When a federal agency identifies a boat suspected of carrying drugs, there’s a standard operating procedure. As The New York Times’ David French explained in his latest column, U.S. officials “seek to stop the boat, search it, seize any drugs and arrest and question the crew. If these drug smuggling suspects open fire, American forces can respond, but they cannot simply execute someone on the mere suspicion of drug trafficking.”
The United States, French added, does not “kill those suspected of being criminals from the air.”
At least, that is, we’re not supposed to.
Last week, Donald Trump not only claimed that his administration had killed 11 suspected Venezuelan drug smugglers, he boasted about the military operation and released an apparent video showing the results of the airstrike.
Were the 11 people on the boat actually members of the Tren de Aragua gang, as the president claimed? We don’t know. Were there actual drugs on the boat? We don’t know that, either. Was it legal for the Trump administration to use lethal force against a civilian boat in international waters? There’s reason to believe it was not.
It was against this backdrop that JD Vance offered an unexpected defense. Politico reported:
Vice President JD Vance defended using America’s military for ‘killing cartel members’ that bring drugs into the United States on Saturday, dismissing a critic who asserted a recent airstrike on a boat allegedly trafficking drugs was a war crime. ‘Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,’ Vance posted to X on Saturday morning.
This was a difficult argument to take seriously. The “highest and best use” of the U.S. armed forces is to summarily execute suspected criminals?
The vice president did not, however, end there. In a follow-up missive, the Ohioan argued that the Democratic position is “let’s send your kids to die in Russia,” while the Republican position is, “actually let’s protect our people from the scum of the earth.”
For one thing, I’m not aware of any Democratic officials anywhere who want to deploy American military personnel to engage in combat in Russia. (If the vice president can substantiate the claim, I’m all ears.) For another, we can protect Americans from drug smugglers without extrajudicial slayings.
In case that weren’t quite enough, Brian Krassenstein, an anti-Trump social media influencer and podcaster, responded online that “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.”
It was at that point when Vance replied, “I don’t give a s— what you call it.”
Donald Trump recently argued — four times in two weeks, to be precise — that many Americans are so desperate to lower crime rates, that they’ll accept a president acting like a “dictator” to get the job done. At his recent marathon White House Cabinet meeting, for example, the president explicitly declared, “Most people say, ‘If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants.’”
He didn’t say the accusations related to tyranny were wrong; he instead suggested the accusations were irrelevant. To hear Trump tell it, so long as he believes in the nobility of his goal, the ends justify the means, and he should do as he pleases, going as far as he deems necessary. Vance’s line on military strikes against suspected drug smugglers is effectively the same thing: The vice president didn’t push back against allegations that the administration is endorsing war crimes, so much as he expressed indifference as to whether those allegations are accurate or not. It’s a philosophy rooted in the idea that the rule of law is an annoying hindrance that gets in the way of worthwhile pursuits, and as such, officials can — and by some measures, must — ignore it. This proved to be a bridge too far for Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. “Did [Vance] ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation??” the senator wrote via social media. “What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.” Nevertheless, the administration is already warning other would-be drug traffickers that they might also be blown up, suggesting the recent developments were the first step in a larger offensive, not the last. Watch this space. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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