Trump Says We’re Just Going To Straight Up Murder A Bunch Of People
from the american-exceptionalism dept
Be the Duterte you want to see in the world, I guess.
That’s the new line from Donald Trump, the guy who once told supporters he could personally commit murder and he wouldn’t lose any supporters. He said that last time. He’s president again, so apparently it’s time to see if this adage holds up.
Trump has already pretended the mere existence of foreign gang members anywhere in the world justifies whatever actions he chooses to take under the heading of “immigration enforcement.” That includes sending people to countries they’ve never lived in or back to countries they fled from for fear of getting tortured or killed. All of this has been greeted with shrug from a man with an ill-fitting jacket and head full of hate.
In recent weeks, things have escalated. Trump is pretending the mere existence of a worldwide drug trade is a combination of undeclared war on the United States and an ongoing act of terrorism. So, we’ve just started committing extrajudicial killings in international waters and expecting DOJ/DoD lawyers to work out the legal details after the fact.
A few legislators have started to speak up about this, suggesting that, at the very least, Trump should approach Congress to secure a declaration of war to justify these… well, let’s call them what they are: murders. Even though he’s got a majority working for him, Trump doesn’t want to do this. He’d rather just do whatever he wants and let everyone else deal with the consequences.
Trump has never been the most coherent or erudite of orators. And that’s what gives statements like these an extra edge: the boorish, almost-bored vow to commit murder spilling out of the mouth of the nation’s largest single-cell organism.
Here’s what Trump said, in case you can’t see the embed:
Trump: “I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like dead.”
That is chilling. There’s literally no precedent for that in this country. And he’s not just talking about the nearly daily sinking of boats Trump and Hegseth claim (without evidence) are filled with drugs and drug dealers. He’s talking about what’s in the works, which appears to be a land invasion of Venezuela and Colombia.
That’s the sort of thing that usually requires a declaration of war. But, of course, Republican presidents in particular have tended to feel congressional involvement isn’t necessarily needed. George Bush invaded Panama to take down Manuel Noriega. Ronald Reagan did the same thing in Grenada. And the less said about the forever war on terror, the better, because I’d hate to see what’s being discussed now turn into decades of misery for everyone involved.
This is horrific and it should have been immediately greeted by a deafening uproar by Democratic leaders. It should have been rejected out of hand by members of Trump’s own party. Instead, it has just become another part of the background noise that is the Trump administration grinding its way towards its authoritarian goals.
Filed Under: defense department, donald trump, drug dealers, drug war, extrajudicial killings, murder, trump administration, venezuela
Comments on “Trump Says We’re Just Going To Straight Up Murder A Bunch Of People”
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It needs to be done.
Over decades our politicians have pursued other solutions – tried other options. At least President Trump is trying something new.
The people being targeted traffic drugs into our country from South America. They don’t stop at drugs, however. These same people traffic young women and young girls (yes, children) into our country and across South America for sexual exploitation. They murder people including these same women & girls when they’re no longer “valuable”.
I’m sorry – not sorry that our President is killing them. The sad truth is that sometimes certain people simply need to die. When your business is “drugs and slavery” forgive me for not giving a damn when they get blown up.
Furthermore were these groups not recently declared to be foreign terrorist organizations? Say what you want but if you murder innocent people and sell young women/girls into slavery as a “business model” that is terrorism.
I fully endorse what he’s doing. It’s exactly what I voted for.
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Murdering people without evidence is not “trying something new.”
Are there some people who do that? Yes. But you defeat that by tracking them down and stopping them, not just blowing people up without any evidence or due process.
Yeah, the whole fucking problem is that we don’t know that the people being killed are in the “drugs and slavery” business. That’s why you have due process.
Thinking it’s good to just kill people because they’re brown and MIGHT be associated with such things makes you worse than them. It is immoral and evil.
No. They were not.
Again, you’re skipping the step of actually figuring out if the people we’re killing did any of that. Why?
You voted for indiscriminate murder? Get the fuck off my site.
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Every President murders people.
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Then every president should be prosecuted with the same due process rights that every other person deserves. You can’t morally whatabout murder. No amount of anyone else doing anything makes it okay to skip due process.
We put the surviving horrific Nazi fucks on trial before we executed them. Some people weren’t executed because we determined they hadn’t done enough to deserve execution. Because otherwise we’d be as bad as they are.
