By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, June 15, 2026
Acting on orders from President Donald Trump, the U.S.
military has murdered Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, popularly known
as Niño Guerrero, a Venezuelan drug trafficker and leader of the Tren de Aragua
crime syndicate.
This was—and ought to be treated as—a straightforwardly
criminal act on the part of the American president and those who have carried
out his illegal orders. Guerrero Flores had been charged with federal offenses
under U.S. racketeering conspiracy laws. But there is no law authorizing
summary execution of drug-crime suspects. There is no congressional
authorization to carry out military attacks in Venezuela. Guerrero Flores may
very well be everything the Trump administration says he is and more—though under
the Trump administration the word of the White House is no more reliable than
the word of a South American drug dealer—but, even if that were the case, there
is no legal authorization for the preemptive extrajudicial killing of crime
suspects. The Trump administration explains that it has “determined” that the
United States is at war with drug cartels and that Guerrero Flores, like the
boatloads of civilians the U.S. military has been massacring at sea for months,
is a “combatant.”
Under the George W. Bush administration, the power of the
executive branch to simply declare so-and-so an “enemy combatant”—in an
open-ended war without a well-defined enemy or geographic boundaries—became an
entrenched part of the presidential war-making power. Barack Obama extended
this to authorize the assassination of American citizens—and their children—and
carried out such assassinations, notably in the case of Islamist social-media
propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, who rose to the attention of the American
war-making machine owing to his high-profile position as—I hope this descriptor
makes it into the history books—“the Osama bin Laden of Facebook.” George W.
Bush is a decent and patriotic man, but the aggrandizement of the presidency
during his time in office served the country poorly as the office devolved to
Barack Obama, a seething would-be autocrat who looks like Dwight Eisenhower
next to the man who succeeded him: Donald Trump, an ordinary criminal and
would-be caudillo. Trump was succeeded in turn by the vegetative husk of
Joe Biden, who had been a vain imbecile in his prime, and who promptly returned
the office to Donald Trump, an ordinary criminal and would-be caudillo.
Trump, presumably writing with every color crayon in his
box, declared: “Tren de Aragua terrorists no longer have safe
haven in Venezuela or anywhere else and, under my leadership, we will find
these vicious murderers and drug lords anytime, anyplace, and send them to the
depths of hell where they belong.”
That is, shall we say, beyond the presidential remit.
The president of the United States is the chief officer
of the executive branch of the federal government. His job is to carry out laws
passed by Congress. That is it. That is the executive function: to execute.
There is a reason—an excellent, wise, experience-grounded reason—that it is
Congress, and not the president, that has the power to declare war, levy taxes,
spend money, ratify treaties, and make law. Trump’s enablers—and presidential
imperialists of both parties—have cited the Bush-era Authorization for Use of
Military Force (AUMF) as well as some supposed inherent powers of the
presidency to justify everything from Trump’s global campaign of lunatic
violence to Biden’s crackpot industrial policy to Obama’s decision to
assassinate Americans.
The worst enabler of all, of course, has been Congress
itself, which has invested the presidency with an ever more expansive capacity
for imperial violence, not only through such explicitly military measures as
the AUMF (part of Congress’s long and cowardly history of wanting wars to be
fought without the political risk of declaring them) but also through
notionally economic legislation such as the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which
invests the president with the power to restrict imports on national security
grounds and provides the supposed authority of the Section 232 tariffs (a
plainly unconstitutional tax) imposed by Trump and Biden.
The Romans gave their dictators temporary emergency
powers, expecting these to be held exclusively by such paragons of republican
virtue as Cincinnatus. What they got was Julius Caesar, Augustus, and, soon
enough, Caligula. As Brian Bethune observed in a review of Aloys Winterling’s biography of Caligula in Maclean’s:
The Roman Empire
was founded by Caligula’s great-grandfather Augustus, who established his
one-man rule by keeping to the outward forms of the moribund republic. He would
pretend to be first among aristocratic equals and “suggest” measures to the
Senate, which would pretend to debate them before doing exactly what Augustus
wanted. But Caligula had no tolerance for double-talk: he was supreme ruler and
wanted it openly acknowledged. That spawned ever more conspiracies against him
and increasing paranoia and vicious reprisals from him. Inevitably, a plot did
succeed in killing Caligula, a day before his planned move to Egypt—a culture
open to the idea of a divine monarch.
