(Dobbs) “This is not stretching the envelope. This is shredding it.”Trump just keeps doing abnormal things until they become normal.
If you’ve ever wondered how Donald Trump gets away with what he gets away with, look no further than the boats that the United States has been blowing out of the water in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The latest count, as of this writing— which I have to say because by the time you read this, there might be more— is 14 air strikes, 15 boats blown up, 61 dead. Remember the first attack on September 2nd, almost exactly two months ago? It was a headline story. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. sank “a drug vessel which had departed from Venezuela,” and it happened in the “southern Caribbean.” The death toll was 11. The president announced on his website that the men who died in the boat were “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Sharing the headlines, especially after the next few strikes were announced, were verdicts of legal experts that the president did not in fact have the right to do this. That drug smuggling from South America does not constitute the “armed conflict” that he used as his justification. That the military is not allowed to deliberately target civilians who are not engaged in armed hostilities against us. That even if they were smuggling drugs, the people in the boats were not, as Trump called them, “unlawful combatants.” That there was no congressional authorization, which the Constitution requires. And maybe most damning, that beyond vague and unspecific claims about who was in the boats and what they were doing, neither President Trump nor Secretary Rubio or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor press secretary Karoline Leavitt nor anybody else offered any evidence, let alone proof, that their assertions were accurate. And that therefore, every attack on every boat was an extrajudicial execution. Or as some called it, murder. But that was then, this is now. The newest attack— again, “as of this writing”— was Wednesday. Four more men killed. This one, according to the secretary of defense, was “on yet another narco-trafficking vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization in the Eastern Pacific.” But you wouldn’t find an online account about it easily anymore. After 14 air strikes and 61 deaths, this has become normal. It’s no longer worthy of a headline. If you went looking for the story, you had to scroll deep down to find it. In yesterday’s New York Times, you had to scroll through 33 other articles before you reached it. In The Washington Post, it was minimized in a small box beneath 54 other pieces before it came up. Inexplicably— or not— while Fox carried the story, on its home page, you wouldn’t find it at all. So this is how Trump gets away with it. He just ignores the law and ignores the limits. He ignores expert counsel and ignores the Constitution. He doesn’t credibly explain himself and he doesn’t apologize for a thing. For a while, critics rant about what he does but he just keeps on doing it and doing it until it drops off the front page, buried beneath newer stories that also compel our attention. Gaza. Ukraine. Tariffs. Hurricanes. China. Demolitions at the White House. He knows that his corrupt conduct— not just with the boats, but with the extortions and the deportations and the political persecutions and so much more— eventually will not compel our attention. This is what we mean when we lament that Donald Trump’s abnormal and aberrant behavior becomes “normalized.” It’s like he’s telling us, yes, we’re blowing boats out of the water, what are you going to do about it?! Pathetically, the answer from Congress is, nothing. Partly because so many members fear the repercussions of standing in Trump’s way. And partly because he has shut out half of Congress. Wednesday, his people went to Capitol Hill and briefed senators. But only Republican senators. They didn’t even tell Democratic senators they were coming. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s vice chairman, Democratic senator Mark Warner, rightly called it “a slap in the face to Congress’s war powers responsibilities and to the men and women who serve this country. Decisions about the use of American military force,” he said, “are not the private property of one political party.” Montage of social media posts by President Trump and Secretary Hegseth courtesy of New York Times. Not that the briefing would likely back up the administration’s claims, let alone its justifications for the strikes. Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of the Armed Services Committee was included in an earlier briefing by Trump’s officials and came away telling reporters, “They had themselves all tied in knots and trying to explain why this is legal to do.” The fact is, they don’t even try to prove their case. They seem to think that aerial videos of the attacks themselves, usually attached to their online posts, are proof enough. They are not. All they prove is that we killed some men and sank some boats. Even if some or even all of the boats were smuggling narcotics, that doesn’t mean the United States can just shoot them out of the water with no due process. At least, not legally. Hegseth can say as he did Wednesday on X that the boat destroyed in the 14th air strike “was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics.” But given his record, the defense secretary, like his boss, is a little hard to believe. His post had an obligatory video of that latest strike, but nothing else except his word. Typically drug smugglers have been classified as criminals, not “unlawful combatants,” and if apprehended, typically they have been arrested and prosecuted. Until now. Now, by staging air strikes against them, allowing for no defense at trial and leaving any substantiation to be mangled by sharks or sink to the bottom of the sea, the administration doesn’t have to deal with messy details of evidence and indictments and trials for suspected smugglers. It will just kill them off at will. A former advisor for law-of-war issues for the United States Army, retired Lt. Col. Geoffrey Corn, bluntly assesses the administration’s actions. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he has said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.” But that won’t stop Trump. He’ll keep shredding it and shredding it until we can’t even find it in the news. Until the legal experts turn their attention to a newer outrage. Until we stop noticing. That’s how he gets away with what he gets away with. Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame. You can learn more at GregDobbs.net |