Trump thinks that the Constitution gives him the power to do anything he wants. He literally believes that and is acting accordingly. But apparently, some members of Congress are worried that he might not actually have the right to kill people indiscriminately as he’s doing down in the waters off the coast of Venezuela (and soon elsewhere) so they want to make it explicit:
Draft legislation is circulating at the White House and on Capitol Hill that would hand President Trump sweeping power to wage war against drug cartels he deems to be “terrorists,” as well as against any nation he says has harbored or aided them, according to people familiar with the matter.
A wide range of legal specialists have said that U.S. military attacks this month on two boats suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea were illegal. But Mr. Trump has claimed that the Constitution gave him the power he needed to authorize them.
It was not clear who wrote the draft congressional authorization or whether it could pass the Republican-led Congress, but the White House has been passing it around the executive branch.
The broadly worded proposal, which would legally authorize the president to kill people he deems narco-terrorists and attack countries he says helped them, has set off alarm bells in some quarters of the executive branch and on Capitol Hill, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity about sensitive internal deliberations.
Some people think that Trump’s extrajudicial killings, which he takes great pride in (when he’s not lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize) could be a problem:
Critics have also said that Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have given illegal orders, causing Special Operations troops to target civilians — even if they are suspected of crimes — in apparent violation of laws against murder.
What are these laws against murder you speak of? Haven’t they heard that the president can do anything he wants and is immune from all accountability no matter what?
It seems there’s a tiny bit of concern among some Congressional Republicans about all this:
At a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Thursday, several Democrats asked questions about the legal authority for the military strikes. But a Pentagon nominee said he was unable to answer them. At the end of the hearing, the Republican chairman of the panel, Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, said the administration must respond.
“The questions about what happened in the Caribbean are going to have to be answered,” Mr. Wicker said. “This committee has congressional oversight responsibility. Members are entitled to ask the questions that they’ve asked, and answers will be given. And I just think it’s important for every American to understand that obligation.”
David Ignatius wrote about the military’s role in all this which should be of concern. They aren’t supposed to carry out unlawful orders. But, as Ignatius points out, Pete Hegseth has purged the military of most of its lawyers, recently even sending 600 of them to become immigration judges. He is overwhelmingly hostile toward them:
Hegseth has a 20-year beef with military lawyers. He ridiculed them in his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” writing that the JAGs “are often not so affectionately known as ‘jagoffs.’” He claimed that “most” JAGs prosecuted U.S. troops rather than “bad guys” because “it’s easier to get promoted that way.” His resentment, by his account, dates from a 2005 JAG briefing in the south of Baghdad, where his platoon was advised not to shoot someone carrying a rocket-propelled grenade unless it was “pointed at you with the intent to fire.” Hegseth, a young lieutenant in the National Guard, said he told his platoon, “That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed,” and ordered them to, if they saw a threat, “destroy the threat.”
Hegseth’s antipathy deepened when he became a Fox News commentator. His friend Parlatore, who had represented him in a divorce proceeding, was a lawyer for a Navy SEAL named Eddie Gallagher who was accused of war crimes in the 2017 death of an Islamic State prisoner in Mosul, Iraq. Parlatore told a military jury that the case “should be terrifying … to anybody that has to go down range and then have their actions questioned by investigators like this,” according to author David Philipps.
Parlatore helped Hegseth publicize the case on Fox, and Trump, then in his first term, was an avid viewer. According to Philipps’s book, “Alpha,” Trump phoned Navy Secretary Richard Spencer and demanded that Gallagher be released from the brig — then he phoned again and said, “I want you to call Pete Hegseth at Fox and tell him what you’re doing.”
Gallagher was convicted of desecrating the corpse of the prisoner, but Trump overturned the verdict and restored his Navy SEAL insignia. At the time, critics warned that presidential intervention at the urging of a Fox commentator could undermine military justice.
The Gallagher case was Hegseth’s “origin story” as defense secretary. During his confirmation hearing in January, he didn’t budge in his opposition to what he called “burdensome rules of engagement.” And a month after he took office, the attacks on military lawyers began.
Ignatius points out:
The U.S. military has always emphasized obeying the laws of war, for all the difficulties that might cause. George Washington appointed the first judge advocate only a few weeks after taking command of the Continental Army; he wrote that “an Army without Order, Regularity & Discipline, is no better than a Commission’d Mob.”
George Washington was a loser. What did he know?
This is very, very bad. Trump seems to want to wage war in our hemisphere. His loose talk about “taking” countries like Greenland and Canada, the obvious attempt to create regime change in Venezuela, threats against Mexico, all of it adds up to some kind of imperial ambition.
At the same time he’s obviously on the verge of abandoning Europe and our Asian allies except as countries to strongarm into giving him money. He’s ignoring Putin’s military encroachments on Eastern Europe, saying in the UK this week that it doesn’t have anything to do with the United States:
This is a foreign policy from hell and I don’t think anyone fully understands it, least of all Trump. But that’s exactly how things can go sideways in a hurry.
Any president has the most power in this area and Trump sees no impediments anyway. Now it appears that the Congress would like to completely abdicate any responsibility for national security and just let him have his way. Keep your fingers crossed that nobody makes a catastrophic mistake.
Update: Are we going back to Afghanistan?
President Trump said he is aiming to regain control of Bagram Air Base, which has been under Taliban control since U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.
“We gave it to them for nothing. We’re trying to get it back, by the way. That could be a little breaking news, we’re trying to get it back because they need things from us,” Trump said Thursday of the base.
“We want that base back but one of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons,” he added
The president, while speaking at a press conference in the United Kingdom with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, did not expand on plans to get the base in U.S. hands and did not explain what he meant by the Taliban needing “things” from the U.S.
The base was the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan and fell to the Taliban during the chaotic withdrawal under the Biden administration. Trump in February asserted the U.S. should have kept control of the base and claimed that China’s People’s Liberation Army had taken control of it, which China previously denied.
Great.