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was known by his
childhood nickname, “Caligula,” meaning “little boot,” because as a child he
liked to play dress-up and pretend to be a soldier. Trump has a similar puerile
fondness for military pomp and martial posturing—and, more to the point, his
pretensions include both the divine and the monarchical. And, deepening the unfortunate trend
originating with earlier presidents, he has leaned into the constitutionally
undefined notion of the president as “commander in chief,” or, as the Romans
would have put it, imperator.
Which is to say: This is not really about Niño Guerrero.
This is about the United States of America, what kind of government we mean to
have, and what kind of nation we mean to be. The question is not: “What would
we do if faced with a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up
to and including murder and who attempts to stay in office when voted out?” The
question is: “Now that we have a lawless president who is willing to carry out
crimes up to and including murder and who already has once attempted to stay in
office when voted out, what are we going to do?”
I suppose we could sit around and wait for the great
patriots and constitutionalists such as Sen. Ted Cruz to rediscover their
manhood, but that is a long wait for a train that ain’t coming.
Economics for English Majors
To quote the great economist Frito Pendejo: “I like money.”
Elon Musk likes money, too, though it is not always
entirely clear why he likes money. He does not seem to have a lot of
interest in ordinary rich-guy consumption—certainly not the kind of interest
that would necessitate a net worth exceeding $1 trillion. (On paper, anyway.) I
don’t know what one even does with $1 trillion—keep score, I guess.
Trinkets and toys and trophies and such—that’s more Jeff Bezos stuff, I think.
Musk is at his best—and also at his most pathetic—when it comes to those things
that money cannot buy. The part of his character that is responsible for the
rocket company is probably the same part of his character that is responsible
for the idiotic, destructive, and at times probably criminal DOGE shenanigans,
along with the social media buffoonery (both as a user and as an owner) and the
political misadventures and the rest of it. I don’t have any beef with rich
people per se—but rich people who want to be loved and need to be talked about
and feel important very often end up being kind of gross and sad, or worse than
that.
(When I think of the dumb things I would buy if I had
dumb money ... I have a hard time getting up to more than $1 billion, to be
honest: Maybe $100 million for the airplane, a little bit of real estate, possibly a new truck … I’d think of dumb ways to spend
money, for sure, but it’d turn into some reasonably sober version of Brewster’s
Millions pretty quickly. I would be happy to accept the challenge, should
it come to that. But the part of one’s disposition that would make one entirely
contented with the first $1 billion instead of $10 billion or $100 billion is
the part that also keeps one from making the first $1 billion.)
About Musk’s new money (“I am nouveau riche, but then it’s the riche that
counts”) a few thoughts:
First: Economics writers should stop comparing Musk’s notional wealth to national GDPs.
I get it as a handy scale thing, but comparing stocks (a certain amount at a
given time) to flows (the passing of a quantity over time) is, strictly
speaking, a no-no. If Musk’s annual income exceeded that of his native South
Africa, then the GDP comparison would be reasonably apt; but even if we take
Musk’s $1 trillion-plus net worth as fixed, the proper comparison would be
against South African assets, which of course amount to much more than GDP.
Second: People should probably stop writing about Musk’s
payday as though it were a moral scandal. It isn’t. This is how things are supposed
to work. Mostly.
Business management is one of the many places in public
life in which we see the “principal-agent problem.” The problem is that when
you hire someone to do something for you, or entrust someone with your
interests, you almost always create a situation in which the interests of an
asset’s owner (the principal) are somewhat at odds with those of the manager he
has hired (the agent). The simplest example of this, which also happens to be
the one more relevant to this discussion, is the question of executive compensation.
The CEO wants to get paid as much as he can, whereas the shareholders want to
spend no more than is necessary. Good management costs money, of course, as
does good help in general, and intelligent investors know that, but it
nonetheless is the case that every $1 that goes home in an employee’s pocket is
$1 out of the shareholders’ collective pocket. Spending other people’s money
always presents a temptation to corruption, which is why we have bidding and
oversight procedures for government contracts and compensation committees and
reviews in the corporate world.