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Not every POTUS murders people without presenting evidence that the people he’s killing are doing the things he believes are deserving of extrajudicial execution in international waters. Obama’s drone strikes deserve to taint whatever legacy he has as the first Black man to be the President of the United States, but at least he tried to justify those with evidence that he was trying to kill actual terrorists. Other than Trump’s word (which has less credibility than Baghdad Bob), what evidence proves that the people in those boats he ordered to be blown up were actually involved in smuggling drugs into the United States?
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So then you can be killed anytime?
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What is sadder is that some people are really buying the “worst of the worst” narrative from a President that is lying more than he respires.
Re: Citation(s) needed. Needed desperately.
And no, Trump’s say-so doesn’t count. Nor does that of any of his cabinet or MAGA/Project 2025 coterie. They’ve simply lied about too many things — too often, too baldly, too loudly, and even too damn proudly — to retain any credibility.
Present valid receipts, or step aside.
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Several of those boats had waaaay to many people on the for carrying smuggling drugs, instead they were trafficking people. And we fucking killed them.
You guys are, as always, moronic assholes.
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Not for nothing, but can you prove they were human traffickers any more than Trump has proved they were drug runners?
Re: Schrödinger's Narco-terrorists
If the people Trump is trying to kill are drug trafficking terrorists, why are the survivors being rescued by the US military and released to their home countries?
Shouldn’t they be being arrested and put on trial?
Here is the problem:
He doesn’t ask them. And they don’t want to draw attention to that because then why vote for them? They hope they’ll be the last ones before the firing squads.
I’m pretty sure we’re all thinking the same thing at this point.
When you put together ‘flagrant human rights violations’, ‘president willing to eject, arrest or murder anyone who speaks out’, and ‘legal system and elected representatives abdicated responsibility’, there’s really only one conclusion to reach.
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Time for a revolution?
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And, if you’re willing to give up essential liberties for some temporary safety, there’s only one thing to say:
“Sieg Heil!”.
I mean, what Nobel Peace Prize hopeful hasn’t used that exact phrase before?
This is despotism. The concentration of power in one man’s hands so his word becomes law
It’s crystal clear the executive is trying to seize all the real political power in the USA by constantly shifting the goalposts so the outrageous becomes normal.
Worse, they have active collaborators on the Supreme Court and in the Senate and Congress
Trump can ignore the written law whenever he fancies and his judges on the Supreme Court will blatantly rewrite the law via the shadow docket while pretending it isn’t an abuse of their power
Meanwhile Congress and the Senate stand back and look like traitors as their own powers are unlawfully seized one by one with barely a murmur of protest
Re: Shutdown?
Not a word? No kings day said a lot for how little media it got. No pushback? The gov is shutdown. Now i know its Trumps plan to drag this out till enough gov workers quit, while playing at attempting to blame democrats. That said people are pushing back, its just required new methods as the ones we had are broken.
State governments must already be talking to each other. That means things like calling a convention are coming up, and just calling one is enough to get congress to do its job most of the time.
So things are not sunk, we’re still voting at mid terms and can enough to at least impeach Trump again.
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People can describe the problem over and over again on as many sites as they like, but neither calling it out nor due process nor voting will be sufficient counters.
By the time all is said and done, messaging and a charismatic leader are all well and good, but a Liberal think tank is overdue by almost a year on producing what a plan looks like to completely and seriously revolutionize (not a marketing exaggeration) all forms of conservatism out of government, regulate the braying hounds of populism and forcibly seize, redistribute and tax the assets of the wealthiest people in the world.
You cannot do this by slowing shit down by treating due process as a Holy Grail for the simple fact that the determined opposition can break more laws and hurt more people than you can process punishment for.
At some point it will be necessary to drive the entire last century of conservative establishment into the seas to right the failures of the Reconstruction Era before being able to attempt to build credibility as a society for rule of law from the ground up. Even that will only buy 50 years of peace, only 20 if you drag your heels with due process and fuck up the necessary, speedy and earthquake reforms of the SCOTUS, Citizens United, electoral college and neutering the outsized targeting and influence of less populated states while their infrastructure and culture is left to rot.
Once that muscular plan is written, THEN determine a candidate charismatic enough to sell it as moderation but enact it more brutally and competently than MAGA.
Reversion to the status quo just exhausts any opposition to an even more competent right wing autocratic swing.
I guess the precedent is to use a bunch of flowery euphemisms when talking about it, so you do have him there.
But actaully putting it into practice? The precedent is entirely on Trump’s side. Murdering whoever we want outside the borders is bog-standard US foreign policy for the last 60 years. There was a brief period of excitement when Obama extended the policy from “foreigners” to “anyone outside the country”, but that died off pretty quickly.
If anything, this is probably the most “look at that normal US politician” thing that Trump has done in his second term.
