U.S. President Donald Trump waves as he arrives at the White House, following his annual physical exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 10, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies are claiming that by carrying out a series of strikes on Venezuelan boats, they are saving American lives. Those boats, Trump insists, contained illegal drugs and were bound for the United States.
But critics of the attacks are describing them as "extrajudicial killings," warning that the Trump Administration used deadly force without ascertaining that the people on the boasts really were smuggling drugs.
Those boat attacks, according to New York Times reporter Charlie Savage, underscore the Trump Administration's willingness to ignore the rule of law.
"Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts," Savage explains in an article published on October 24. "But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart. A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump's orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs…. The irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency."
Savage adds, "It is becoming clearer than ever that the rule of law in the White House has depended chiefly on norms — on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding."
One of the legal experts who is sounding the alarm is Jack Goldsmith, who teaches at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts outside Boston and served in the George W. Bush Administration during the 2000s.
Goldsmith told the New York Times, "(President Richard) Nixon tried to keep his criminality secret, and the Bush Administration tried to keep the torture secret — and that secrecy acknowledged the norm that these things were wrong. Trump, as he often does when he is breaking law or norms, is acting publicly and without shame or unease. This is a very successful way to destroy the efficacy of law and norms."
Jeffrey S. Corn, a retired judge who now teaches law at Texas Tech University, considers the strikes against Venezuelan boats illegal.
Corn told the Times, "The men and women who volunteered to serve this nation and engage in the most morally challenging conduct imaginable — killing someone who is not immediately threatening you — have a right to know the nation will not order them to engage in that deadly endeavor unless it is genuinely justified both legally and morally. The service members who conduct attacks have to live the rest of their lives with the memory."
Read Charlie Savage's full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).