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rule of law
Don't Let a Fascist Like Trump Act as Judge, Jury, and Executioner
What makes these strikes so appealing to President Donald Trump is that it gives him the godlike power to look down from above and smite anyone who displeases him. But that won't stop the flow of drugs.
Oct 24, 2025
The Trump administration has been blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean—and now one in the Pacific—claiming without evidence that they’re “drug boats.”
These are extrajudicial executions outside any system of law. And there’s a reason we shouldn’t allow drug warriors to act as judge, jury, and executioner: because over the years, they’ve made many, many tragic mistakes and killed lots of civilians.
I’ve seen countless tragedies like these in my decades studying drug policy. Two were particularly egregious.
In 2001, the United States was using local air forces to shoot down alleged trafficking planes over the Peruvian Amazon. In this case, a surveillance plane flown by CIA contractors misidentified a pontoon plane and had it shot down. Instead of traffickers, they killed a missionary from Michigan named Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter.
Would it be okay for the Mexican military to blow up a US fishing boat because they believed it was smuggling deadly guns into Mexico, even if they offered no evidence? Would that be acceptable to this administration?
The second case was an incident in Honduras in 2012, where the Drug Enforcement Administration and local forces mistakenly opened fire on a water taxi, killing four people—including two pregnant women—and then tried to cover it up.
What makes these strikes so appealing to President Donald Trump is that it gives him the godlike power to look down from above and smite anyone who displeases him, without consequence. He’s even told sick jokes about local fishermen in the Caribbean now being afraid to get in their boats.
If he’s allowed to normalize this kind of international extrajudicial killing, I don’t think it’s a far leap for him to try it domestically.
Imagine a cop chasing a guy down the street, getting hot and tired, and shooting the suspect in the back. The cop probably wouldn’t tell a judge, “Well your honor, I didn’t want to chase him, so I just shot him.” But here’s the president declaring on the international stage: We’re not going to do police work. We’re just going to kill people.
Now imagine the shoe’s on the other foot. Most of the killings in Mexico are done by guns smuggled from the United States. They call it the “River of Iron,” and it’s responsible for literally hundreds of thousands of killings in the country in the past 20 years.
So would it be okay for the Mexican military to blow up a US fishing boat because they believed it was smuggling deadly guns into Mexico, even if they offered no evidence? Would that be acceptable to this administration?
The drug war acts as a price support for drug dealers. That’s why no one wants the drug war to continue more than the smugglers themselves.
Here’s what drug warriors don’t understand: The US isn’t under armed attack from drug traffickers. It’s actually the opposite.
Most drugs cost pennies per dose to manufacture. But the higher the risk to the individual smuggler—like the risk of getting arrested, shut down, or blown up—the more they can charge as drugs move down the smuggling chain.
By the time drugs reach users, they’ve snowballed in value. But consumers in the US have proven more than willing to pay hyper-inflated prices, and even risk arrest, for drugs—just as drinkers were once willing to pay bootleggers huge sums for booze during Prohibition.
In short, our policies create tremendous value for substances that are relatively cheap. We’re making trafficking more profitable, not less.
So if the US bombs a trafficker—or an alleged trafficker—we escalate the risk premium for everyone else in that industry. It’s a bad deal for you if you’re the one who’s killed, but it creates a “job opening” for others in the operation, or a rival cartel, to take over that turf—which is now more lucrative.
The drug war acts as a price support for drug dealers. That’s why no one wants the drug war to continue more than the smugglers themselves. This was ultimately why the US ended alcohol prohibition.
Addiction is a public health problem and requires public health solutions, not allowing someone like Trump to play judge, jury, and executioner—at home or abroad.
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Trump Is Nudging the US Toward a Genuine Police State
With Trump attempting to fashion a presidential police force of armed soldiers for domestic deployment, while claiming the right to kill anyone he deems a terrorist, the threat to the rule of law in the United States is not just profound but historically unprecedented.
