Remember the Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin. Please. Fish stories about attacks on U.S. naval vessels inspired the Spanish-American War and our fateful escalation in Vietnam. If we come to blows with Venezuela, Trump’s fishing boat murder spree and seizure of the oil tanker Skipper will take their places in the lame pretext hall of shame. Presidents William McKinley and Lyndon Johnson had compensatory virtues. Trump is a racist seditionist whose strategic vision glimpses nothing beyond the money-changing hole of Trump and Sons. Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, is also a bad guy. But vital U.S. interests do not include ousting him.
If they did, Trump would offer us a cogent rationale. Instead, he is ginning up a coup or war with an orgy of slaughter. Every American should hang their head in shame for the 87 men of color our president has killed in our name in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. His and Hegseth’s first strike in September, including the two helpless men in the water, the video of whose obliteration made at least one member of Congress want to throw up, reportedly occurred when the boat was speeding away from our shores. Like a coward, Hegseth shot them in the back.
It’s one thing to lie to win an election or overturn an election you lost. It’s entirely another to lie to justify killing people. Trump said in September that every boat he sinks destroys enough fentanyl to save 25,000 lives. Venezuela doesn’t produce fentanyl. Say the boats contain cocaine bound for the U.S., which Trump has not proven. We endure a total of 30,000 cocaine overdose deaths a year. Selling users drugs is a crime, not an act of war. It would make just as much sense to label Mexico and France alco-terrorists for exporting tequila and cognac, helping contribute to our 178,000 annual alcohol-related deaths. But we can’t reckon every bad actor to be a warrior.
If Trump gets away with it, it could get worse. Famous for calling refugees and asylum seekers invaders, Trump could have the DOJ write a secret memo giving him permission to kill them along their unarmed road of flight, as Bob Dylan called it. Known for calling the media and his critics enemies of the people, the Jan. 6 man, who let his mob commit acts of potentially deadly violence against 140 police officers, may yet be tempted to try to get the military or law enforcement to turn their guns on his domestic foes. Such outcomes are at least a little more likely now that Congress has lost the courage it briefly exhibited about investigating the fishing boat attacks.
Skeptics think Trump is really after Venezuela’s oil. He’s already threatened to keep what’s aboard the Skipper. If the tanker was skirting U.S. sanctions, it may have been within our rights to board and inspect it and turn it back. One might extend the benefit of the doubt to a decent leader. But Trump lost the benefit of the doubt when he desecrated his oath of office by countenancing anti-constitutional violence on Jan. 6 and, now, by committing the high crime and misdemeanor of using the military to undertake 87 unjustifiable killings. United States volunteers may also be needlessly wounded or killed in Venezuela in the days and weeks ahead.
As Trump’s daily scandals continue, memories will fade of the bogus national security rationale for his high seas hits. He once bragged he could get away with murdering people. And he probably will. Since SCOTUS broadened presidential immunity, he probably can’t be prosecuted. But if Trump’s orders are deemed to have been illegal, Hegseth and his commanders could still be indicted, and they had better be, lest this grave precedent stand. “O hear us as we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea.” That even goes for young men scraping together a living doing that which they ought not do, who under God are as entitled to due process as you and I.