When you have a White House staff of literal Nazis, as Trump does, they look at the Third Reich as a playbook to re-run.
The Final Solution came about by taking small marginalized groups and killing them and going to larger, more assimilated groups before exterminating Jews. Killing as skill-building.
By going after small boats of alleged drug smugglers, magas will be numb to the moral horrors when the abbatoir state comes for their neighbors.
US still import about 330k pounds of Cocaine annually (92% from Colombia and 6% from Peru).
It’s only a third of what was imported in 1980s (mostly because it’s cheaper to import pure Cocaine and cut it when other cheapest products that could be found more easily in US) but it won’t go to zero in the next three years just because some people will be shoot over the oceans.
Or maybe Donald has great plans to produce Cocaine in US (sure he knows many people that could do that), or he’ll drive the actually 2.2 million Americans taking Cocaine (and 42 million having already tried) very angry.
It’s simple. President Trump has an Article II, which gives him the power to do whatever he wants. Particularly he has the power to end life, the power to end liberty, and power to end the pursuit of happiness.
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Not to mention the power to end logic and the power to end compassion.
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Well I hope that’s a joke, but I just can’t fucking tell anymore given how far off the map the maga freaks have sailed.
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“Pursuit” of happiness takes on the meaning of pursuit commonly associated with a lights-and-sirens police chase.
They know who holds their leash, and they wear it willingly
The real kicker is that all it would take is him simply telling his MAGAt servants in congress ‘Declare war so I have some legal cover to continue with the murders’ and both he and they know that they would do it in a heartbeat, he is just showing yet again how fitting the No Kings mass protests were and are by behaving like a king that answers to no-one.
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If the No Kings protests do not result in a detailed plan that mirrors and expands on Project 2025 then it is a waste of effort and applies no pressure.
While we do need to go through the motions of the rigged 2026 mid-terms and rigged 2028 elections, those plans need to be drawn up and acknowledged by all the key players in advance, governors, disaffected generals, disaffected law enforcement, disaffected National Guard, and natural disaster recovery logistics between state regions, in advance of those elections.
There should be a quiet unspoken threat to follow through on an outcome that looks like the closeout of Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime backed by a Project 2032 and a direct implementation of progressive tax rates that are punitive on the top 500k/yr+ individual earners and corporations if the elections are found to have had even a whiff of right wing poll watchers, AI, or the military, close to the 2028 polling stations.
Without all of that prepped No Kings rallies aren’t applying the pressure they appear to be to restore rule of law.
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Do you think it’s a waste of effort to get thousands of people together in one place and let them see how much more alike they are than they might think? Do you think it’s a waste of effort to get images of millions of people around the country marching in solidarity against a tyrannical president shown on media platforms of all kinds? Do you think it’s a waste of effort to help people form new connections with one another that might help them down the road, whether that help is about putting together a Democrat version of Project 2025 or about making sure people are able to take care of themselves?
You’re asking the No Kings movement to do the work of elected officials and left-wing think tanks when most of the people involved aren’t even in those two groups. Millions of people got together in one of the largest nationwide political protests in this country’s history and all you can think to do is effectively say “well they didn’t come up with detailed plans to effectively turn the government into a one-party system run by liberals so fuck them”. No, they didn’t come up with those plans—but building community is equally as important (if not moreso). While neither you nor I can know how much of an effect those protests had in that regard, I’d wager it’s higher than zero, and that must count for something in a country that is increasingly accepting the ideas of “every person is an island unto themselves” and “nobody deserves help from the government”.
I’m fine with the No Kings protests accomplishing nothing of significant political value. I wouldn’t have minded if they did accomplish something along those lines, but I will always prefer the protests we saw happen to seeing no protests at all.
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You are replying to someone who apparently thinks speaking up and protesting is totally useless unless there is a guarantee that an instant change will happen.
Every revolution begins with a single act of defiance.
– Mahatma Gandhi
I can’t wait to find out what the man who “hates his enemies” and is “just going to kill people” will do next!
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i feel like this is a quote from Tom Tomorrow.
What a stupid decision
Let’s get it out of the way that murdering people without a trial or even accusing them of a crime is horrible.
But I’ve watched enough police shows to know thst you NEVER kill the guy transporting the drugs since he’s a small fish. Instead, you arrest him and interrogate him to lead you to the big fish.
Where’s the US navy or Coast Guard? Why aren’t they scooping up these “drug runners”, arresting them, and learning who’s supplying the drugs?
Oh, right, Trump doesn’t care and he just wants to kill people. Today, it’s “drug runners” and tomorrow it’ll be political enemies.