The Pirate Lord Donald Trump

[Passages]

All evidence suggests the president is directing the military to assassinate random civilians off the coast of South America.

by Ryan Cooper
October 23, 2025

The Trump administration has been conducting an unprecedented assassination campaign in the Caribbean—and now the Pacific. CBS News reported that on Tuesday night there was an eighth strike, this time off the western coast of Colombia, that reportedly killed 2 or 3 people. That makes for a total of at least 34 people killed, most of them in international waters, and some reportedly in other nations’ territorial waters.

Though Trump is not the first president to assassinate people by drone—Barack Obama engaged in 563 drone strikes over his two terms, which killed up to 807 people—what’s notable is that he is claiming the authority to kill anyone at any time, on his word alone, violating norms and laws that stretch back to before the founding of this country.

As Tom Scocca points out at Defector, it is just straightforwardly correct to describe these strikes as murders. Even if we grant every one of Trump’s claims about why he is doing it—namely, to stop drug smugglers—drug trafficking is not a capital crime, and even if it were, that does not mean the government gets to blow you up with a drone legally, or sink an alleged drug trafficking boat and then return to massacre the survivors. There would need to be an attempt at capture, and a legal process involving evidence and due process. The president also can’t create a state of war with drug cartels on his say-so alone.

The administration, to be clear, has not presented any proof that any of the people or boats were involved in any crime whatsoever. Trump’s claims that he is stopping fentanyl imports also make no sense given that neither Venezuela nor Colombia produces significant quantities of that drug. Moreover, Trump is one of the most notorious liars in history, and you’d be a fool to trust a single word that comes out of his mouth.
https://prospect.org/2025/10/23/pirate-lord-donald-trump/


How Do You Stop A Serial Killer?

By Tom Scocca
11:11 AM EDT on September 16, 2025

Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.

Monday, on social media, President Donald Trump announced that he had murdered three people—"three male terrorists killed in action" was how he put it. By "terrorists," the president meant nothing more than that he claimed the three people were smuggling drugs; by "in action," he meant that they were traveling in a boat in the Caribbean when a U.S. military aircraft hunted them down and killed them.
https://defector.com/how-do-you-stop-a-serial-killer