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During his unhinged rant to the United Nations yesterday, Donald Trump tried to turn his lawless attacks on purported “drug boats” in the southern Caribbean into a punchline of sorts.
“There aren't too many boats that are traveling on the seas by Venezuela. They tend not to want to travel very quickly anymore,” he said.
Trump has used that line a few times in different venues over the past week, including during a Fox News interview where he talked about “water fishing” as though there’s any other kind.
JD Vance thinks it’s so funny that he used a speech last week ostensibly about tax policy to briefly celebrate war crimes and murder. Boasting about the deadly strikes with the cadence of a very mediocre stand-up comedian, Vance quipped, “Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing in that area of the world!”
The MAGA faithful duly laughed. But as journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff pointed out, the “joke” here is essentially “we based our air strikes on such sketchy intel that we can’t figure out who is a fisherman and who is a drug smuggler.”
Trump and Vance don’t really care if they kill drug smugglers. In fact, Trump’s justifications for the strikes are inconsistent, to say the least. The murders of Venezuelans are as chaotic as they are vicious — and it’s not an accident that Vance is as enthusiastic about the chaos as about the violence.
The goal seems to be to use the military almost at random — not to advance a goal or deter a threat, but simply to exercise power and terror.
Death at sea
During his aforementioned speech, Vance was celebrating the second attack on a Venezuelan boat this month, and there was a third one since. The first came on September 2 when the US military struck a Venezuelan speedboat, killing 11 people. Last week, the two subsequent strikes killed a total of six more.
Trump has claimed the boats are being attacked because they’re smuggling drugs, but his evidence doesn’t amount to much more than “trust me, bro.”
Nobody in the administration has provided evidence of the alleged “big bags of cocaine and fentanyl,” and of course you can’t actually visually confirm whether anything on board contained cocaine or fentanyl since smugglers don’t generally label their cargo.
Beyond this transparent nonsense, Trump has provided precious little information about the ships to the public or to Congress. More, the first boat that was hit appeared to have turned around and been on its way back to shore — which underlines the fact that these ships were not, in any way, by any possible interpretation, a threat to people or the military of the United States.
These attacks in some respects recall the drone war of the Bush and Obama administrations — one which Trump escalated the last time he was in office. Drone attacks were justified after 9/11 on the grounds that Al Qaeda and other radical groups in the Middle East had the will and the capacity to harm US civilian targets.
Drone strikes had a horrible civilian death toll, were domestically unpopular, and may have led to more radicalization abroad. They resulted in great misery and horror as people watched drones their families and loved ones. (This was why Biden largely ended them.)
But dubious as the rationale for drones was, Trump’s justifications for murdering Venezuelans are exponentially less convincing. Venezuelan boats hundreds of miles from the US that may or may not be carrying illegal cargo and are running away are not a danger to US civilians. If they were suspected of carrying contraband, the US could have boarded them and seized it.
The attacks are so poorly justified, and so unprecedented, that even some Republicans have suggested they may not be legal. John Yoo, a former Bush administration official notorious for providing legal justifications for torture, told Politico that Trump was crossing the line between military and criminal matters.
“Traditionally, we’ve treated drug crimes as a criminal justice problem,” he said. “And the administration needs to make a stronger case than it’s been making so far about why the law should consider cartels to be enemies of war.”
Sen. Rand Paul, a conservative libertarian from Kentucky, also rebuked Vance for celebrating the strikes.
“What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial,” he tweeted.
Killing in the name of
As Paul suggests, the reason we have due process is to give people a chance to defend themselves and force the state to explain exactly why suspects have been arrested or targeted in the first place.
Trump says he’s attacking drug smuggling boats — but then Trump suggests to the UN that the military might be targeting other ships too, perhaps accidentally, perhaps just for the hell of it.
Venezuela has noticed that Trump’s rationale is thin. President Nicolás Maduro said (accurately) that the attacks were “a military attack on civilians who were not at war and were not militarily threatening any country.” He also argued that Trump was focused not on drug enforcement, but on “regime change for oil.”
