About a month after Donald Trump first bragged about a military strike on a civilian boat in international waters that killed 11 people, the president spoke to the nation’s generals and admirals and commented on his handiwork. His comments were chilling.
Reflecting on the apparent fact that there are now fewer boats in Venezuelan waters because local fishermen are afraid that the U.S. might kill them, Trump told military leaders, “It’s amazing what strength will do.”
It was a glimpse into a twisted perspective. As the incumbent American president sees it, using the military to kill civilians in international waters reflects “strength.” Of course, by that logic, those who follow the rule of law are necessarily “weak” in Trump’s eyes.
As the deadly military operations continued and the White House claimed that it was targeting “narco-terrorists,” there was no shortage of questions as to whether the administration’s strikes were legal. Even John Yoo, the notorious former deputy assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, has suggested that the White House might be crossing a legal line.
It’s against this backdrop that 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. The notice was sent to several congressional committees and obtained by The New York Times.
In other words, as far as the White House is concerned, the president isn’t murdering civilians with military strikes. Rather, he’s engaged in a lawful military campaign against drug cartels with which Trump has unilaterally “determined” the U.S. is in “armed conflict.”
The Times’ report, which has been independently verified by NBC News, added that the move reflects the president’s maximalist approach to sweeping wartime powers.
Geoffrey Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, argued that drug cartels are not engaged in “hostilities” — which would mean the White House is crossing a legal line.
“This is not stretching the envelope,” Corn told the Times. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”
About a month into his second term, as part of a “Friday Night Massacre,” Trump fired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman CQ Brown Jr., the country’s highest-ranking military officer. As dramatic as this was, the general’s ouster was part of a broader purge: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also announced the firing of Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations, and Gen. James Slife, Air Force vice chief of staff.
Then the Trump administration announced that it was firing the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, wrote via Bluesky that the ouster of these judge advocates general was “just as bad as, if not worse” than Trump’s other Friday night firings.
In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Army paratrooper, explained that the firings of the military’s most senior legal advisers was “an unprecedented and explicit move to install officers who will yield to the president’s interpretation of the law, with the expectation they will be little more than yes men on the most consequential questions of military law.”
Roughly eight months later, the administration is dealing with a consequential question of military law, and as it struggles to craft a coherent answer, the absence of those judge advocates general — who were responsible for, among other things, determining whether presidential orders are legal — is clearly being felt.
