President Donald Trump — whether intentionally or not — is laying the groundwork to normalize the concept of the U.S. military’s killing Americans without due process.
With his recent legally questionable use of the U.S. military to summarily execute suspected drug smugglers in international waters — combined with his increasingly violent rhetoric regarding military incursions into several U.S. cities that voted overwhelmingly against him — the president is once again taking America down a dark road.
If the past eight months should have taught us anything, it’s that there is nothing that Trump and his administration believe they don’t have the right to do.
Second-term Trump has already demonstrated a complete lack of respect for constitutional limits on executive power, the rule of law and due process. His administration has misidentified innocent people as “gang members” and sent them to foreign torture prisons where they reported enduring physical and sexual abuse. His immigration crackdowns feature masked, unidentifiable agents of the state who regularly violently detain people based on their appearance — including natural-born U.S. citizens. He has used the military for domestic law enforcement purposes — and promised to continue to do so even after a court ruled that illegal. And this is hardly a comprehensive list of the outrageous, un-American abuses of power of the still-young second Trump administration.
But last week’s strike on a civilian boat by the U.S. military in the Southern Caribbean, which killed 11 people, is a dangerous new step. The administration hasn’t provided evidence for its claim that the dead were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, based in Venezuela. And beyond Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s citing the fact that Trump’s State Department designated Tren de Aragua as a “foreign terrorist organization” in February and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s saying U.S. intelligence indicated the boat was headed to the U.S., the administration hasn’t fully laid out its legal justification for killing them rather than interdicting them — even if the deceased are the “cartel members who poison our fellow citizens” that Vice President JD Vance claims they were.
As Charlie Savage explained in The New York Times:
“Because killing people is so extreme — and doing it without due process risks killing the wrong people by mistake — the question of which rules apply is not simply a matter of policy choice. Domestic and international law both set standards constraining when presidents and nations can lawfully use wartime force. After breaking new ground by labeling drug cartels as “terrorists,” the president is now redefining the peacetime criminal problem of drug trafficking as an armed conflict, and telling the U.S. military to treat even suspected low-level drug smugglers as combatants.”
When a liberal influencer described the “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process” as a “war crime,” the vice president replied, “I don’t give a s— what you call it.”
Vance’s statement was, as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said, “a despicable and thoughtless sentiment.” But sharing and saying things so repulsive and over the top that they can be taken as “just trolling” or the literal espousing of gutter racism and fascism is part and parcel with MAGA gaslighting. The posting style that was once used exclusively by Trump himself (and his most attention-thirsting online influencer fans) has become one of the movement’s enduring traits. Now Cabinet members proudly comport themselves like 2016-era alt-right sh–posters.
Days before the Department of Homeland Security launched its Chicago immigration crackdown, “Operation Midway Blitz,” Trump posted another in a long series of AI slop memes, this one a take on the famous scene from “Apocalypse Now” in which Robert Duvall’s Col. Kilgore says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning … smells like victory.”
The classic film is about the madness and futility of the Vietnam War — a war America lost and during which the U.S. military killed and maimed untold thousands of civilians by using napalm to drop fire from the sky. Trump’s spin, however, was different: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning. … Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
It’s hardly unreasonable to fear that Trump might some day very soon declare certain people on U.S. soil to be “terrorists,” subject to extralegal deadly force without due process.
Is this just harmless trolling intended to ruffle the feathers of humorless libs? Or is it a wish that he wants to make a reality? Take, for example, Hegseth’s recent comments after Trump signed an executive order reverting the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. The former Fox News host stressed that “words matter” and that the name change was meant to signal “maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.”
Words do, in fact, matter, and that’s why it’s hardly unreasonable to fear that Trump might some day very soon declare certain people on U.S. soil — citizen, legal immigrant or otherwise — to be “terrorists,” subject to extralegal deadly force without due process.
Skeptics may choose to dismiss out of hand the possibility that Trump would turn the military’s guns on Americans he deems “the enemy within.” That’s worse than a lack of imagination; it’s a form of derangement syndrome. If the past eight months should have taught us anything, it’s that there is nothing that Trump and his administration believe they don’t have the right to do. And that includes the taking of human life.