There’s some evidence that Trump wants a broader war. Trump recently deployed naval assets in the Caribbean, including at least 10 stealth fighter jets. He’s also offered a $50 million reward for information that leads to the capture of Maduro. He claims though that he is not discussing regime change internally with Secretary of State Marco Rubio or others in his regime.
And it’s true that Trump doesn’t seem very focused on oil. Instead, his attacks on Venezuela appear to be linked to his anti-immigrant obsession. Last week he posted on Truth Social that Venezuelans in the US are criminals and “people from mental institutions.” He screamed in all caps, “GET THEM THE HELL OUT OF OUR COUNTRY, RIGHT NOW, OR THE PRICE YOU PAY WILL BE INCALCULABLE!”
That bonkers post is in line with Trump’s cruel attacks on Venezuelan immigrants. His administration is working to revoke temporary protected status for 270,000 of them, many of whom were granted protection after fleeing the autocratic regimes of Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez.
Venezuelan communities in Florida especially were (until recently) conservative and pro-Trump. But Trump, as Venezuelans are learning, hates all immigrants, especially if they aren’t white. Rather than seeing politically friendly refugees from left-wing regimes as allies (as earlier Republican presidents did), Trump simply smears them by conflating them with criminals and with the government they fled.
None of this is surprising. But it is incoherent. Is Trump trying to stop drug shipments? Or is he murdering Venezuelan civilians to pressure Venezuela to take in hundreds of thousands of deportees? Or is he trying to unseat Maduro? Does Trump even know?
It’s quite possible that different people around Trump have different goals, and that he babbles about drug strikes or deportations depending on whether he last talked to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or rabid ethnic cleansing proponent Stephen Miller. But the jollies administration officials get at the thought of murdering civilians suggests that the various justifications Trump has offered for murdering Venezuelan civilians are, to some extent, simply pretexts or excuses.
As Adam Serwer says, in this case, as in most things relating to Trump, “the cruelty is the point.”
Vance and his fans are cheering not despite the fact that their president is terrorizing innocents, but because he is. Or, to put it another way, MAGA believes that all Venezuelans, foreigners, and/or all non-white people, are by definition second class humans at best and guilty of being outsiders and traitors to MAGA at worst.
This is the logic of fascism. And while that logic is often deployed abroad, it’s also inevitably rolled out at home. Trump and Vance are making it clear that they consider it their right, and their pleasure, to murder anyone, anywhere, for any reason or for no beyond a passing whim. That’s an ugly message to Venezuelans. It’s an ugly message to the UN and to America as well.
That’s it for today
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Thank you for this piece.
This isn’t foreign policy, it’s a regime architecture built on hatred. Not strategy, not deterrence, not even coherent doctrine. Just raw, performative cruelty. The strikes in Venezuela aren’t about national security; they’re about spectacle. And the laughter that follows is a behavioral signal: violence is now a form of loyalty.
I’ve written extensively on how authoritarian systems rewire incentives to reward obedience and punish empathy. This administration has no moral compass; only transactional and for personal gain. Human rights aren’t part of the equation. That’s why liberal democracies like Canada and the EU are quietly becoming the new stewards of dignity and restraint. They’re absorbing the moral slack the U.S. has abandoned.
This moment isn’t just dangerous. It’s clarifying.
— Johan
Professor of Behavioral Economics & Applied Cognitive Theory; Former Foreign Service Officer
What hasn't been explained to me is why a bona fida drug smuggling operation would have 11 people on what's basically a not very big motor boat. That was the case with the first one. And if the point was to show how they were doing things about drugs they'd have made a point of boarding the vessel, finding the drugs, having them independently tested and then arranged for triumphant press conferences in the US.
I can't help thinking someone (or a gang of them) wanted to take the chance of looking big and powerful with no risk of US servicemen getting killed or sympathy for the deceased infecting mainstream Americans.