Without charge or trial, one man — demonstrating powers that would make a Greek tyrant sickened with envy — ordered the killing of another half-dozen civilians, announcing his decision in a missive delivered after the sentence had already been carried out. These were nameless foreigners on a boat, smote from the face of the Earth, as celebrated in a 33-second video shared by the judge, jury and executioner, while transiting along a route “associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks.”
Put plainly, these were men off the coast of Venezuela who were guilty, at a minimum, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since President Donald Trump returned to office, being accused of trafficking drugs is not just a capital offense, but an act of war. In an executive order issued the day he was inaugurated, Trump asserted that drug cartels are “foreign terrorist organizations,” and that anyone accused of associating with them (or their transit routes) is a terrorist who may be summarily killed on a battlefield that’s now global.
Gone are the days of indicting, trying and convicting drug traffickers; provided the users are conservative, white and not homeless, gone too are the days of holding those addicted to their products responsible for their actions, at least rhetorically — they are, for purposes of speechmaking, the victims of foreign terror. So instead of boarding and searching boats suspected of carrying narcotics, Trump’s U.S. military has executed at least 27 people accused of drug offenses as if they were enemy soldiers in a war declared by Congress.
The dead civilians have thus far all been foreign nationals, which is to say: excluded from our operating definition of human beings endowed with certain unalienable rights.
But with U.S. soldiers already patrolling U.S. cities to combat what the U.S. president describes as a sprawling “enemy within,” is it so unreasonable to fear that the war could come home? Could a president, declared immune from all domestic criminal law, assert the same awesome power he’s demonstrated abroad, but in his own country?
“It’s the power of the Old Testament God, or Zeus or Thor’s hammer: to smite people who displease you without consequence from the heavens — to reach down and just crush them like a bug,” Sanho Tree, a former military historian who leads the Drug Policy project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing think tank, said in an interview with Salon. “That is more seductive to Trump than anything else I can think of right now, because he’s all about vengeance, and this is the ultimate form of revenge. Vaporize your opponents.”
To be sure, no matter what six justices on the Supreme Court might say, no president — according to the Constitution and the higher laws to which all on this planet are bound — has the freedom to commit murder. But these things do not enforce themselves, and what was once shocking and transgressive can become routine.
“Doing this internationally was a low bar for him, and he’s largely gotten away with it,” Tree noted. A recent Senate vote demonstrates as much: All but two of the chamber’s Republican majority agreed that one 79-year-old man should be allowed to carry out acts of war — with the deliberate targeting of civilians: war crimes — in theaters where none has been declared.
“And that’s what they want to normalize at home,” Tree said. “If they can get away with it.”
There are already militarized raids in cities like Chicago, with masked federal agents jumping out of helicopters to zip-tie children and their parents, nominally over the alleged presence of Venezuelan gang members (the suddenly ubiquitous Tren de Aragua, recently designated a foreign terrorist organization). The rhetoric, too, is escalating.
“We’re not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals that we see in the streets,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said at an Oct. 8 White House roundtable on the threat posed by anti-fascism. “Just like we did with cartels, we’re going to take this same approach, President Trump, with Antifa,” she said, noting that the group — which is, conveniently, not a group but an ideological tendency — has likewise been designated as a terrorist organization. “Which is exactly what they are,” Bondi said. “Americans will no longer tolerate their unhinged violence.”
But the administration is not just planning to use the same tactics. The Department of Homeland Security has made clear that the plan now is to assert that anti-fascists and foreign narco-terrorists are the same — an ever-present, omni-enemy that lurks behind every critique of this administration.
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In an Oct. 14 press release, DHS said it had obtained “credible intelligence” indicating that foreign drug cartels, “in coordination with domestic extremist groups,” have placed “bounties” on the heads of federal immigration agents.
“These criminal networks have issued explicit instructions to U.S.-based sympathetics, including street gangs in Chicago, to monitor, harass, and assassinate federal agents,” DHS asserted. Without evidence, the department drove the connection home: “In Portland and Chicago, Antifa groups have provided logistical support such as pre-staged protest supplies, doxxing of agent identities, and on-the-ground interference to shield cartel-linked individuals from deportation.”
