President Donald Trump looks on as he exits Air Force One on his arrival at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, January 31, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
President Donald Trump's has made "casual butchery of the innocent" a common occurrence in his administration, according to a new analysis from The i Paper, which further argued that his conduct is, in key ways, even more bloodthirsty than the mob.
The piece, published on Saturday, hailed from veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn and dug into the growing list of violent acts committed against the innocent that Trump and his allies are racking up, including one which he dubbed "the worst single atrocity in U.S. military history since the Vietnam War."
"On the first day of the US-Israeli attack on Iran on [February 28], US missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyiba girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran, killing at least 168 children as they sat at their desks along with 14 teachers – according to the Iranian media – in what may be the worst single atrocity in US military history since the Vietnam War," he wrote, later adding. "The slaughter of the schoolgirls by feckless US military commanders is but one ghastly example of the moral depravity of America during Donald Trump’s second presidency. Trump boasts of assassinating the 86-year-old Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but makes no mention of the killing by his side of his daughter, daughter-in-law and a 14-month-old granddaughter whose name was Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani."
He continued: "For the US government, casual butchery of the innocent has become the norm. In the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, US Southern Command has carried out some 196 extrajudicial killings of people in boats whom it claims, without producing any evidence, were 'narco-terrorists smuggling drugs into the US.' According to an Amnesty International report on the killings, the US has released and not prosecuted survivors from the air strikes on their boats, strongly suggesting that it has no proof they were carrying drugs."
Cockburn further cited a statement about these strikes from Amnesty International, which called them both "illegal" and "immoral," and accused the Trump administration of normalizing "extrajudicial killings." He went a step further, echoing the common comparison of Trump to a mob boss and likening his government to a "gangster underworld." However, he also argued that this comparison might, in fact, not be fair to the mob.
"This goes to the moral heart of the matter," Cockburn wrote. "The thought processes and behavior of the Trump administration in these cases resemble those of the gangster underworld, pitiless in targeting the weak and defenseless, respectful only of those who respond to violence with greater violence. If anything, the American Mafia arguably operates with greater moderation than Trump has here, making a distinction between civilians and its criminal rivals."