Bove.

In May, Trump pardoned Larry Hoover, the former leader of the Gangster Disciples in Chicago, who oversaw that gang’s drug trade. Prosecutors estimated they sold $100 million in illegal drugs in Chicago alone, along with all the itinerant crime and violence that comes with running a major drug operation. That pardon apparently came at the request of Trump supporter Kanye West.

Trump also pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the guy who operated the Silk Road “black web” site that facilitated the trade of illicit drugs. I think there were a lot of problems with Ulbricht’s prosecution, but that isn’t why Trump pardoned him. He pardoned Ulbricht as a favor to Trump-supporting factions of the Libertarian Party.

And at the end of his first term, the Trump administration dropped the charges against former Mexican general and Secretary of Defense Salvador Cienfuegos, who had been arrested and charged for drug trafficking and laundering money on behalf of the H-2 cartel. That pardon appears to have come at the behest of the Mexican government.

This is not an administration dedicated to protecting the country from the carnage of drug overdoses. It’s an administration that is murdering low-level drug runners while letting the high-level operators actually running these operations off the hook — so long as they pay the right MAGA influencers or have patronage to offer in exchange.

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This administration doesn’t believe in war crimes.

After weeks of boasting about his prolific killing of “narco-terrorists,” including posting a meme of beloved children’s character Franklin the Turtle blowing up a boat, Pete Hegseth now denies giving an explicit “kill all” order with respect to the second boat strike in September. He has blamed Admiral Bradley for the order to kill the two survivors, while at the same time purporting to defend Bradley’s decision.

But it seems pretty clear that anyone currently serving under Hegseth at the Pentagon knows that “kill them all” is the defense secretary’s guiding philosophy, whether or not he makes his intent explicit.

It’s no secret that Hegseth furiously — and successfully — lobbied Donald Trump to pardon two men convicted of war crimes. They had been convicted of killing or ordering subordinates to kill unarmed civilians in Afghanistan. Hegseth also lobbied Trump to reverse the demotion of Eddie Gallagher, who was accused by his fellow Navy SEALS of basically killing innocent civilians for sport.

Gallagher’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, is also Hegseth’s personal lawyer, and defended him when he was accused of sexual assault. After Hegseth took office, Parlatore was recommissioned as a Navy commander, and now oversees media relations at the Pentagon. It was Parlatore who crafted the policy requiring media outlets to sign a pledge promising not to report information unauthorized by the Department of Defense.

Hegseth’s favorite word is lethality. In his weird Tony Robbins-meets-William Calley lecture to the generals and admirals he assembled earlier this year, he said, “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”

This is a lifelong crusade for Hegseth, a man who is rather fond of crusades. He doesn’t believe in war crimes. He boasted in one of his books that he specifically told troops under his command in Iraq to ignore the military’s rules of engagement.

This is why one of the first things Hegseth did was purge the Pentagon of JAG officers, the military lawyers who advise the Pentagon on issues like rules of engagement (or, say, the legality of deploying the military domestically), and who prosecute soldiers who commit war crimes. Hegseth has also defended Col. Michael Steele, who he served under in Iraq. Steele reportedly encouraged a “kill board” incentivizing his troops to compete to pile up the most bodies, and gave out “kill coins” to encourage more lethality. Four men under Steele’s command were later charged with killing unarmed Iraqis. They’d later say Steele told them to kill all military-aged men in the area they were raiding. Hegseth has called Steele a “certified badass.”

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Hegseth and the administration have demonstrated a consciousness of guilt.

It seems clear that people within the administration were concerned enough with the legal ramifications of killing the survivors of the strike in September that they stopped the “no survivors” policy. But when there were survivors after a subsequent strike in October, they weren’t sure what to do with them. If these were the hardened “narco-terrorists” the administration claimed, this would be an easy call. You arrest them, extradite them to the U.S. and try them.

But administration officials knew they couldn’t do that. Because they had been falsely claiming to know exactly who the people they were killing really were. And at a trial, all of that would come out. So they scrambled. The New York Times reported that the Pentagon wanted to send them to CECOT, but were rebuffed by State Department lawyers. Instead, they repatriated them to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador. Trump said at the time that the men would be tried in those countries. They have not been charged or tried.

There are other indications that the administration knows what it’s doing is illegal:

• Hegseth has barred Pentagon officials from talking about the strikes with Congress.

• The lead attorney for the U.S. Southern Command believed the strikes were illegal, as did numerous other attorneys with experience in the laws of war. They were overruled by political appointees at the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

• Admiral Alvin Holsey stepped down as head of the Southern Command around the time the strikes began. He’d been at the job for only a year. While Holsey and Hegseth apparently sparred on a number of issues, it’s been widely speculated that Holsey believes the strikes are illegal and wanted no part in them.

• The OLC has refused to release the memos that allegedly lay out the legal authorization for the strikes. That’s probably because even John “Crush the Testicles of Children” Yoo is dubious of any possible legal rationale. That office, incidentally, is currently led by T. Elliot Gaiser, a 36-year-old lawyer who worked on Trump’s effort to overthrow the 2020 election, and who believes Mike Pence had the authority to refuse to certify the results.

• The boat strike policy came up last February at a DOJ conference on organized crime, where then senior DOJ appointee Emil Bove apparently announced that, instead of using the Coast Guard to intercept drug shipments as the U.S. has been doing for decades, the new plan was to “just sink the boats.” Those in attendance were stunned. “I looked around at others in that room when he said that, and jaws literally dropped,” one person in attendance told NPR. Bove is, of course, also known for telling DOJ attorneys to “say fuck you to judges” when ordering a plane of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT in violation of a federal judge’s instructions. And he’s now a federal judge himself.