What happens from here is not certain. But the threat that extrajudicial killings might come to America is more of a disappointment than a surprise.
“It’s an escalation, but it’s also, in a way, inevitable,” Ruben Carranza, a senior expert at the International Center for Transitional Justice, said in an interview. Today, Carranza works to achieve justice and reparations for victims of atrocities, such as in his country of birth, the Philippines, where from 1998 to 2000 he served as an assistant secretary of national defense.
Carranza noted how even before Trump — indeed, under former President Barack Obama — the U.S. had asserted the right to carry out extrajudicial killings in an expansive definition of the battlefield. The U.S. did not deliberately target civilians, and certainly did not boast of doing so, but it nevertheless killed scores of innocent people in countries like Yemen, a legacy with a legal rationale that the present administration is using as cover for its own expansive definition of the war on terror.
“I think what the Trump administration is doing is just making this big bag where they can dump all the justifications they can towards any target they wish — so that drug dealers are also undocumented immigrants but they’re also Antifa, somehow — to justify the violence that they’re committing and that they will probably escalate,” he said. “It’s almost like they’re making it up as they go along.”
An extreme example of where a militarized war on drugs could lead is Carranza’s native Philippines. Under former President Rodrigo Duterte, thousands of people were killed in an openly lawless war on drugs. Duterte, like Trump, did not try to hide his rejection of liberal norms or the rule of law. “I have no patience, I have no middle ground,” he said in 2016. “Either you kill me or I will you.”
In a leaked phone conversation the next year, as the bodies of accused drug dealers were piling up, Trump praised Duterte for his take-no-prisoners approach. “I just want to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” Trump gushed, according to a leaked transcript. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”
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The point is not that America under Trump is destined to become like the Philippines under Duterte. But if one accepts that Americans are not exceptional — that they and their government are not uniquely resistant to the lure of populist demagoguery — then one should study other examples to prepare for what may be coming.
Given its problems in the courts, where typically compliant grand juries have been refusing to indict protesters accused of assaulting federal agents, it’s not hard to imagine an administration unfamiliar with habeas corpus (“Who?“) making its war on drugs and anti-fascist dissent look even more like a military operation.
“There are obviously greater constitutional safeguards in the process of charging, arresting, detaining a person than killing,” Carranza noted. “You can’t just detain someone; you have to charge them. But killing someone? You can say they fought back, which is exactly what they said with respect to extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.”
There are “obvious advantages to the employment of violence,” Scot Nakagawa, executive director of the 22nd Century Initiative, a nonprofit that promotes coalition-building among pro-democracy groups, told Salon, among them instilling a “sense of hopelessness” in the opposition.
But there are also disadvantages, especially when the targets are prepared. That can mean refusing to take the bait — exposing absurdity by embracing the comic — as well as being ready to document, reveal and accurately frame the state’s use of force. Instead of abandoning hope in the face of an imbalance in power, opponents can use that discrepancy to their advantage, highlighting how claims of anti-fascist-narco-terror, used to justify the deployment of tanks and snipers, are belied by the reality of protesting grandmothers and dudes dressed as frogs.
Unlawful violence, particularly when deployed against those who expect it, can “isolate strongman leaders globally,” Nakagawa said, “and, if resistance movements maintain nonviolent discipline, expose the contradictions between the regime’s actions and the smokescreens they put up to justify them.”
If the Trump administration does bring war to America, it will indeed be a reason for despair. Still, however grim, state violence at home cannot be so easily dismissed by checked-out Americans; it will create victims with names and faces, and with mothers and fathers and friends who can demand justice — and identify perpetrators. Justice may not be immediate, but the arc of history has shown that no evil lasts forever.
Opponents as well as supporters of this president would do well, again, to consider the Philippines. The same Rodrigo Duterte who enjoyed popular support as he waged war on his own country is today behind bars, indicted for war crimes three years after leaving office. Like others who once thought themselves immune, he now awaits trial at The Hague.
