Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.
Monday, on social media, President Donald Trump announced that he had murdered three people—"three male terrorists killed in action" was how he put it. By "terrorists," the president meant nothing more than that he claimed the three people were smuggling drugs; by "in action," he meant that they were traveling in a boat in the Caribbean when a U.S. military aircraft hunted them down and killed them.
Thirteen days ago, by his own account, Trump killed 11 other people in another military strike on a boat, likewise for no reason other than that he claimed the boat was carrying drugs. The boat was unarmed and reportedly heading back to shore when the United States military, under Trump's orders, attacked it. Then the attacking aircraft—apparently military drones—returned, according to multiple media reports citing government officials, and killed off the survivors.
Some of the specifics come from reporters talking to anonymous sources, but the central facts—that the president ordered these people killed, and what reason the president gave for killing them—are entirely undisputed. Trump openly declared them. He murdered the people on the boats.
It's not rhetorical to say Trump "murdered" these 14 people. It's not a way of saying that I personally disagree with the way he chose to use military power—that his use of the country's killing power seems to me to be disproportionate, or unwisely chosen, or unpersuasively justified. It's not a claim that what the president is now doing is tantamount to murder, or morally indistinguishable from murder, or that it shares the practical characteristics of murder. Murder is the straightforward description of the relationship between what Trump said he did and why he said he did it. These 14 people were on boats that the president said were being used to smuggle drugs, so he killed them.
The natural urge here is to try to amplify the outrageousness of Trump's action by focusing on the details. Any good journalist would write, for instance, that Trump offered no evidence that the boats were smuggling drugs, or that the boats were even bound for the United States. Trump did not offer any evidence for his claim that the boats were smuggling drugs, let alone smuggling drugs to the United States, and Trump is a well-known habitual liar, and on certain levels that's worth considering in this case—just as it's worth considering that Venezuela, the boats' point of origin, does not produce the fentanyl that is supposed to be, in the Trump administration's account, such a menace to American lives that no measures would be too extreme to stop it from entering the country.
Yet none of that really matters. To debate whether or not the president had solid evidence before he killed everyone aboard an alleged drug-smuggling boat is effectively to agree that the president is allowed to kill everyone aboard a drug-smuggling boat. There is nothing that comes anywhere close to giving the president that authority—not when he claims to be acting in the name of law enforcement, not when he claims to be fighting a war. Trump's assertion that Venezuelan criminals would count as terrorists and that terrorists can be treated as military targets is nonsense, but even if it were somehow true, if the United States military were legally and officially fighting a war in the Caribbean, opening fire on a retreating boat and then killing all the survivors would still be murder.
Every American president commits acts that would count as moral crimes, and often enough as crimes under the law, too. George W. Bush invaded Iraq based on lies, bringing about hundreds of thousands of deaths, and oversaw a global torture ring. Barack Obama assassinated American citizens abroad, including a teenager. Joe Biden armed and supported the exterminationist campaign against Gaza. The bombing of 14 people in two boats would be numerically unnoticeable next to Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal.
Those other presidents, though, went to the effort of trying to construct a legal framework for their killings, however tenuous or spurious it might have been, or they committed their atrocities in secret and tried to keep them covered up. The Trump administration did not even pretend to have authorization for the killings, and Trump announced each one himself, accompanied by video of the deed. The legal rationale, as delivered by the vice president, was "I don't give a shit what you call it"; the practical rationale, from Trump himself, was that "300 million people died last year from drugs."
What do you do with an unrepentant killer who won't stop killing? Trump is murdering people simply because he likes murdering people and he thinks it makes him look good. Calling in an airstrike on a boat full of civilians is, for him, the same thing as announcing that the Department of Defense is now the Department of War. People say he can't do it, but he can.
