For most of our history, American presidents have at least gone through the motions of cloaking lethal force in some form of legal justification.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War but sought Congress’s approval. Franklin Roosevelt went to Congress for Lend-Lease before escalating aid to Britain, and sought a declaration of war against Japan. George W. Bush and Barack Obama leaned heavily on the post-9/11 Authorizations for Use of Military Force to justify everything from Afghanistan to drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia to killing Bin Laden.
It looks like Trump has taken Miller’s reported hypothetical and turned it into policy. What was once an outrageous musing has become a bloody precedent.
The principle has always been that the United States does not simply kill people without some kind of legal process. It may be stretched, it may be abused, but it has been invoked.
What Donald Trump has now done with the strike on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast is to break that tradition in a way that is both lawless and unprecedented. He gave the order to kill eleven human beings with no congressional approval, no international authorization, and no visible evidence justifying it.
This was simply murder on the high seas. And the world knows it.
He did it in the full knowledge that six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have granted him immunity for crimes committed while in office, even international crimes. That ruling opened the door to precisely this sort of extrajudicial killing and stripped away one of the last guardrails protecting both our law and our global standing.
The official claim is that the boat carried members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But eleven people on a small vessel that couldn’t possibly travel as far as America doesn’t sound like a cartel’s drug shipment (typically there’s only one or two people manning such a boar); it sounds like desperate migrants fleeing a collapsing country.
That possibility makes the strike even more chilling when paired with a story Miles Taylor has told about Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller. Taylor recounts traveling with Miller and a Coast Guard admiral after a drug war event in Key West.
On that trip Stephen Miller asked the admiral if it would be legal to use a Predator drone to obliterate a boat full of migrants in international waters. Miller’s reasoning was that migrants weren’t covered by the Constitution, so what was to stop us from blowing them out of the water?
The admiral reportedly shot back that it would violate international law, that “you cannot kill unarmed civilians just because you want to.” At the time it was an alarming glimpse into the sadistic mind of a man who saw immigrants as less than human.
Now it looks like Trump has taken Miller’s reported hypothetical and turned it into policy. What was once an outrageous musing has become a bloody precedent.
This has profound legal and moral implications.
By attacking a vessel flying the flag of a sovereign state, Trump risked triggering a direct military confrontation. Venezuela could have fired back at American forces in the region. A firefight at sea can escalate quickly into a regional war, and Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro would have every incentive to turn to Russia and China for protection.
Leaders of both of those nations are eager to deepen their presence in our hemisphere, and this gives them an opening. It’s not inconceivable that Moscow or Beijing could send ships or aircraft to Venezuela in response.
That would put foreign military forces hostile to us within thirteen hundred miles of Miami. If shots were fired between American forces and Russian or Chinese deployments in the Caribbean, the slide toward a larger war would be real, very much like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963 (except then we had a statesman as a president, instead of a corrupt buffoon).
World War I began with a simple assassination that pitted one nation against another and then the sinking of the civilian boat the Lusitania; this is how great power conflicts can begin. Trump’s reckless strike doesn’t just risk Venezuelan lives. It risks American troops, regional stability, and, in the most ominous scenario, world peace itself.
Meanwhile, at home, the timing is impossible to ignore. Authoritarians throughout history have turned to foreign crises to distract from domestic scandals.
Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia as Watergate began to close in. Reagan invaded Grenada days after hundreds of Marines were killed in Beirut. Trump has lived for decades under the shadow of allegations of sexual predation, including reports that Jeffrey Epstein recorded him with underage girls during the years he owned and ran Miss Teen USA.
If new evidence of that were to surface, Trump would need a distraction on a scale large enough to blot out the outrage. Creating a crisis with Venezuela, complete with martial language and threats of escalation while renaming the Department of Defense to Department of War, serves that purpose. It’s the oldest play in the authoritarian book: wag the dog.
