Round-up: Senators defying Trump on drug strikes. And speech. Plus, Trump's retribution.

Analysis of the week's events

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Senators defy Trump on drug strikes

Over the past week or so, the Trump regime has carried out three military strikes against boats in the Caribbean. Each of the boats was allegedly operated by the Tren de Aragua drug cartel and allegedly carrying narcotics destined for the United States.

These strikes are almost certainly illegal under international and U.S. law. A country cannot simply blow up civilian boats from another nation when it feels like it. Doing so amounts to extra-judicial killings - and the U.S. military personnel carrying out these strikes could be liable for prosecution.

The Trump regime is trying to get around this by designating the cartel as a “foreign terrorist organization” and the crew of the boats as “narco-terrorists”, a definition that clearly stretches the meaning of “terrorist” to the point of absurdity.

But even if we were to accept the premise that drug trafficking somehow constitutes a terrorist threat and that people doing it should be armed combatants, there’s another problem… which is that the Trump regime reportedly is not even sure who the people on the boats they struck were:

Defense Department officials briefing congressional staff on Tuesday about last week’s US military strike on a boat in the Caribbean did not present conclusive evidence that the targets of the attack were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, according to the senior Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and three people familiar with the briefing.

“They have offered no positive identification that the boat was Venezuelan, nor that its crew were members of Tren de Aragua or any other cartel,” Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Tuesday after his staff were briefed by DoD.

The briefers also acknowledged that they could not determine exactly where the targets were headed, two of the sources said. Whereas Trump has said they were en route to the US, Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially said, “these particular drugs were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean, at which point they just contribute to the instability these countries are facing.”

Another of the sources said the briefers disclosed that the boat turned around at one point after appearing to spot a military aircraft above that had been watching them. The boat turning around, reported earlier by the New York Times, raises more questions about whether it posed an immediate threat to the US that necessitated military action.

So. They don’t know who was on the boat. They don’t know where it came from. And they don’t know where it was going. But they killed everyone on board anyway.

Many Democrats have pushed back against the regime’s actions, which is the right thing to do. Allowing the president to simply decide to murder foreign civilian on a flimsy basis is a slippery slope. It’s heartening to see Democrats taking this principled stand even though they risk being portrayed as friendly to the cartels, a political dilemma that Republicans will be only too glad to exploit.

Even a few Republicans have gotten in on the act. Rand Paul, the libertarian chair of the Homeland Security Committee, has blasted J.D. Vance over his support for the strikes. Paul says that a policy of targeting civilians could lead to “horrendous mistakes”. Even John Yoo, the lawyer who drafted legal guidance justifying the use of torture during the Bush administration, thinks the strikes are likely illegal.

The drama is likely to continue. Democrats are pushing legislation to try to stop the regime conducting these strikes, while some MAGA Republicans are pushing alternative legislation that would try to provide legal justification for them. We’ll see, when push comes to shove, whether Republican senators stand up for their supposed principles or just fold like they so often do.

…And speech

Trump’s attempt to use the aftermath of the Kirk killing to crack down on free speech, which I wrote about extensively yesterday, has also run into some surprising pushback from Republicans.

The main voice wading into the fray has been Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas. Cruz seems particularly exercised about ABC’s sacking of Jimmy Kimmel, a move which came after overt pressure from FCC chair Brendan Carr. The move, Cruz says, is “right out of the mafioso”. He also added: "It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it. And so again, I like Brendan Carr, but we should not be in this business”.

One thing I find interesting about this is seeing a Republican politician actually standing up for a principle in the face of the Trump regime. Cruz still approves of nearly every other illegal or immoral thing the regime is doing, but it’s interesting to see that there is some sort of line.

On the other hand, Cruz’s pushback is not really that strong. He’s not calling for Carr to resign, and “let’s not do it to them because they might do it to us” is not exactly a principled defense of the constitution.

But it does reveal one thing: Cruz is acting like, or at least pretending to act like, he expects the United State to continue to be a competitive multiparty democracy into the future. His warning presupposes that there might come a time when Democrats are back in power again and able to wield the power of the state.

And on my darkest days - which come increasingly frequently - I wonder if the Trump regime expects the same thing. It often seems like it’s playing for keeps. And I expect that when push comes to shove, Ted Cruz isn’t going to try to stop it.

Trump’s prosecutions of his enemies

Yesterday, a top federal prosecutor resigned rather than wait to be fired by the White House. The reason he was pushed out? He told Trump there’s no basis for prosecuting some of his most hated political enemies.

Erik S. Siebert had been tasked by Trump with overseeing investigations into New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey. Trump hates James because she was responsible for making him a felon with the Stormy Daniels case, and he hates Comey for about a million reasons, dating back to the Mueller investigation.

Nevertheless, said Siebert: we can’t just prosecute people because you don’t like them, Mr. President. And so now he is gone.

What happens next isn’t clear. Generally federal prosecutors are only supposed to investigate concrete allegations of wrongdoing, not just fish around for something incriminating on people the president doesn’t like. Siebert was a straight shooter who insisted on doing things the right way. But who will replace him?