Media Pretend Trump Attacks On Cartels Are Unprecedented

The Trump administration is using lethal strikes against drug cartel boats in the Caribbean, and — as always — journalists are quite confident that nothing like this has ever happened before. He’s murdering drugrunners, executing them without due process, in an unprecedented use of military force! I could show you a dozen recent examples of this argument, but — as always — the dumbest, laziest example could come from just one source.

Watch the master at work, typing whole paragraphs despite what appear to be significant cognitive impairments:

“We are watching Trump execute supposed drug traffickers without due process. …” This is a stunning new development, and French explains that Trump supporters tolerate it because of their shameful ignorance: “They are desperate to rationalize, excuse and justify anything that he does, and they do not know much of anything about the law.”

There’s the premise: Dumb MAGA trash may not know this, but the law doesn’t allow the use of lethal force against drug cartels, because drug traffickers must be given due process, and so there’s just no reasonable role for the military in counternarcotics operations if you understand American legal and historical norms. Trump is a bizarre outlier, recklessly doing dangerous things that no one has ever dared to do before.

Now, notice the date on this news story:

So in 1986, the U.S. Army participated in an attack on a drug processing facility in Bolivia, with 100 American infantrymen supported by a bunch of American helicopters. Screenshot, with captions:

For literally decades, with considerable controversy and debate, the United States has militarized the drug war in Latin America. Everyone on the planet knows this, and has known it for many years, as one of the most crushingly obvious political realities of this century and the last one. Again, note the date on this news story:

Here’s the introduction to the Oct.-Dec. 2012 issue of Special Warfare magazine, an official publication of the U.S. Army, from pg. 4 of this PDF file:

So other than infantry assaults and shooting down planes and embedding Special Forces soldiers with Latin American militaries in a few hundred armed raids over the course of five-plus decades, it’s a shocking break with American political norms to use lethal force against the cartels. No one else has ever done it before, except for literally every single other president.

If this isn’t a history you’re familiar with, you can read a detailed discussion of American military counternarcotics operations here, with extensive legal and political context. If you want an example straight from the source, you can read President Bill Clinton’s 1993 Presidential Decision Directive on Counternarcotics in the Western Hemisphere, assigning a substantial role in drug interdiction to the military here.

Once again, Donald Trump is doing something that’s highly debatable, and can be argued about well within the bounds of ordinary political disagreement, but the debate is garbaged up with a bunch of hysterical and willfully obtuse fakery about his supposedly shocking break with American political norms. We never have honest debate, because of the growing psychosis of Trump monomania within the preening and empty “new elite” in media, academia, and politics. Trump is not the first American president to think up the allegedly stunning idea of using lethal force against the supply of illegal drugs from Latin America, and anyone who suggests to you that he is should be regarded as a colossal idiot.

Going back to David French and his lazy argument, the same goes for the part about gathering armed force outside Venezuela without congressional approval. Again, a highly debatable choice, but also comparable to the Obama administration’s unapproved war in Libya or the Biden administration’s attacks on Houthi targets in Yemen.

If we reach beyond very recent examples, Thomas Jefferson sent the U.S. Navy and a bunch of Marines to attack pirates in Northern Africa, and did so without a congressional declaration of war. Right or wrong, Trump isn’t doing anything new with these choices, which are all well within the range of long-established political norms. We’re addicted to hysteria, and it prevents meaningful debate. Maybe that’s the point of it. (See also my recent essay at Tom Klingenstein’s website on Trump’s supposed “politicization” of the military.)

On a related note, take a few minutes to read a federal judge’s 1984 ruling in Conyers v. Reagan.

Those names alone should hint at the outline of the dispute. Members of Congress sued the Reagan administration over the president’s decision to order the military to invade Grenada without congressional authorization, asking the courts to order the troops to cease fire and get back on the boat: “For relief, plaintiffs request that this Court invoke its equitable powers and grant plaintiffs a writ of mandamus and/or an injunction directing defendants to withdraw the remainder of U.S. Armed Forces personnel from Grenada and also grant plaintiffs a declaratory judgment holding the invasion of Grenada and the continuing occupation by U.S. Armed Forces to be illegal and in violation of the United States Constitution.”

Insert own Judge Boasberg joke here.

But the judge declined: “If the Court were to permit plaintiffs to come before it and litigate this matter, after plaintiffs were unsuccessful in their attempts to forward legislation that addressed their concerns, the Court would unnecessarily and unwisely interfere with the legislative process and raise significant separation of powers concerns.”

Insert own Judge Boasberg joke h— sorry, did I already do that one?

Again, the claim that Trump is venturing into dangerous new territory by using military force without congressional authorization is too silly to entertain. These are new iterations of old debates, and it’s not at all hard to see that Trump isn’t acting against our allegedly sacred political norms. His idea about the boundary of his military authority is historically ordinary. Contestable, debatable, but unremarkable.

These articles were originally published on the author’s Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends.”

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles. Find his Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.