To be clear: that September attack was no isolated incident. Trump has now ordered more than twenty deadly strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats from Venezuela, killing an estimated eighty-three people. His Administration has yet to release the legal justification that the Pentagon is relying on for the strikes, or evidence to support its claims that those killed were, in fact, drug traffickers. Even if they were—as the Republican congressman Mike Turner, of Ohio, the former chair of the Intelligence Committee, pointed out on Thursday morning—drug dealing is not subject to the penalty of extrajudicial death by missile. Although the killing of two defenseless men left floating in the water during the September strike has created a sensation in the days since the Post’s scoop, the entire military campaign itself is an outrage. “Focusing on the shipwrecked is a distraction insofar as it suggests everything else preceding and after that strike was all legitimate,” Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and former Pentagon lawyer, told the Times. “Even under a law of armed conflict, they were all civilians, and we are not actually in armed conflict. Either way, it was all murder.”
Nonetheless, Trump escalated his undeclared war, threatening to oust the government of Venezuela’s President, Nicolás Maduro, writing on social media that the airspace over the country was “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY” and warning that land-based strikes could begin “very soon.”
All of which is entirely consistent with the unilateral exercise of war-making powers that has been a hallmark of Trump’s second term. While the President has chased glory for settling other countries’ conflicts, since retaking office in January, he has carried out strikes in Iran, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. He’s called American cities “war zones” and sent in the military to crack down on phantom crime waves over the opposition of elected leaders.
It’s quite a trick for Trump to both claim credit for ending wars that are not actually over while initiating new ones that have no legal justification, aside from Trump’s belief that he, and he alone, gets to decide what qualifies as an emergency worthy of sending in the troops. On Monday—at the same moment that the U.S. is meting out the death penalty to a bunch of guys in speedboats, who may or may not be drug traffickers, and threatening to depose the President of Venezuela for his links to the guys in boats which he may or may not have—the former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted by the Justice Department last year for drug trafficking on a truly epic scale, walked free thanks to a pardon from Trump. “Why would we pardon this guy and then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States?” Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, asked. Good question. Is this the long-awaited Trump Doctrine?
Of course, there’s always been an impressive gap between Trump’s self-perception and how others see him. By his standards, standing before the world as a peacemaker while waging an undeclared and largely unexplained war is hardly the boldest contradiction that Trump asks us to swallow. And yet a remarkable aspect of his remarkable decade in politics has been his ability to persuade millions of Americans to believe in even his most egregious acts of misrepresentation.
I couldn’t help but think of this while watching what was surely the most memorable of Trump’s appearances this week—his on-camera nap while his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, lavished praise on his peacemaking efforts. “On all these things, Mr. President, I think you deserve tremendous credit,” Rubio said. When Rubio mentioned the “transformational aspect of our foreign policy,” Trump briefly stirred, before leaning back in his chair and shutting his eyes once again.
The images of Dozing Don, “the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history,” as Rubio’s State Department called him this week, must surely become iconic. It was only a few minutes into Tuesday’s nearly three-hour Cabinet meeting, after all, when Trump had made his obligatory reference contrasting himself to his predecessor, “Sleepy Joe” Biden, the oldest, low-energy-est, worstest President ever. Trump’s core pitch to his followers has always been all about his strength, power, and energy—his willingness to fight for them, no matter what. Will he still command their loyalty as his vigor fades before their eyes? Is there a point at which the contradiction between his self-image and what we will see is simply too great to be sustained? With a President pushing eighty, the difference between Trump’s reality and reality-reality is only going to get wider.
Perhaps his sagging poll numbers and the incipient signs of rebellion among certain Republican members of Congress who are not all that eager to endorse war crimes in a war they have not authorized will prompt Trump to wake up and rethink at least some of his erroneous ways. But don’t bet on it. Whether he’s wide awake or fast asleep, he will still be surrounded by industrial-strength sycophants such as Rubio, who appear to have no problem slapping his name on buildings and praising him no matter what he does. How long can it be until they are feting this great peacemaker of ours for his grand victory in the Battle of the Caribbean, a glittering event to be held, no doubt, in the Donald J. Trump Ballroom, on the grounds of the Donald J. Trump Executive Compound? ♦