Oct 17, 2025
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the armed forces on more American cities during a rambling address to top military brass. He told the hundreds of generals and admirals gathered to hear him that some of them would be called upon to take a primary role at a time when his administration has launched occupations of American cities, deployed tens of thousands of troops across the United States, created a framework for targeting domestic enemies, cast his political rivals as subhuman, and asserted his right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists.
Trump used that bizarre speech to take aim at cities he claimed “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” He then added: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
Trump has, of course, already deployed the armed forces inside the United States in an unprecedented fashion during the first year of his second term in office. As September began, a federal judge found that his decision to occupy Los Angeles with members of California’s National Guard—under so-called Title 10 or federalized status—against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom was illegal. But just weeks later, Trump followed up by ordering the military occupation of Portland, Oregon, over Gov. Tina Kotek’s objections.
“I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. And he “authoriz[ed] Full Force, if necessary.”
“When military troops police civilians, we have an intolerable threat to individual liberty and the foundational values of this country.”
When a different federal judge blocked him from deploying Oregon National Guardsmen to the city, he ordered in guard members from California and Texas. That judge then promptly blocked his effort to circumvent her order, citing the lack of a legal basis for sending troops into Portland. In response, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act—an 1807 law that grants the president emergency powers to deploy troops on US soil—to “get around” the court rulings blocking his military occupation efforts. “I think that’s all insurrection, really criminal insurrection,” he claimed, in confused remarks from the Oval Office.
Experts say that his increasing use of the armed forces within the United States represents an extraordinary violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That bedrock 19th-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement has long been seen as fundamental to America’s democratic tradition. However, the president’s deployments continue to nudge this country ever closer to becoming a genuine police state. They come amid a raft of other Trump administration authoritarian measures designed to undermine the Constitution and weaken democracy. Those include attacks on birthright citizenship and free speech, as well as the exercise of expansive unilateral powers like deporting people without due process and rolling back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers.
A Presidential Police Force
US District Judge Charles Breyer ruled last month that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles, which began in June, was illegal and harkened back to Britain’s use of soldiers for law enforcement purposes in colonial America. He warned that Trump clearly intends to transform the National Guard into a presidential police force.
“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the US military to execute domestic law,” Breyer wrote in his 52-page opinion. “Nearly 140 years later, Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced… Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”
The judge ruled that the Pentagon had systematically used armed soldiers to perform police functions in California in violation of Posse Comitatus and planned to do so elsewhere in America. As he put it, “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country… thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
In the face of that scathing opinion, the president has nonetheless ramped up his urban military occupations, while threatening to launch yet more of them. “Now we’re in Memphis… and we’re going to Chicago,” Trump told a large crowd of sailors in Norfolk, Virginia, during a celebration of the Navy’s 250th anniversary earlier this month. “And so we send in the National Guard, we… send in whatever’s necessary. People don’t care.”
As October began, Trump had already deployed an unprecedented roughly 35,000 federal troops within the United States, according to my reporting at The Intercept. Those forces, drawn from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and National Guard, have been or will soon be deployed under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least seven states—Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas—to aid and enforce the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, while further militarizing America. Other guardsmen, being sent to cities across the country ranging from Memphis to New Orleans, are serving under Title 32 status, which means they will officially be under state control, a measure Trump uses in states with Republican governors.
National Guard forces deployed to Washington, DC as part of Trump’s federal takeover of the district in August are operating under the same Title 32 status. But with no governor to report to, the DC National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general directly to the secretary of the Army, then to Pete Hegseth, and finally to Trump himself.
In September, a long-threatened occupation of Chicago began with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation targeting immigrants in that city, dubbed “Midway Blitz.” A month later, the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago sued Trump, seeking to block the imminent deployment of federalized Illinois and Texas National Guard troops to that city. A federal judge in Chicago blocked the deployment of troops in Chicago for at least two weeks. The Justice Department appealed but an appeals court ruled Saturday that while the troops can remain there under federal control, they can’t be deployed.
