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Trump Blows Up Another Venezuelan Boat [1]
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Date: 2025-09-15
The Muddled Excrescence is at it again: U.S. strikes a second Venezuela boat, killing three, Trump says.
The U.S. military struck a boat for the second time this month, President Trump said on Monday, as his administration continued its deadly campaign against Venezuelan drug cartels that it has accused of bringing fentanyl into the United States. The strike occurred in international waters and killed three people, Mr. Trump said in a social media post. “This morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a SECOND Kinetic Strike against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Mr. Trump wrote.
As before, it appears this was a speedboat which is not capable of reaching the US coast on its own.
Legal specialists condemned the U.S. military action on Monday as illegal, as they had the first attack. “Trump is normalizing what I consider to be an unlawful strike,” said Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, a retired top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2000 to 2002.
We already know the Navy has the power (if not the legal authority) to stop a boat in the Caribbean — Trump's Navy Boards a Tuna Boat in Venezuelan Waters. While this was (evidently) a speedboat rather than a fishing boat, the navy can stop one of those, too: we have speedboats of our own and they are heavily armed. But of course if the navy did that, they would have to search the boat, and in all likelihood they would find nothing. (Otherwise why blow it up and thus destroy any evidence or lack of it?) But that would be at least giving the appearance of following the law, and Trump, who is consumed by appearances, doesn’t want to go that route.
“The administration has not even seriously tried to present a legal argument to justify the premeditated killing of the people aboard these two vessels,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in the laws of armed conflict who has written critically about Mr. Trump’s earlier strike. “The U.S. president does not have a license to kill suspected drug smugglers on that basis alone.”
Well, he thinks he does have a license to kill. The Supreme Court gave him one.
And just as I was posting this, there was this update to the NYT story:
President Trump was asked whether he planned to provide proof that the people the U.S. killed in a strike on a boat off Venezuela on Monday were drug smugglers en route to the United States. “All you have to do is look at the cargo that was scattered all over the ocean,” the president told reporters during Oval Office remarks.
Ah, no. Cargo also blows up when you blow up the small boat it’s riding on.
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