• According to media reports, Hegseth called one advisor who told him the strikes were illegal “weak.” He called a different advisor who said the same thing a “pussy” during a meeting with other officials.

• The Pentagon deliberately used code words when discussing possible survivors of the boat strikes in order to misdirect State Department officials. The New York Times, for example, reports that they used the phrase “distressed mariners,” a term traditionally used to describe civilian survivors of incidents unrelated to conflict. This even though the administration claims to be at war with the cartels as justification for the strikes.

There is no national security reason to withhold video footage of the second strike.

Hegseth has claimed that the administration can’t release the video of the second strike on the survivors of that September strike because it’s “top secret” and would reveal methods and tactics. This is nonsense. Hegseth has been posting videos of first strikes to social media. Retired military officials have said there’s nothing that could possibly be revealed in the video that Hegseth didn’t already make known by releasing video of the first strikes.

The boat strikes are substantially different from the drone strikes carried out in the “war on terror”

Some of have compared the strikes to those on overseas targets throughout the war on terror. But there are some important differences. First, those strikes were authorized by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was passed by Congress. That legislation gave allowed strikes against any forces associated with the parties who carried out the September 11th attacks, and Congress has since passed updates to the law. There is real debate over how long the AUMF ought to authorize such strikes, the lack of due process the U.S. has afforded to targets, and the military’s seemingly high tolerance for collateral damage. I think the AUMF is far too broad, the lack of due process is appalling, and our tolerance for the deaths of innocents is way too high. I also don’t think a president should have the open-ended power to fight an eternal war against an amorphous enemy. President Barack Obama’s drone killing of a U.S. citizen in Yemen in particular set a horrible precedent, and many of us warned it was an ominous sign of the powers future administrations might claim.

That said, there is no world in which what Trump is doing is authorized by the AUMF. Again, drug cartels are not terrorists, these drug runners have not attacked the United States, and we’ve seen no evidence they plan to do so.

Trump’s most recent gambit — and assault on the English language — was to declare fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction.” This makes as little sense as calling drug dealers “terrorists.” Words have meanings. This of course is merely the most absurdist application of a policy that’s been in place since the September 11th attacks. But if we let presidents elude constitutional restraints and claim sweeping powers simply by uttering magic words like “terrorist” or “weapon of mass destruction,” those restraints might as well not exist.

If Trump can do this, he can do just about anything.

It ought to go without saying, but letting a president claim the power to execute people without due process, without any sort of oversight or review, and without ever requiring him to a legal rationale or present evidence to the public, to Congress, or to the court simply by declaring a person, group, or vague collection of people as “terrorists” is a gobsmackingly dangerous idea. And it’s even worse given how eager this administration has been to label its political opponents terrorists.

In a chilling memo issued last September, Trump claimed to designate as “terrorism-supporting” any group or person espousing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” or showing “extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” It even claims “organized doxing” to be an act of terrorism. Doxing, or publishing the names of, say, ICE or Border Patrol officers, is perfectly legal, so long as it doesn’t include a specific incitement to violence. Identifying abusive police officers is, in fact, a basic act of journalism.

Trump’s memo calls for clearly unconstitutional financial, legal, and prosecutorial targeting of huge swaths of the public for clearly protected speech. Earlier this month, a DOJ memo instructed federal prosecutors to pursue terrorism-related charges against anyone who “doxes” or “impedes” federal immigration officers. It also suggests that anyone who donates to organizations that support doxing or impeding immigration enforcement could be charged as supporters of terrorism. It’s a definition broad enough to include whistle brigades, Know Your Rights groups, and others who advocate for immigrants and help them avoid deportation. Again, this is all First Amendment-protected activity.

It isn’t hard to imagine this administration taking the next step, and claiming the right to simply assassinate people it accuses of this sort of “terrorism,” particularly if, as we’ve been seeing, its efforts to charge people criminally keep failing in court.

Sound farfetched? For weeks, journalist Nick Turse at The Intercept has been asking the administration to simply affirm that extrajudicial executions on U.S. soil of American citizens or others who meet Trump’s definition of “terrorist” would be illegal and unconstitutional. It’s a simple question that any other administration would have quickly answered, possibly with some offense that anyone would even ask. The Trump administration has refused to answer.

As one former State Department lawyer told Turse, “Many of us have warned that there seems to be no legal limiting principle to the Administration’s claims of authority to use force and to kill people . . . This is one of the many reasons it is so important that Congress push back on the President’s claim that he can simply label transporting drugs an armed attack on the United States and then claim the authority to summarily execute people on that basis.”

Despite their public statements, Trump and his people have made clear that illicent drugs are just a pretext for these strikes.

Trump has been threatening, preparing for, and agitating for war with Venezuela. He and his administration have made clear that toppling Nicolas Maduro is a major priority.

Just this week Trump announced a blockade of the country, which is essentially an act of war. And in a bizarre rant on Truth Social, he made clear that this warmongering isn’t over Maduro’s dictatorial refusal to leave office, or the economic and political oppression he has imposed on his people. It’s about oil. Trump accused Venezuela of “stealing” U.S. land and stealing U.S. oil, apparently referring to the country’s 2007 nationalization of its oil fields and its expulsion of U.S. corporations.

Meanwhile, in an interview with Vanity Fair, Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles gave the game away with a line so inflected with passive evil that a chill went down my spine when I heard it.

“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” she said.

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