NORTH CHATHAM, New York
September marked nine months since a convicted felon, habitual deadbeat, and adjudicated sexual assailant was inaugurated as forty-seventh president of the United States. It has been a bumpy ride, to say the least; a short yet chaotic span of time that feels more like nine years.
It is near impossible to keep pace with the barrage of Donald J. Trump’s desperate distractions to camouflage his lengthening list of despicable deeds: viz. damnation of political opponents as “leftwing lunatics” and “scum”; an oafish speech given during the recently concluded United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan, in which he informed one hundred and fifty heads of state, “Your countries are going to hell!” and “It burns when I pee!” That and complaints of “fake news” regarding his abiding friendship with the late pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein—which if indeed fake could be instantly rebutted by investigative files that Mr. Trump refuses to release.
Now let us take a deep breath—very deep—to consider the latest in Trumpian sociopathology, for which the usual camouflage may not much longer overcome attention to targeted deaths “with malice aforethought,” as prosecutors say; murders admittedly and proudly assigned to the military by the man in the White House, commander-in-chief of America’s armed forces.
I speak, of course, of September’s three attacks on speedboats off the coast of Venezuela by the U.S. Special Operations Command, in which MQ-9 Reaper drones fired AGM-14 Hellfire missiles on vessels piloted by Trump-alleged “narco-terrorist” comrades of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang.
In each extra-judicial execution, Special Operations claimed the boats were jammed full of street drugs such as cocaine and fentanyl, bound for the U.S. Further, Special Ops acknowledged that the boats were in retreat; that all aboard were killed instantly; and that the search for scattered cargo and corpses is ongoing.
Ignored in the grisly process was Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, to which the U.S. is a signatory, which sets out standard procedure for interdicting a suspected smuggling operation on the high seas: mid-course stoppage of the vessel for Coast Guard boarding and commandeering, seizure of contraband, arrests of all crew members for incarceration and prosecution in applicable courts of law.
What happened instead was a snuff film, followed by Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory spectacle at a televised news conference attended by fist-pumping shills thrilled by scenes of speedboats gone boom and flying body parts.
As I write, the murder toll is seventeen—and counting. For as the flattering flunkies Marco Rubio, JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth assess the situation:
• “Instead of interdicting [the speedboats], on the president’s orders we blew [them] up—and it’ll happen again,” bragged Mr. Rubio, secretary of state in the Trump cabinet. “This president is not a talker, he’s a doer.”
• “We knew exactly who was in [those boats],” said Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s heavily tattooed alcoholic secretary of defense and honky-tonk strip club afficionado. “We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua.”
• Legal scholars and military law practitioners quoted in mainstream media generally characterize the attacks as “first degree murder” under U.S. domestic law and “war crimes” under international maritime law. In reaction to such judgment, Vice President JD Vance told reporters, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
Donald Trump’s fantasies of promiscuous military violence against civilians date back to his failure to win reëlection in 2020, and his frustration with large-scale public disgust over his immigration policies and personal conduct. Angered by street demonstrations in Washington at the time, he asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper if he might deal with political protestors this way: “Can’t you just shoot them, shoot them in the legs or something?” That year, too, he consulted Pentagon officials on the question of desperate migrants slipping into the country from the southern border. He asked, “Can’t you just shoot them in the legs?”
Now in 2025, Mr. Trump has ramped up fantasies of maiming malcontents and refugees to what any flat-nosed mafiosi would call “permanent violence.” The Trumpian rationale: So-called narco-terrorists peddle drugs that have taken the lives of tens of thousands of Americans, thus constituting war against the United States. According to his murky interpretation of open-ended legal predicates and authorizations granted by Congress in the wake of Al-Qaeda bombing raids on New York and Washington twenty-four years ago, the president is permitted to strike back at will.
Therefore, summary executions of men in open-air speedboats and fishing craft plying the Caribbean Sea are fair game—men who may or may not be criminal participants in hemispheric drug commerce; who may or may not have been bound for American shores, some 3,000 miles from Venezuela (4,000 km); who may or may not be or have been affiliated with Tren de Aragua; who all have rights to due process under U.S. and maritime law.
