When I first heard that an American fighter plane had attacked a boat in international waters off Venezuela, my first thought was that there must have been a high-value target on that boat. I waited for the details, but they were never released. Eventually I heard that there were 11 people on the boat. Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth said that they were gang members and they had a boatload of drugs that they were intending to bring to the U.S.

I looked at that video released by the War Department, and I was struck by two anomalies. First, the boat wasn’t large enough to travel from Venezuela to the U.S. But more importantly, could a small boat with 11 people have room for a significant load of drugs? It didn’t seem so.

Where was the evidence that this boat was bringing drugs to the U.S. I never heard it. Secretary Hegseth would clarify the reason for the attack in the boat if he supplied facts and evidence. Does Trump plan to attack other boats and ships that may or may not be carrying a shipment of drugs.

This is not normal.

Thom Hartmann addressed the questions about the use of American power to police international waters.

He wrote:

When the Court says Trump is above the law, who speaks for the eleven dead on that boat? Their lives ended not in a battlefield crossfire or a clash between nations, but at the whim of one man emboldened by six justices who declared him untouchable. 

Trump simply ordered human beings erased, confident the Court had given him immunity from any consequence and the leaders of his military would obey an illegal order. Eleven souls were sacrificed not just to his cruelty, but to a judicial betrayal that transformed the presidency into a license to kill.

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.

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….

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?