Paying executives partly, largely, or exclusively in
equity (which is to say, in an ownership stake in the company) or through
payments tied to specific performance metrics is one way to try to align the
interests of the agents with those of the principals. If I have 100,000 shares
of stock and you have 1,000 shares, or 10,000 shares, or 1 million shares, our
wealth may be different and our exposure to the price of those shares may be
different, but our incentives are pretty well aligned, at least as far as that
share price is concerned. The real world is complicated, of course, and there
are all sorts of ways executives (and others) game different compensation
systems.
(There is a reason it generally is illegal for a CEO to
short his own stock.)
And, in the U.S. context, there is the added
consideration that we tax income from long-term investments differently from
how we tax salary income. If shareholders had just written Musk a check for $1
trillion, he’d have been liable for a 37 percent income tax on practically all
of it; if he holds his shares before selling them—and why wouldn’t he?—he’ll
pay the lower capital-gains rate. And he’ll pay that tax only on realized
income—and he may never feel any particular need to realize most of that
income, which ultimately would become an estate tax issue for whatever number
of children and other heirs he leaves behind. That bugs the heck out of some
people, though it shouldn’t.
There are all sorts of different ways we could handle
this stuff as regards taxes and other issues. But it is worth keeping in mind
that current practices emerged for good reasons, and the incentives that have
been created were created for well-meaning and generally intelligent reasons.
We could start taxing investment income at the same rate as salary income, and
what we would expect to see would be a shift away from equity and
performance-based compensation toward cash compensation: If the tax rates are the
same, then $1 in the pocket today is more valuable than the uncertain
possibility of $1 in the pocket tomorrow.
Maybe that gets us to a different number on the Gini
coefficient one of these days. Maybe not. But I don’t think that should be our
top priority. (In truth, I do not think that should be a priority at all;
economic inequality is a non-issue, in my view.) One of the reasons the United
States has the kind of innovative, high-tech economy it has is that a guy with
a big idea and a guy willing to bet his own money on that big idea can get stupid
rich in the United States, thanks in part to the way we do business and thanks
in part to the culture that goes along with that. The average European Union
country has a GDP per capita about half of that of the United States.
Even the relatively rich countries lag behind more than you might expect: The
United States is about half again as affluent as Germany, twice as prosperous
as Italy, and going on three times as rich as Japan. Those are all nice
countries with a lot of good things going for them—but they do not have
anything like American economic performance.
I do not know whether Musk’s space-and-AI business will
thrive. Maybe investors will get hosed—or maybe they will look back in a few
years and decide those shares were a bargain. What I do know is that it was
Tesla that made Musk a billionaire (he was a mere $200 million guy before
that!) and that Tesla has created a lot of nifty and valuable technology that
helped drag one segment of the automotive industry into the future, and that
shareholders who bought in 10 years ago and held would have made a total return
of roughly … 2,700 percent, which is nothing to complain about. And they’re
pretty fun cars!
Words About Words
“Words mean things,” as Rush Limbaugh often said.
The Trump administration, here personified by quondam
pornographer/retired game show host/serially bankrupt Village People fanboy
Donald Trump and Secretary of Thirst Pete Hegseth, argues that the
Department of Don’t You Dare Call It a War (But, You Know, It’s a War) excludes
applicants on gender-dysphoria grounds because such candidates lack the
“honesty, humility, and integrity” necessary to serve in the U.S. military. I
have some opinions about the transgender controversy that are very much at odds
with the opinions of other people I like and respect and believe to be
good-faith disputants. But if there is one thing that all of us should be able
to agree on, it is that watching the Trump administration make arguments based
on “honesty, humility, and integrity” ought to make a mentally normal person
throw up in his mouth.
Not since Jared Kushner’s push for a merit-based
immigration policy necessitated seeing the words “Jared Kushner” and
“merit-based” in the same sentence have I laughed so hard or so bitterly.
To quote Henry II (the cinematic one, not the historical
one): “I would
spit.”
Honesty. Humility. Integrity. Words used to mean things.
In Closing
In anticipation of the sort of response I am used to
getting to newsletters such as this one, I will offer this: It isn’t catastrophizing;
it is catastrophe. I am not raising the alarm about unlikely events that
may come to pass in the future—I am pointing out what is actually happening,
today, in this country, under a government of our own choosing. I will stop
writing about how our government is murdering people when our government stops
murdering people.
No comments:
Post a Comment