Donald Trump or whoever is running things for him in the White House—say hi to Keyboard Warrior Stephen Miller—has used the U.S. military to launch six missile attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea that have killed a total of 29 people they are calling “narco-terrorists.” The attacks have been carried out since Trump, in an annex to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2024, declared that drug cartels are “non-state armed groups” which he “designated as terrorist organizations and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.”
Those words may sound familiar if you read one of the first executive orders Trump signed on January 20 declaring that undocumented immigrants “unlawfully” crossing the border into the United States constituted an “invasion” that presented “significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans.”
On September 22, Trump signed another of his executive orders declaring Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” and on October 8, at a White House meeting of his top national security officials including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump agreed to further designate Antifa as a “foreign” terrorist organization that “wants to destroy the American people and their way of life.”
So, let’s review: Trump is using the United States military to launch lethal attacks in the Caribbean on a group he calls terrorists. He has provided no evidence that the boats they have shot out of the water were carrying drugs, no evidence of the identities or nationalities of those who were killed, and no evidence that the dead were part of any drug cartel that Trump has designated as a terrorist organization.
In this country, specifically in the city of Chicago, Trump used federal officers to launch an armed assault on an apartment building, removing the residents of 130 apartments from their dwellings, handcuffing and detaining them, including little children. Federal officers presented no evidence that the people in the apartment building were there illegally or that they had any connection to foreign or domestic drug gangs. Trump’s agents issued no search warrants and left a trail of broken-down doors and scattered personal possessions in their wake before, hours later, releasing nearly all of those who had been detained.
Trump has been attempting to send the Texas National Guard into Chicago for two weeks. Today he filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court of two lower court decisions which have barred him from deploying members of the National Guard from Texas or any other state to Chicago or anywhere else in Illinois.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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