By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, September 04, 2025
Tuesday afternoon at the White House, President Trump
announced the relocation of the Department of Defense’s Space Command from
Colorado — home of NORAD and the Air Force Academy — to the U.S. Army’s
Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala.
“The problem I have with Colorado, one of the big
problems, they do mail-in voting. They went to all mail-in voting,” Trump said. (When Trump says, “went to,” he means since 2014.) “So, they have automatically crooked
elections. And we can’t have that. When a state is for mail-in voting, that
means they want dishonest elections because that’s what that means. So that
played a big factor also.”
I would argue that moving Space Command from Colorado to
Alabama over the state’s voting laws is a dumb political decision, but Joe Biden made the previous decision to
not move it to Alabama, and reportedly the southern state’s restrictive abortion laws
played a role in the decision, so I guess the U.S. government has stopped
trying to put military bases in locations where they make sense, and now it’s
entirely based upon how the president feels about a particular state. (Senator
Tommy Tuberville said the location would be called “the Donald J. Trump Space
Command Center in Huntsville.”)
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Trump announced that
the U.S. military had carried out a strike against a boat carrying drugs and
killed eleven terrorists:
When you come out and you leave
the room, you’ll see that we just, over the last few minutes, literally shot
out a boat, a drug-carrying boat, a lot of drugs on that boat.
And you’ll be seeing that and
you’ll be reading about that. It just happened moments ago and our great
general, head of the joint chiefs of staff, who has been so incredible,
including what took place in Iran, knocking out potential nuclear power for a long
time to come. I think within a month, they would have had it if we didn’t do
what we did. But he gave us a little bit of a briefing, and you’ll see. And
there’s more where that came from. We have a lot of drugs pouring in from our
country, coming in for a long time. And we’re just — these came out of
Venezuela. And coming out very heavily from Venezuela — a lot of things are
coming out of Venezuela.
When Trump said, “you’ll be reading about that,” he meant on Truth Social, the social-media platform he
owns:
Earlier this morning, on my
Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively
identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of
responsibility. TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating
under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug
trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United
States and Western Hemisphere. The strike occurred while the terrorists were at
sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the
United States. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action. No U.S.
Forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody
even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!
Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!!!!!!
The video of the strike was released, but the Pentagon
has not yet held any on-the-record press briefing about the operation. Secretary
of Defense Pete Hegseth did discuss the raid with his former colleagues on Fox
and Friends. “I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat,
we knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented,
and that was Tren De Aragua, a narco-terrorist organization designated by the
United States trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.”
The last on-the-record press briefing at the Pentagon was
August 14. The last one before that was August 7, and the last one before
that was July 2.
Wednesday, President Trump met with Polish President Karol Nawrocki, and
took a question about the attack:
Q: On Venezuela, can you
give us a sense of what the U.S. policy, or what you’re trying to achieve with
the aircraft carriers, or the boats I should say, near Venezuela? And also, the
boat that you mentioned yesterday where eleven people were killed, what was
found on that boat and why were the men killed instead of taken into custody?
Trump: On the boat, you
had massive amounts of drugs. We have tapes of them speaking. There was massive
amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people. And everybody
fully understands that. In fact, you see it. You see the bags of drugs all over
the boat and they were hit. Obviously, they won’t be doing it again.
And I think a lot of other people
won’t be doing it again when they watch that tape. They’re going to say, let’s
not do this. We have to protect our country and we’re going to. Venezuela’s
been a very bad actor. They’ve been — as you know, they — they’ve been sending
millions of people into our country, many of them Tren de Aragua, some of the
worst gangs, some of the worst people anywhere in the world in terms of gangs.
And we had some in Washington,
D.C. We took care of them very quickly, but they’re out of here, they’re gone.
But Venezuela has been very bad both in terms of drugs and sending some of the
worst criminals anywhere in the world into our country. They emptied out — you
don’t know this, but they emptied out their prisons in Venezuela and they
emptied them out into the United States of America, and that’s part of the
problem we have.
Were the guys on the boat bad guys? Almost certainly. Is
it awesome to see bad guys getting blown up? Sure. Are we sure that using
military force against drug smugglers in this manner is entirely consistent
with the U.S. Constitution, U.S. law, and the Posse Comitatus Act, which
largely bars the use of the American military in domestic law enforcement,
unless Congress signs off on it? That’s a much murkier question.
