U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he meets with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (not pictured) at Trump Turnberry golf club on July 28, 2025 in Turnberry, Scotland, Britain. Christopher Furlong Pool via Reuters
The New Republic reports President Donald Trump’s administration keeps changing its story to justify an unprecedented military strike on an alleged Venezuelan cartel boat transporting drugs.
Department of Defense officials privately expressed concerns that the government had changed details of its story about the strike that killed 11 people, according to a Thursday report by the New York Times.
The New Republic reports Secretary of State Marco Rubio telling reporters the ship was travelling to Trinidad, Tobago, or “some other country in the Caribbean.” But after Trump claimed the ship was on course for the United States, Rubio changed his claim to align with that of the president.
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International drug traffickers “pose an immediate threat to the United States, period,” Rubio said Wednesday, according to the New Republic. “If you’re on a boat full of cocaine or fentanyl or whatever headed to the United States, you’re an immediate threat to the United States.”
“Shifting the narrative to center the United States is particularly concerning considering the fact that the Trump administration has yet to produce a legal authority for the use of military force against cartels,” wrote New Republic writer Edith Olmsted.
Trump claimed this week that the eleven crew members were “narco terrorists” that belonged to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, which the executive branch has labeled a terrorist organization.
But Olmsted said that designation does not serve as a legal basis for a combat strike, and added that the government has “offered no evidence to support its claim that the boat occupants were drug traffickers, despite Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claiming administration officials “knew exactly who was in that boat” and “exactly what they were doing.”
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“The actual details still remain murky beneath the Trump administration’s shifting narratives, and the government has been anything but transparent about the military strike, which may prove to have been illegal,” Olmsted wrote.
Read the full New Republic report at this link.