Ever since Donald Trump began his campaign of blowing up boats off the coast of South America early last month, journalists covering the story have been too accepting of his obviously bogus rationale.
The attacks — which, one needs to acknowledge right from the start, amount to extrajudicial executions, or murder — have little or nothing to do with combatting the flow of deadly drugs from cartels into the United States.
We know this for a number of reasons:
- It’s quite possible the boats are not in fact carrying drugs. The Trump administration has provided zero evidence.
- Even if they were drug boats, they could easily have been interdicted by the U.S. military rather than blown to bits.
- Even if they were drug boats, they were not headed directly for the U.S. — few if any had the range — nor were the drugs necessarily intended for the U.S.
- Trump’s explanation for the killings — that each boat sunk saves 25,000 American lives — is an absurd lie. That would be 250,000 lives saved so far, when in fact around 80,000 Americans total die annually from drug overdoses — and most of them from fentanyl, which does not come to the U.S. from South America.
And yet you still see headlines like this one, in the New York Times on Wednesday: “U.S. Strikes 2nd Boat in Pacific as Antidrug Operation Expands”.
You see articles like this one, in the Washington Post on Thursday, about “an expansion of the Trump administration’s deadly counternarcotics campaign.”
You see articles like this one, in the New York Times on Thursday: “Trump Says He Will Not Seek Authorization for Cartel Strikes,” which credulously describes his “military campaign against drug traffickers.”
The Real Motives
So what are Trump’s real motives for attacking these boats? I think there are three obvious attractions to Trump here, that satisfy his deep needs.
- They’re a saber-rattling precursor to an increasingly likely attack against Venezuela, whose president Trump is eager to topple — something I suspect he sees as part of his imperial destiny. Trump has simultaneously ordered a massive buildup of U.S. military forces in the region, including, as of today, an entire aircraft carrier strike group.
- They are an opportunity to flex his power. They show once again how he can ignore domestic law, the Constitution, international law, Congress, his critics, and basic morality, in order to do whatever he wants.
- He gets to kill people on his say-so. He seems to enjoy the prospect. Asked if he would seek permission from Congress for future attacks, Trump on Thursday said no. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country,” he said. “We’re going to kill them. You know, they’re going to be, like, dead.”
- And a special bonus: The attacks devalue the lives of brown people. Can you imagine him blowing up boats full of white people headed from Europe or Australia? No you can’t.
This is, incidentally, highly reminiscent of Trump’s success in getting the media to ascribe his invasions of blue cities to his concerns about crime — when in fact they are also a power flex with racist underpinnings.
Better Coverage Incoming?
Several paragraphs into a New York Times article on Thursday about bodies washing up on the shores of Trinidad, authors Simon Romero and Prior Beharry — notably from the Times’s international desk — snuck in some essential context missing from so many other stories about the boat attacks.
They explained:
The Trump administration publicly says the mission is to combat drug trafficking out of Venezuela, which is a relatively minor player in the global drug trade compared to Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia or Peru.
But American officials have privately made clear that the objective is to drive President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from power.
Washington Post reporters Karen DeYoung, Warren P. Strobel, Susannah George and Ana Vanessa Herrero published an article on Thursday about Trump’s apparent determination to attack Venezuela. They quote “people familiar with internal administration deliberations” saying that “the U.S. deployments and boat strikes were psychological warfare to promote fractures in the Venezuelan armed forces or persuade Maduro to step down.”
And on Friday, the New York Times published a major piece by national security and legal policy reporter Charlie Savage (gift link) about how Trump is flaunting the law in these strikes. His lead:
Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.
A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs.
Going forward, articles about the boat strikes ought to make clear, at the very top, that these attacks are effectively murders; that they are precursors to war against Venezuela; and that whether the boats are carrying drugs is pure speculation and not justification for their destruction.
By contrast, calling them “antidrug operations” or “cartel strikes” is nothing less than aping administration propaganda.