The footage is crisp, the explosion satisfyingly cinematic. A fireball consumes a small boat on the open water, a pyre for human beings reduced to pixels in a campaign ad.
With the glee of a child burning ants with a magnifying glass, President Donald Trump has taken to social media to celebrate his latest achievement: the summary execution of 17 human beings from Venezuela.
Let us be unequivocal in language the administration has abandoned: the President of the United States is a murderer.
He has ordered the extrajudicial killing of individuals on the high seas, acting as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner without a shred of evidence presented, a moment of due process, or a declaration of war.
His authority? His own whim. His justification? The failed, racist specter of the “War on Drugs,” now resurrected with a fresh coat of blood and a missile’s glare.
This is not law enforcement; it is lawless barbarism.
Smuggling, even if proven, is not a capital offense tried in international waters by Hellfire missiles.
The administration’s lazy invocation of “narco-terrorist” is a hollow mantra, a purposefully nebulous term designed to short-circuit scrutiny and grant a would-be autocrat the power of life and death.
If the president declares you a terrorist, you are one. And if you are one, you are dead.
This is the grotesque fulfillment of every post-9/11 fear, the “Bush Doctrine” stripped of its pretenses and handed to a man with no respect for the Constitution he swore to uphold.
Trump’s lack of respect for life is not a bug in his system; it is its core programming. This is the man who championed “taking out” the families of terrorists, who mocked a disabled reporter, who dismissed the deaths of soldiers as losers and suckers.
His cruelty is not a means to an end—it is the end itself.
The naval strike, as Sara Haghdoosti rightly notes, “has done what it was actually intended to do: grow Trump’s reputation as a strongman.”
The victims are not people; they are props. Their deaths are not a tragedy; they are a talking point.
The overdose crisis here at home, fueled by despair and a shredded social safety net, continues unabated.
This performance of violence does nothing for the addict, the grieving family, or the healthcare worker.
It is pure theater of death, staged for an audience of one: a president desperate to project an image of strength to mask a bottomless moral vacuum.
Congress watches, feckless and muted, as the executive branch shreds the very concept of war powers.
The world watches as the world’s oldest democracy abandons the rule of law for the law of the jungle.
President Nicolás Maduro, a tyrant of a different stripe, is handed a priceless propaganda victory, allowing him to rally his people against a gringo bogeyman who just proved every accusation true.
We have not entered a “new era” in the war on terror. We have regressed to the oldest era of all: the age of the king, where the sovereign’s will is the only law that matters.
The missile strikes are not a strategy; they are a symptom of the disease—a virulent, unAmerican authoritarianism that treats human life as cheap and presidential power as absolute.
The boaters are dead. The Constitution is under fire. And the godless man who gave the order is posting the video for likes.