“They are not conducting missions right now,” a Northern Command spokesperson told TomDispatch on Tuesday, admitting that she didn’t know exactly what the troops were doing.
The president has also threatened to deploy National Guard troops to Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, Saint Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle.
“When military troops police civilians, we have an intolerable threat to individual liberty and the foundational values of this country,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “President Trump may want to normalize armed forces in our cities, but no matter what uniform they wear, federal agents and military troops are bound by the Constitution and have to respect our rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, and due process. State and local leaders must stay strong and take all lawful measures to protect residents against this cruel intimidation tactic.”
“Living in a Dream World”
Trump’s Portland order drew pushback from Oregon’s Democratic lawmakers, local leaders, and outside experts, who said there was no need for federal troops to be deployed to the city. “There is no national security threat in Portland,” Gov. Kotek announced on social media. “Our communities are safe and calm.” Independent reporting corroborated her assessment.
After Kotek conveyed that to Trump in a phone call, the president seemed to briefly question whether he had been misled about an antifa “siege” there and the city being “war-ravaged.” As he recounted, “I spoke to the governor, but I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’”
Days later, despite countless reports that there was neither a war nor a siege underway in Portland, Trump posted on social media that Kotek was “living in a ‘Dream World’” and returned to peddling lies about the city. “Portland is a NEVER-ENDING DISASTER. Many people have been badly hurt and even killed. It is run like a Third World Country,” he wrote on TruthSocial. “We’re only going in because, as American Patriots, WE HAVE NO CHOICE. LAW AND ORDER MUST PREVAIL IN OUR CITIES, AND EVERYWHERE ELSE!”
Judge Karin Immergut of the US District Court in Oregon issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from sending 200 Oregonian National Guard troops for a 60-day deployment in Portland. As she concluded in her opinion, she expected a trial court to agree with the state’s contention that the president had exceeded his constitutional authority.
The Trump administration has also admitted that it’s waging a secret war against undisclosed enemies without the consent of Congress.
Trump immediately took aim at her—despite the fact that he had appointed her to office during his first term—saying that she “ought to be ashamed of herself.” He then claimed, without any basis, that Portland was “burning to the ground.” Trump then made further hyperbolic claims about the city and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. “Portland is on fire. Portland’s been on fire for years,” he said, describing the situation as “all insurrection.”
The same Northern Command spokesperson told TomDispatch on Tuesday that the federalized troops in Oregon were also in a holding pattern. “They are on standby,” she said.
The president’s Portland order followed a series of authoritarian actions that have pushed the nation ever closer to becoming a genuine police state. In August, reports emerged that the Pentagon was planning to create a Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force that would include two groups of 300 National Guard troops to be kept on standby at military bases in Alabama and Arizona for rapid deployment across the country. (That proposed force would also reportedly operate under Title 32.)
The Pentagon refused to offer further details about the initiative. “The Department of Defense is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe,” said a defense official, speaking at the time on the condition of anonymity. “We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.”
Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order claiming to designate antifa—a loose-knit anti-fascist movement—as a “domestic terror organization.” He also issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directs the Justice Department and elements of the Intelligence Community and national security establishment to target “anti-fascism… movements” and “domestic terrorist organizations.” Such enemies, according to the president, not only espouse “anti-Americanism” and “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” but also are typified by advocacy of opinions protected by the First Amendment, including “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
After referring to the “war from within” during his address to the military’s top officers, he cast his political rivals as subhuman and claimed that they needed to be dealt with. “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” he told the sailors during the Navy’s 250th anniversary celebration.
The Trump administration has also admitted that it’s waging a secret war against undisclosed enemies without the consent of Congress. According to a confidential notice from the Department of War sent to lawmakers, the president has unilaterally decided that the United States is engaged in a declared state of “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” or DTOs. It described three people killed by US commandos on what was claimed to be a boat carrying drugs in the Caribbean last month as “unlawful combatants,” as if they were soldiers on a battlefield. And that was a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running US war on drugs, in which law enforcement, not the US military, arrests suspected drug dealers rather than summarily executing them.
As Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and a specialist in counterterrorism issues, as well as the laws of war, pointed out, the White House’s claims that Trump has the authority to use lethal force against anyone he decides is a member of a DTO is extraordinarily “dangerous and destabilizing.” As he put it: “Because there’s no articulated limiting principles, the President could simply use this prerogative to kill any people he labels as terrorists, like antifa. He could use it at home in the United States.”
Police State USA
The Trump administration’s military occupations of American cities, its deployment of tens of thousands of troops across the United States, its emerging framework for designating and targeting domestic enemies, its dehumanization of its political foes, and its assertion that the president has the right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists have left this country on the precipice of authoritarian rule.
With Trump attempting to fashion a presidential police force of armed soldiers for domestic deployment, while claiming the right to kill anyone he deems a terrorist, the threat to the rule of law in the United States is not just profound but historically unprecedented.
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The Real-Time Demise of American Democracy Under Trump
Our democracy is no longer guaranteed—from Wall Street to the White House, power is slipping into the hands of a few oligarchs at the expense of working people and ordinary families.
Oct 06, 2025
For generations, Americans have been taught that the United States is the world’s beacon of democracy. Politicians across the spectrum speak of the nation as a “shining city on a hill,” a place where freedom and the rule of law set the standard for the rest of the world. But the truth is harder to swallow: the U.S. is drifting away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism.
A survey of more than 700 political scientists conducted by Bright Line Watch in 2020 found that the vast majority believe the U.S. is rapidly moving toward some form of authoritarian rule. Scholars rated American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After Donald Trump’s first election in November 2016, they gave it a 67. Several weeks into his second term, the score had plunged to 55. Elections, rights, and freedoms are under attack—and America is running out of time to save its democracy. The experts’ warnings are not abstract; they reflect a country where voter suppression, gerrymandering, corporate influence, a compliant Supreme Court, and executive overreach are eroding the foundations of democratic governance. When citizens are uninformed—or choose not to vote—the systems of power tilt toward elites, making it easier for authoritarian forces to consolidate control. Authoritarian forces also thrive on fear—fear of immigrants, political opponents, or anyone deemed an outsider—turning Americans against one another and eroding the inclusive ideals that once defined the nation as a melting pot.
One of the hallmarks of authoritarian systems is the concentration of power in a single office. In the US, the presidency has been steadily amassing authority for decades. Presidents of both parties have expanded executive power—from Woodrow Wilson, who during and after World War I oversaw a massive expansion of federal authority, centralized control over the economy, and signed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent, to more recent administrations. After September 11, 2001, Congress handed the executive branch sweeping powers through the Authorization for Use of Military Force, essentially giving presidents a blank check for war. Since then, presidents have increasingly governed through executive orders and “emergency” declarations, bypassing Congress altogether. Barack Obama further expanded executive authority through extrajudicial drone strikes, targeting individuals abroad without judicial review or due process, demonstrating that executive power can be exercised unilaterally and with limited accountability. Meanwhile, Congress has been paralyzed by polarization and gridlock, leaving lobbyists and corporate donors to fill the vacuum. The Senate’s structure, which gives Wyoming and California the same representation despite a 70-fold population difference, allows minority rule to dominate national policy. Gerrymandering and voter suppression further hollow out electoral accountability. A government that concentrates power in the executive while undermining the voice of ordinary citizens is not functioning as a democracy.
Wake up, America! It’s one thing to recognize the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism and complain about it—it’s another entirely to take action.
Authoritarian governments also justify extraordinary powers in the name of “security.” The U.S. is no exception. The National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealed a government that watches its citizens on a scale once unthinkable. At home, local police departments increasingly resemble military units, rolling out armored vehicles and tear gas against peaceful protesters. We saw this during Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter uprisings. The deployment of force against citizens exercising their constitutional rights should alarm anyone who values democracy. Yet the normalization of militarized policing has created what philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote as a “state of exception”—where emergency measures become everyday tools of governance.