Except this time the stakes are far higher. This time we’re dealing with a president who’s been told by six corrupted members of the highest court in the land that he’s above the law.
When Miles Taylor first revealed Miller’s macabre question about bombing migrant boats, some dismissed it as idle cruelty. It now looks like a glimpse into the inner workings of Trump’s policy mind. In this worldview, immigrants are vermin, human rights are optional, Democrats are “extremists,” and lethal force is just another tool of politics.
Combine that with the Supreme Court’s gift of immunity and you have a recipe for lawless violence on a scale America has never contemplated. The entire edifice of international law is designed to prevent precisely this sort of conduct.
Extrajudicial killings, violations of sovereignty, the targeting of civilians: these are the acts that international courts prosecute when they can, and that history condemns when courts cannot stop them.
And now we’re learning that Trump did something similar in 2019 when he was last president. He authorized a SEAL Team strike against North Korea, where they killed three civilians in a boat who were simply out fishing.
Extrajudicial killings, violations of sovereignty, the targeting of civilians: these are the acts that international courts prosecute when they can, and that history condemns when courts cannot stop them.
If America embraces this new Putin-like assertion of America’s power to bomb anybody, anywhere, on the whim of the president, we’ll have abandoned any claim to moral leadership.
Worse, we will have normalized the authoritarian logic that anyone the president labels an enemy can be eliminated without trial, without evidence, without process. We’ll have handed Xi a rationale to attack Taiwan; all he has to do is claim that a non-governmental gang within that nation is importing drugs into China (or something similar).
The international reaction has already been severe. America’s allies are horrified, our adversaries have been emboldened, and human rights groups are openly appalled.
But the real test is here at home. Do we still believe in the principle, famously cited by our second President John Adams, that America is a nation of laws and not of men? Do we still insist that presidents cannot kill at will? If Trump can strike a boat off Venezuela today, what is to stop him from ordering lethal force against dissidents, protesters, or political opponents tomorrow?
Do we still insist that presidents cannot kill at will? If Trump can strike a boat off Venezuela today, what is to stop him from ordering lethal force against dissidents, protesters, or political opponents tomorrow?
Keep in mind, the same Stephen Miller — who reportedly wanted to blow up boats of immigrants to kill more brown people — just in the past week claimed that the Democratic Party is a “domestic extremist organization.”
The doctrine of immunity means there is no legal backstop. The only remaining check is political will. And Trump’s fascist toadies are all in on more extrajudicial killings.
Yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete “Kegger” Hegseth said:
“We’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike.”
Secretary of State “Little Marco” Rubio echoed the sentiment, saying during a speech in Mexico City yesterday that similar strikes “will happen again.”
This is why Democrats, independents, and every American who values the rule of law must call this out for what it is: an atrocity against eleven people, an assault on international norms, and a direct threat to American democracy.
Trump has shown us exactly how far he’s willing to go. He’s willing to risk a war in our hemisphere. He’s willing to put our troops in danger. He’s willing to risk drawing Putin and Xi into a confrontation with us that could spiral out of control. He’s willing to destroy lives to protect himself. And he’s doing it because six Republicans on the Supreme Court told him he could.
If Congress doesn’t act now to confront and contain this lawless behavior, if we don’t restore accountability to the presidency, then we’ll have surrendered not just our moral authority but our future.
The question is not whether Trump wants a distraction from his scandals; of course he does. The question is whether we’re willing to let Trump and his fascist toadies drag America and the world into catastrophe to get it.
This isn’t just about a boat off Venezuela. It’s about whether America will allow a president, blessed by the Court, to kill without evidence, without process, without even the pretense of law.
Eleven dead migrants are the proof of what immunity means in practice: impunity. If Trump can slaughter refugees today, what stops him from targeting dissidents, protesters, even political opponents tomorrow?
The answer, unless Congress and the people act, is nothing. And “nothing” is what those justices have left to protect us, our laws, and our humanity.