Our Andy McCarthy, who spent a big chunk of his adult
life putting bad guys behind bars as a federal prosecutor, asks whether the Trump administration is now acting as if we
are in a de facto state of war against the Venezuelan government:
In essence, the president is
taking the position that a vessel operated by a designated foreign terrorist
organization, which is allegedly an arm of a hostile foreign regime and which
is carrying illegal drugs for distribution in the United States, is functionally
the same as a hostile foreign naval force that is in the act of conducting an
armed attack against the United States. That is to say: The president
claims inherent constitutional authority (under Article II) to use lethal force
to stop — to destroy — the hostile foreign force, with no need for a
congressional authorization of military force.
This is a controversial claim, to
put it mildly. . . .
Because Trump has, as usual,
chosen to act unilaterally but has not endeavored to explain the parameters of
the authority he claims, obvious questions arise. How extensive is the military
force he has authorized? Does it anticipate only operations on the high seas or
is an invasion of Venezuela contemplated? Trump contends (the Fifth Circuit
notwithstanding) that TdA, directed by [Nicholas] Maduro, has invaded the U.S.
or is conducting a predatory incursion on our territory; so, are TdA members
now being deemed enemy combatants? Has the president authorized lethal force
against them if they are encountered in the U.S.? And what about captures,
including the apprehensions of Venezuelans whom the Justice Department has
indicted on narcoterrorism charges? Are such captured Venezuelans going to be
brought into the U.S. criminal justice system for civilian trials? Are they
going to be subjected to military detention as alien enemy combatants?
These and many other matters have
to be sorted out. Indeed, if it is ultimately determined that U.S. government
officials are conducting lethal operations even though the laws of war do not
actually apply, they are going to be accused of heinous crimes.
Andy concludes by pointing out that the long-term
authorization of military force requires the assent of Congress, and asks,
“Where the hell is the Republican-led Congress?” My best guess is that sometime
earlier this year, they were abducted by aliens.
A few days ago, while taping the Three Martini Lunch
podcast — now on YouTube! — I mentioned to Greg that after Die
Hard and 24, one of the pop-culture offerings we cite the most is Clear
and Present Danger, the 1994 action thriller starring Harrison Ford, based
upon the Tom Clancy novel about Jack Ryan uncovering illegal covert operations
against drug cartels. As I laid out:
Clear and Present Danger gets
mentioned with much more surprising frequency than you would expect. One of the
lines from that is from Donald Moffat — who’s playing an unnamed president, but
he has jellybeans on his desk, so we can guess the implication there — he says,
“The course of action I’d suggest is a course of action I can’t suggest.” And
this is when he sends a covert operation team into — is it Colombia? Basically,
you know, generic South American country involved in the drug trade — to do a
secret off-the-books covert operation. And look, how many thriller novels and
movies have been about, “We’re sending in Omega Squad,” this kind of, they go
in, they shoot ‘em up, and save the day.
And this was Tom Clancy saying,
“This sounds really cool, but you don’t actually want to do this. If and when
things go wrong, there’s no accountability.” And of course, the mission goes
wrong. They have casualties. And President Donald Moffat wants it all to
disappear.
If the U.S. government is going to use military forces to
bomb and shoot up Venezuelan drug cartels and perhaps some parts of the
Venezuelan government along the way, then at minimum, this really sounds like
the sort of thing that ought to be authorized by Congress. Whether you love the
idea of a literal war on drugs or not, the
American public deserves to know about highly consequential decisions like a
situation close enough to war that is not covered by the post-9/11 authorization for the use of military force.
But we probably can’t shoot and blow up our way out of
America’s problem with drugs. We can attack the supply side — literally, in
this case — but that still leaves the matter of the demand side.
ADDENDUM: Three problems with that New York Times report that
“advisers to President Trump have discussed the possibility of giving Mayor
Eric Adams of New York City a position in the administration as a way to clear
the field in November’s mayoral election.”
Problem one is that Adams is . . . pretty darn low in the
polls lately, anywhere from 7 to 11 percent. Even if all of Adams’s
supporters unified behind another candidate, that still leaves Zohran Mamdani
with the most votes.
That Times report also states, “The talks have
also involved finding a possible place in the administration for the Republican
candidate, Curtis Sliwa.”
Problem two is that Sliwa sounded vehemently, implacably
opposed to the idea of ever dropping out in our
interview with him last week,
and he doesn’t sound the least bit interested in any Trump administration gig.
Problem three is that it’s more than fair to wonder if
Sliwa supporters would ever vote for Andrew Cuomo, or if Cuomo supporters would
ever vote for Sliwa.
If Mamdani is terrible, and Cuomo is terrible, then the
best option for right-of-center New Yorkers may well be a three-way race where
Sliwa can eke out the largest plurality.
Or perhaps Trump could sabotage Mamdani by loudly,
frequently, and passionately endorsing him, talking about how he agrees with all the ways Mamdani wants the government to
intervene in the economy.
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