Yes, Americans still enjoy constitutional rights—but too often these rights exist more on paper than in practice. Free speech? Tell that to whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Snowden, or Reality Winner, who were prosecuted under the Espionage Act for revealing government misconduct. Voting rights? They’ve been under relentless attack, especially since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted protections for minority voters. States have since imposed strict voter ID laws, purged voter rolls, and closed polling places in Black and Latino communities. Even fundamental rights like reproductive freedom are being stripped away. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, unleashing a wave of state-level abortion bans. Millions of women and people who can become pregnant no longer have control over their own bodies. That’s not democracy; that’s state control of private life.
Another clear sign of authoritarian drift is the domination of politics by wealthy elites. Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, corporations and billionaires have been able to pour unlimited money into elections. Political campaigns are dominated by super PACs and billionaire donors. Our democracy is no longer guaranteed—from Wall Street to the White House, power is slipping into the hands of a few. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found in 2014 that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” leaving ordinary voters almost powerless to shape the laws that govern them.
The authoritarian character of the United States cannot be understood solely within its borders. With more than 750 military bases worldwide and a defense budget larger than the next ten nations combined, the United States functions as a global empire. Military interventions—from Iraq to Afghanistan to drone strikes across the Middle East and Africa—have often been launched without meaningful Congressional approval. Empire abroad normalizes authoritarianism at home. Militarized policing, mass surveillance, and a bloated national security state are justified by the logic of “permanent war,” which also benefits defense contractors, private security firms, and other corporate interests that profit from endless conflict. As Hannah Arendt wrote, imperialism abroad often requires repression at home. That warning has become reality.
The United States still holds elections and maintains a written constitution, but appearances are misleading. The US still calls itself a democracy, but in practice, authoritarian forces are calling the shots. What makes American authoritarianism distinctive is its velvet glove: it is not a dictatorship in the classical sense but a regime where democratic symbols cloak undemocratic realities. Its most effective disguise is the illusion of freedom itself—an ideology of free market capitalism that promises choice while consolidating power in the hands of a few. Americans are told they live in the land of opportunity, yet the choices available to them—whether in the marketplace or at the ballot box—are increasingly constrained by corporate monopolies and two political parties beholden to the same economic elites. Recognizing this drift is the first step toward reversing it. Unless structural reforms are undertaken—curbing corporate power, restoring voting rights, protecting civil liberties, and demilitarizing both foreign and domestic policy—the United States risks cementing its place not as the defender of democracy but as an exemplar of its decline.
It is a bitter irony that 66,000 living World War II veterans—who risked everything to fight authoritarianism abroad—now witness the creeping authoritarianism at home and the steady erosion of the freedoms they fought to secure. Their sacrifices are a reminder that democracy is fragile and must be actively defended.
Unless structural reforms are undertaken—curbing corporate power, restoring voting rights, protecting civil liberties, and demilitarizing both foreign and domestic policy—the United States risks cementing its place not as the defender of democracy but as an exemplar of its decline.
Democracy is not self-sustaining. If Americans care about preserving freedom, they must act: vote in every election—from school boards to city councils to state legislatures—and recognize that their power extends beyond the ballot box. As consumers and shareholders, they can choose carefully which corporations they support, amplifying businesses that align with democratic values while withdrawing support from those that undermine them. Citizens can also engage directly with elected officials, starting meaningful discussions to make their voices heard, and volunteer with nonpartisan nonprofit advocacy organizations and watchdog groups that protect the democratic process, civil rights, and corporate and government accountability and transparency. Pushing for structural reforms that rein in executive power and corporate influence, challenging fear-mongering narratives, and defending the rights of marginalized communities are all essential steps to reclaiming and preserving democracy.
We each have a role to play. Wake up, America! It’s one thing to recognize the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism and complain about it—it’s another entirely to take action. Be no bystander; democracy depends on participation. We ignore its demise at our peril.
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