This Might Be the Worst Argument I’ve Ever Read

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 04, 2025

 

Yesterday, Charlie published a satirical post attributing his own skepticism toward the Trump administration’s claims that the legal and strategic rationale for the ongoing military campaign against Venezuelan “drug boats” to his own thinly veiled admiration for drug traffickers. The point of that cutting exercise was to illustrate the absurdity of the tactics deployed by those who would answer legal arguments with hollow grandstanding and toothless moral blackmail.

 

Within hours, the Trump administration’s chief spokesperson, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, would prove Charlie prescient:

 

 

As polemics go, this is one of the worst I’ve ever read.

 

Authored by Shane Harris and published by the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC), the very first words of this maladroit intimidation tactic dressed up as an argument are “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — yes, as a proper noun. It doesn’t get more sophisticated from there.

 

The skeptics of Trump’s Venezuela campaign — which polls indicate includes not just most of the country but most Republicans — are, to an individual, the “Never-Trump crowd.” And they’ve reached a “new low” by “defending narcoterrorists” in deference only to “their reactionary opposition to everything Trump does.”

 

The piece might have ended there. The author had already made the only point he was going to make. But Harris used all the rope that AMAC handed him.

 

The author alleges that Trump has all the legal authority he needs to ignore the American laws that render terrorism and drug trafficking distinct offenses. After all, he designated Venezuela’s cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. What more do you need?

 

What’s more, the results of the campaign speak for themselves. “To any American with even a modicum of decency and common sense,” Harris wrote, the strikes that have killed at least 80 alleged drug couriers are “good news.” After all, drug addiction represents an imminent threat to U.S. national security, the author alleges — perhaps more than any conventional terrorist threat.

 

The most abhorrent passage that is likely to offend those with any admiration for logic followed that assertion:

 

Does someone have to be running around with a gun or a bomb to be considered a “threat” to the American people? The narcoterrorists in the Caribbean pose at least as serious a threat — and likely a more tangible threat — to the American people as do the Islamist terrorists that the military spent the last 20 years chasing around the Middle East.

 

How callous. Try telling that to the survivors of victims of political terrorism, whose loved ones were torn apart by a nail bomb while eating lunch or shot to death for no other reason than to send a message to the American political class, that their suffering pales in comparison to the plight endured by those whose loved ones willingly put illicit substances into their bodies. Try telling American military planners that the threat to U.S. interests abroad posed by Islamist radicalism or state-sponsored violence has fewer implications for American national security than the ancient narcotics trade.

 

Terrorism has a legal definition. Drug trafficking has a legal definition. Making a portmanteau of the words “narco” and “terrorist” doesn’t magically erase these distinctions.

 

If this campaign is of such vital national interest that it merits this level of high dudgeon, it really shouldn’t be hard to field an argument in its favor predicated on a neutral principle. But Harris’s piece fails even to gesture in the direction of an argument that would persuade those who believe the president has not made the objectives of his Venezuela campaign clear, has not sought legal or political authority for his actions, and is jeopardizing long-standing U.S. interests in the process.

 

It’s not as though the administration doesn’t have a case to make. I’ve made it. Dan McLaughlin has made it. Joshua Treviño and Melissa Ford have made it. This administration’s principals could, too, if they were so inclined. But they’re not.

 

Rather than give their supporters something rational on which they might hang their hats, the Trump administration is applying muscle to opponents and supporters alike. If you raise even academic objections to the administration’s failure to do this campaign properly — by seeking public support and congressional authorization for it, thereby making American voters and their representatives stakeholders in this shared national project — you are a moral monster who, like Charlie, must secretly harbor some affection for drug traffickers.

 

To call this style of argumentation childish is an insult to children. It is not an argument at all. It’s a brushback pitch designed to shut their critics up. But brushback pitches only work if they approach their target. This one is so wildly off the mark, so comically bad, that it’s more likely to inspire the administration’s critics than silence them. After all, if this is all they’ve got, they don’t have much.