Donald Trump once said he could shoot someone and get away with it. 223 bodies later, it’s time for Democrats to prove him wrong.
Early Monday, U.S. Southern Command announced that the military had carried out a “lethal kinetic strike” on a small boat in the eastern Pacific, killing two people. The Pentagon says the vessel was trafficking drugs. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. We’ll never know because they destroyed all evidence, and the two people aboard were not stopped, searched, arrested, charged, or tried. They were obliterated from the air on the say-so of a classified Trump “kill order” no U.S. court has ever reviewed.
Ten years ago, Donald Trump boasted that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. Everyone treated it as a grotesque joke about his political durability. But as I’ve been saying for years now, it wasn’t actually a joke. This is the same man who said earlier this year the only limitation on his power is his “own morality.” And I can tell you from firsthand experience in meetings with the man, he thinks a good bit about killing and torturing people.
His Fifth-Ave remark was a madman’s theory of power. If he acted with enough impunity, he thought, no one would hold him accountable. In the second term, he’s blitzed the world with test cases of that theory in the most literal way.
Since September of last year, his administration has destroyed at least 67 boats and killed at least 221 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific without trial. He said he could get away with something like this. So far, he has.
Readers of this publication have seen this coming for a long time. Nearly a year ago, I wrote about how I was the first to warn about the illegality of Trump’s boat strikes when they were in the earliest phases of ideation in his first term… and then again immediately after this campaign began in the second term. Trump called himself the “law and order president,” but what he really meant was “I am the law.” He’s deploying the armed forces of the United States to carry out his own presidential judgments, lethally, with no court in the loop.
But something strange happened on the way to strike number 68. The killing stopped. Or I should say it “paused.”
For more than two months (from late June until this weekend), there were no deadly boat strikes at all. That’s pretty odd, given that summer is when we used to see spikes in the data — i.e. more drug-running attempts. The administration has offered no explanation for the pause, and the silence is incredibly suspicious. Here’s what I can say with certainty: drug traffickers did not take the summer off, nor did the boats stop running.
Whatever interrupted this campaign wasn’t happening on the water. My strong suspicion is that the pause reflects cold feet somewhere inside our government. Perhaps uniformed officers and military lawyers pushed back and raised alarms about the legality of continuing these operations, and that made the administration nervous. Clearly whoever was standing in the way has since been moved (or removed) because the boat strikes are back on.
If that’s what happened, Trump officials were right to be nervous. Killing civilians without trial is a pretty dirty business, and merely slapping a label on them — like “unlawful enemy combatants” — doesn’t make them allowable military targets. Indeed, on their face, these strikes go beyond “controversial” or “legally contested.” They are obviously illegal. And the people who order, approve, and paper over illegal killings can go to prison for it, no matter what a classified Justice Department memo tells them.
If someone inside the administration knows what happened during those two months, the country deserves to hear it. My inbox is open. But I’d advise them to go to Congress as quickly as possible before they get swept up on the wrong side of the eventual investigation.
None of this is how America handles drug interdiction. When I served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term — and when there were at least some semi-competent people working in national security policy — operations like these crossed our desks routinely. There were dozens upon dozens of them. Most of the stories went the same way. Suspected trafficking vessels were monitored, intercepted, and boarded by the Coast Guard and our partners.
In just about every single case I can recall, the suspects were arrested. In zero of those cases were the suspects executed on the spot by U.S. forces. And it ain’t because we were squeamish about punishing drug smugglers. You don’t use lethal force against someone unless they pose an imminent threat to life, and a boat carrying drugs a thousand miles from our shores is not an imminent threat.
More importantly, if you actually want to stop the drugs, you must stop the boat. You don’t sink it. When U.S. forces capture smugglers, they interrogate them and flip them. Then they map the network (from the financiers and the port officials to the cartel lieutenants) and roll up the entire operation.
Trump’s mafioso, tough-guy theatrics have made the situation worse. When you blow up the boat, you incinerate the evidence, the intelligence, and the witnesses. Every strike basically becomes a dead end. Law enforcement veterans have been saying this for months, and they’re completely right.
Earlier this month, Senator Tim Kaine, who sits on the Armed Services Committee and has reviewed the classified material, warned the White House that these strikes have likely killed people who weren’t involved in narcotrafficking at all. So there’s that. A United States senator, after reviewing the intelligence, believes the program is illegitimate and that even if it were targeting genuine traffickers, it has evidently killed innocent people anyway.
This doesn’t sound like “law and order” to me. It sounds like the early phases of an investigation that leads to criminal indictments. And that investigation could begin in earnest very soon.
In seventy-odd days, Americans vote, and if Democrats retake even one chamber of Congress, they will hold subpoena power over every email and shred of paper that led to Trump’s boat-bombing campaign. I would urge them to put Trump’s extrajudicial killings at the top of the investigative agenda — even above the corruption and the self-dealing — because nothing else on the list involves the government of the United States killing people without trial. The two-month pause will be one of the first questions: what did the lawyers say, who objected, and who overruled them?
Trump told us exactly who he was on that stage in 2016. He could shoot someone, and he’d get away with it. For at least 223 people and counting, he has. The job of the next Congress (and eventually, I believe, of prosecutors) is to prove him wrong.
Your friend, in defiance,
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