Trump’s attacks on alleged drug boats are illegal acts of murder. But too many Democrats are shying away from calling the president out.
Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House on September 30, 2025.
(Hu Yousong / Xinhua via Getty Images)
Pity the nation where John Yoo is the voice of reason.
Yoo, of course, is one of the most notorious of the many national security ghouls who served in the George W. Bush administration, where he used his legal expertise to write in 2002 the so-called “torture memos” that sought to justify the use of waterboarding and other violations of the Geneva Convention in the name of the Global War on Terror. This is not someone typically concerned about following the law.
Yet in 2025 Yoo has emerged as a critic of one of Donald Trump’s most brazenly illegal foreign policy acts: his decision to blow up boats in South American waters on the grounds that they are being run by Venezuelan drug cartels.
No evidence has been provided to support these claims—but even if there were such evidence, the United States is not at war with Venezuela, or with drug cartels, or with any of the 14 people killed in these attacks. And there is no proof that the boats posed an imminent threat to any American. Bombing the boats and killing all those on board is an act of murder, plain and simple.
Even someone with Yoo’s rotted moral compass can see that. Writing in The Washington Post on September 23, Yoo warned that “these attacks risk crossing the line between crime-fighting and war.” He added that “a broad, amorphous military campaign against the illegal drug trade” would “would violate American law and the Constitution.” He speculated that “the use of military force against the cartels may plunge the U.S. into a war against Venezuela” which would also create “difficult problems.”
These mild cautionary words hardly amount to a ringing expression of anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiment. Yet they are much more pointed than anything said by congressional Republicans (who have predictably lined up behind Trump, with only the mildest expression of even a desire for oversight). Even more scandalously, they are harsher than the comments of most congressional Democrats.
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Opposing illegal acts of murder might seem like an obvious move for an opposition party. But Democrats, like they do so often, have preemptively conceded defeat.
On September 18, Politico reported, “Democrats have a dilemma as they oppose President DONALD TRUMP’s attacks on alleged drug trafficking vessels from Venezuela: Hold the military accountable for the strikes without looking like they’re defending cartels.” And on September 29, journalist Aída Chávez tweeted, “A senior Dem staffer is discouraging Democrats from coming out against regime change in Venezuela, congressional sources tell me. The staffer is using the Bush-era Iraq line, arguing that opposing Trump/Rubio’s regime change amounts to supporting Maduro.”
This Democratic staffer clearly hasn’t reflected on the simple fact that the “Bush-era line” conflating opposition to war with support for a dictator had the damaging effect of aligning senior party leaders (including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden) with a disastrous war and undermining the ability of the party to be an effective opposition—or that Democrats started recovering politically only when they took a firmer stance against the Iraq fiasco.
The stranglehold that militarism has on the Democrats can be seen in the comments of Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a “former” CIA analyst who remains an ally of the national security state. Slotkin told Politico, “We have uniformed military asking their chain of command for letters that ensure that they don’t have personal liability for any illegal action in these operations. I have no problem going after drug traffickers.” In other words, Slotkin’s goal is not to stop Trump’s bombing campaign and possible rush to war with Venezuela but to simply make sure it follows proper legal protocol.
On the Pod Save the World podcast, Ben Rhodes, former adviser to Barack Obama, pointed out that this “is an insane thing for Democrats to be cautious about. Americans don’t like war, they don’t like regime change wars—MAGA people don’t like that.… It is wrong to go to war in Venezuela. It is wrong to have policies of regime change. It’s wrong to kill people [extrajudicially] in boats. Full stop.”
Despite the cowardice of most in Congress, Trump’s actions are so egregious that they may yet force a constitutional crisis. On Thursday, The New York Times reported, “President Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants,” the administration said in a confidential notice to Congress this week.”
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This notice to Congress drew an unusually strong reaction from Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. Reed asserted that Trump has claimed for himself the power to wage “secret wars against anyone he calls an enemy” while offering “no credible legal justification, evidence or intelligence” for his actions.
Reed further said, “Drug cartels are despicable and must be dealt with by law enforcement. But now, by the president’s own words, the U.S. military is engaged in armed conflict with undefined enemies he has unilaterally labeled ‘unlawful combatants,’ and he has deployed thousands of troops, ships and aircraft against them. Yet he has refused to inform Congress or the public.”
As the writer Jake Romm noted in The Nation yesterday, the Venezuela attacks are part of a larger turn of the American empire away from a rhetorical support for international law since 1945 toward a more lawless world where the powerful have free rein to impose their will on the world. This turn has a long history that predates Trump. Indeed, the War on Terror and Yoo’s torture memos were significant pivot points in this turn. Israel’s current remorseless genocide in Gaza is another one.
This unrestrained great-power imperialism will take a long time to defeat, but it must be fought at every opportunity. One place to draw a line is at Trump’s rush to war with Venezuela. Democrats should oppose it with everything they have.
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