In 2019, during his first term, Donald Trump launched a covert spying operation in North Korea. According to new reporting from theNew York Times, a team of Navy SEALS was dispatched to North Korea to “plant an electronic device that would let the United States intercept the communications of North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-un, amid high-level nuclear talks with President Trump.” 

But the mission was a Bay of Pigs type fuck-up. Using mini submarines, the SEALS landed on the North Korean coast in the dead of night. They soon encountered an unidentified North Korean boat, however, and in order to cover up the spying operation, the SEALs shot everyone onboard and stabbed them in the lungs so their bodies wouldn’t float once they were dumped in the ocean. They quickly realized that the dead North Koreans were unarmed fishermen out looking for shellfish. The SEALS fled the scene of the crime and the Trump administration never informed Congress of what it had done—even though murdering innocent North Koreans is the kind of reckless provocation that could lead to a confrontation with an adversarial nuclear-armed power that now “has roughly 50 nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach the West Coast.”

Needless to say, attacking and killing another country’s fishermen in their own waters is brazenly illegal. The Trump administration says that the “rules of engagement” were followed, but the Times story makes this dubious, with there being no evidence that the SEALS were ever under threat from the fishermen. In a sane world, this kind of action against a foreign country would be followed by an apology, compensation, and criminal trials for the killers and those who directed the operation. But Trump essentially claims the right to kill whoever he wants, whenever he wants. 

We saw further evidence of that wanton lawlessness when the administration recently bombed a small boat in the Caribbean, which it alleged was carrying drugs. The vessel originated in Venezuela, and may have been traveling to the United States (although Secretary of State Marco Rubio originally stated the boat was heading for Trinidad before changing his story, and according to theNew York Times“some officials at the Defense Department privately expressed concern on Wednesday about the administration’s shifting narratives, including where the vessel was headed.”) 

Eleven people on the boat were killed in the strike, and the administration has offered (1) no evidence that these people were, in fact, trafficking drugs, and (2) no legal (or, for that matter, moral) justification for killing them even if they were trafficking drugs. In fact, the Times quoted one former law enforcement official who believed it “was more likely that the vessel was carrying migrants on a human smuggling run,” meaning that the administration might have simply murdered unarmed migrants looking to come to the country for work. Disturbingly, many of Trump’s supporters seem to be fine with that. When I posted about this dark possibility on social media, I was met with literally hundreds of replies from MAGA types saying they hoped the boat was full of migrants, that it would be a good start, that it was exactly what they voted for, etc. The level of sociopathy and soullessness at the core of the MAGA movement cannot be overstated.

There was no reason to kill these people, however, even if they were drug traffickers. The Coast Guard typically intercepts boats like this and arrests the people on board, as the Times explains:

In the past, the Coast Guard and even the U.S. Navy have interdicted boats bound for the United States with drugs, detaining and prosecuting the crew. A former senior federal law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter, said the attack was a “significant change” in U.S. anti-narcotics operations. … “In all of my years of doing this,” the former official said, “I’ve never seen the U.S. military say, ‘OK, this is a drug shipment,’ and then just blow it up.”

The Wall Street Journal quoted an expert explaining how such operations typically work: 

John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama with experience in antidrug operations in Latin America, said longstanding U.S. Coast Guard policies for stopping drug-trafficking vessels involve cutters carrying a law-enforcement detachment from the Coast Guard. The units are usually led by a Coast Guard officer with as much as 24 months of legal training who is deputized to make arrests, he said. After identifying a ship hauling drugs, the Coast Guard attempts to get the crew to stop and give up. If the ship tries to flee, a sharpshooter manning a 50-caliber rifle aboard a helicopter can get the order to take out the engines. “Everything is done to preserve life,” Feeley said. “What we don’t do is just shoot up boats like Netflix likes to pretend. We can shoot in self-defense, but we rarely do that because most narcos just give up.” The Coast Guard then searches the boats for drugs. “You don’t know if there are drugs on board until after you board,” he said.

Doing everything possible to preserve life is important, because, first, as Feeley says, these people are legally innocent—you don’t actually know there are drugs aboard until you search the boat, so if you deploy lethal force in these cases you’re eventually going to end up killing innocent people. But even if there was a 100 percent certainty that these were drug traffickers, we do not (or are at least not supposed to) conduct extrajudicial executions. And while importing a banned, harmful consumer product is bad, of course, and cartels are violent organizations, trying to bring drugs into a country is not in itself a violent act. Many Americans are rightly horrified at Singapore’s use of the death penalty for those who bring drugs into the country, and Rodrigo Duterte is currently on trial in the Hague for summarily killing those he claimed were “drug dealers.” But the Trump administration’s actions make Singapore look like a model of restraint and respect for human rights, because they at least offer people a trial before they kill them, instead of just blowing them out of the water. 

It’s pretty clear that the Trump administration wasn’t making any serious effort to ensure that their strike was necessary or legal. As Marco Rubio said, it was intended to “send a message,” and the administration has promised it will be the first of many such attacks. They don’t offer legal justifications or evidence, but that’s part of the point: to show that Trump doesn’t need to do that, because he’s so powerful that nobody can stop him. Trump is constantly pushing the boundaries of executive power, daring his critics to try to make him follow the rules. Because there is no organized countervailing power, he gets away with most of it. 

It doesn’t help that Democrats consistently roll over and play dead. Astonishingly, after Trump killed 11 people on a boat, with zero legal justification and zero evidence offered that they were members of a cartel, Politico reported that rather than denounce this abuse of power, Democrats “have struggled to find a unified message that won’t make them look soft on drug cartels.” Politico noted that Senator Tim Kaine said he was looking into the legality of the strike but “didn’t elaborate on his concerns” and even Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders, “who are usually quick to note overuse of presidential power,” did not provide Politico with a response to a request for comment. (On the other hand, Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, was scathing when Vice President JD Vance said he didn’t “give a shit” if this was called a war crime.) 

Democrats also bear responsibility for giving the president the expanded, unaccountable power to kill that Trump is now taking advantage of. It was, after all, Barack Obama who massively expanded the use of drone strikes to kill anyone the president deemed a national security threat, without any meaningful oversight by Congress or the courts. In fact, “there were ten times more air strikes in the covert war on terror during President Barack Obama’s presidency than under his predecessor, George W. Bush,” and Obama conducted “more strikes in his first year than Bush carried out during his entire presidency,” killing hundreds of civilians, pioneering the conflation of “military-age males” with “legitimate targets,” and sometimes even targeting U.S. citizens. Having themselves embraced Trump’s “tough on crime” rhetoric and the use of lawless violence as a foreign policy tool, Democrats are poorly positioned to aggressively fight Trump over these unlawful killings.

But fight we must, because if Trump can in fact simply kill at will, none of us are safe, and we are that much closer to outright dictatorship. These are not even the only cases of Trump using the power to kill. In his first term, Trump boasted about sending federal agents to kill an Antifa member, and he may have blown up a religious ceremony in Yemen while trying to attack Houthis. We need members of Congress who will investigate and punish a president who abuses his power, passing laws restricting what he can do, inquiring into violations, and using impeachment when he exceeds his lawful authority. Trump is engaged in an effort to normalize the use of extrajudicial killing, and we must remain outraged and committed to ending this vile practice.