[Edit: After thinking about it, I decided to soften the title a little, since there is still a chance we can avoid him dragging us into war. But he’s certainly doing his worst to see that we have one.]
There are a lot of diaries here and elsewhere about what Trump did yesterday in ordering the destruction of a boat near Venezuela and the death of the 11 people on board. Much of the concern is about what it signifies domestically — because Trump, like all autocrats, creates foreign enemies in order to seize and maintain control his domestic situation. But I want to ask those assembled here to think about a different aspect: What will world leaders take away from Trump’s latest action?
First, consider this: Trump ordered his — our — military, the mightiest in history, to take out a small boat that was unarmed and that posed no immediate threat even if it was carrying illegal drugs. As Chris Hayes pointed out tonight, that boat was a thousand miles from the US and could never have come anywhere near us.
Second, we have only the word of an absolute liar that the boat was carrying illegal drugs AND that they were destined for the US. No evidence, no records . . . nothing.
He posted on social media that Tuesday's US military operation had targeted members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
Trump said the vessel was in international waters and was transporting illegal narcotics bound for the US. . . .
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said that US forces had "shot out" a "drug-carrying boat" in the vicinity of Venezuela.
"A lot of drugs in that boat," he said.
How does he know? Did his gut tell him this? Did his need for something, anything, to distract from Epstein! Epstein! Epstein! lead him to order the strike? How will we know? If there was any evidence, it’s now at the bottom of the sea and burnt to a cinder.
Any competent adviser (and he hasn’t fired them all yet) would have told him that if we did suspect drug running, we should track the boat, since it would clearly have been heading toward a collection point, and then track the mother ship until it entered our waters, where the Coast Guard would capture it and we would be able to interrogate the crew and get more intel with which to truly fight the drug war.
So that’s the third thing that this act will lead world leaders to consider. Trump acts impulsively, without thinking about the consequences, without looking at the next steps needed. And when he orders the most powerful military in the history of the world to carry out his impulses, they salute and carry them out.
This is not the first time Trump has acted violently against a sovereign nation, but it is the first time, so far as I can think of one, that he has committed an act of violence far from the United States against another country’s nationals without even a pretext of justification, and moreover an act clearly to the detriment of his stated goal (in this case, stopping drugs from coming into the US).
Leaders of Europe and other countries have gamed out how to deal with Trump — the Trump of last month, or last week, when he could be counted on to at least hesitate before doing something crazy. They knew how to flatter him, how to play to his vanity, how to make him think their reasonable proposals were really all his idea. I don’t think they know how to deal with the Trump of this week, and they absolutely have to be terrified of the Trump of next week and the one after. And I am sure their intelligence services are giving them more accurate information about Trump’s accelerating physical and mental decline than we are being told.
How long will it be before some group of nations decides that, for their own survival, they have to stop Trump any way they can?
-------------------------------— 0750 PDT --------------------------------------—
Just to clarify the obvious: If a nation or group of nations does decide that, for their own safety and the survival of their own citizens, that Trump has to be removed one way or another, the next leader of the US (who will be Vance) will feel we have to respond. Even if they are subtle about it, they will leave enough clues (or we will invent clues, just as we did for that boat).
Will that lead to WWIII? Perhaps not immediately or directly. But what Trump just did is to further destabilize an already destabilizing planet. Read your history of World War I — a group of powerful nations all armed to the teeth and some of them ruled by less than competent leaders, none of whom actually wanted to go to war but all of whom ended up doing so because some anarchist shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire.
-------------------------------— 1315 PDT ------------------------------—
This is only going to get worse:
Trump Ordered Military To Blow Up Suspected Drug Boat Instead Of Intercepting It, Rubio Says
Speaking to reporters in Mexico City, Rubio said Trump made the call for the military to blow up a boat that American officials suspected was carrying illegal drugs from Venezuela to the U.S., foregoing the option to simply stop the boat.
“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again. Maybe it’s happening right now,” Rubio told reporters Wednesday in Mexico City a day after Trump disclosed the strike, which marks a major escalation in his administration’s crusade against drug trafficking. . . .
When asked if the military gave the boat a warning, Rubio replied: “The president has a right to eliminate immediate threats to the United States. This president is not a talker, he’s a doer.”
A dinky speedboat a thousand miles from our shores was an “immediate threat.” Riiiiiiight.