Whereas Messrs. Rubio and Vance and Hegseth are convinced of righteousness à la Trump, the New York-based human rights lawyer Jameel Jaffer takes issue, calling the drone attacks “flagrantly unlawful.” In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Jaffer elaborated:
“In [these cases] there was no pre-existing armed conflict. Nor is there any non-frivolous argument that these [murdered] men posed an imminent threat, even under an elongated definition of imminence. Killing these men in these circumstances looks like outright murder to me.”
Notably, the Trump administration has rebuffed all requests for evidence that would justify immediate lethal action against the speedboats. Indeed, U.S. military intelligence agencies report that the boats had reversed course for an apparent return to Venezuela. Not a single name has emerged from among the dead “narco-terrorists,” never mind Pete Hegseth’s exacting list. Not a peep of conspiratorial audio has been presented to the public through media—this despite Mr. Trump himself having said, “We have tapes of them talking.”
—In the final week of September, authorities in the Dominican Republic claim to have recovered 2,200 pounds (997.9 kg) of “suspected cocaine” from remnants of a recently destroyed speedboat. It is unclear if that boat was one of the trio destroyed in U.S. drone attacks. Neither the White House nor Mr. Hegseth’s Pentagon has offered comment.
•
When campaigning for the presidency in the spring of 2016, the über confident Donald Trump told a gathering of admirers in Sioux Center, Iowa, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible!”
Homicidal ebullience of yesterday may not buoy the chances today of Mr. Trump escaping criminal indictment in the matter of alleged drug smugglers blown to bits at his direction. In short, he could be prosecuted for murder—eventually, if not while still in office where he is immune from being frog-marched to a jail cell for the duration of capital trial.
As a practical matter, and in accordance with due process he denied seventeen others, a newly formed Congress under Democratic Party control—quite likely after federal elections next year—would first impeach and convict Mr. Trump. Then, upon the glorious day of his return to the status of ordinary citizen (that being January 21, 2029), Congress would summon federal marshals to haul him off to prison—doubtless in leg irons and a straitjacket, doubtless screeching “It’s, like, incredible!”
And what of those who aided Donald Trump’s rôle as judge, jury, and Lord High Executioner? Could they be charged as accessories to murder?
• Mr. Trump’s political henchmen—Rubio, Hegseth, Vance, et cetera—would probably employ the “I was just following orders” defense. Good luck with that excuse, famously debunked and rejected in decisions arising from post-World War 2 Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg.
• Article 118 of the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice holds that soldiers and military commanders could be liable for criminal prosecution on the basis of their duty to say “Sir, no sir!” to a “manifestly illegal” order.
David French—conservative essayist, U.S. Navy combat veteran, and Harvard-educated lawyer—is under no illusion that America’s currently proto-fascist political and judicial establishments will bring justice to Donald Trump, much less recognize the dangerous repercussions in conflating crime with war.
“Military strikes raise the possibility of military escalation,” Mr. French recently wrote. Following the first speedboat attack in early September, he noted, “Venezuelan fighter jets flew over an American destroyer…and now the United States is deploying even more military assets to the Caribbean, including F-35 fighters, our most advanced combat aircraft.”
Further, Mr. French worries that Donald Trump is too stupid or too conflicted to realize the clear and present danger of diverting U.S. military capability in the face of Russian aggression and a restive China—hostile forces profoundly more dangerous than a drug gang.
Come what may, criminal and civil litigation in these cases looms large—or “bigly,” as the president prefers. Citizen Trump, who turns 80 years of age next year, will surely spend the balance of his life defending himself in the grind and glare of international criminal tribunals and multi-million-dollar civil claims of wrongful death brought by family members of those he had slaughtered.
As I write, activist law professors and students in the U.S. and their counterparts in Venezuela and Colombia are planning wrongful death claims. Litigation will slog forward until the day that Donald Trump is no more.
Until then, Mr. French writes, “Every person who pumped his fist at Trump’s news conference should pause and think very hard about letting him—or any president—expand the definition of war until due process dies, blotted out by the flame and smoke of a missile strike.”
