Right-wing media concoct their own legal justification for Trump’s extrajudicial strike on Venezuelan boat

Right-wing media figures celebrated President Donald Trump’s extrajudicial killing of 11 people on a Venezuelan boat on September 2, concocting their own legal rationale in the absence of any immediately provided by the administration. Indeed, they largely treated the arbitrary nature of the strike and its accompanying lack of oversight as a feature, not a bug.

Trump publicized the strike in the Caribbean the same day the U.S. military carried it out, claiming he had targeted “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” adding that the group is “a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro,” the president of Venezuela.  

Trump didn’t initially specify the legal authority under which he had ordered the airstrike. According to The New York Times, “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

Some international law experts warned that the killings had no lawful justification or precedent and could amount to a war crime. Legal blog Just Security examined several potential legal authorities the administration could invoke, finding them lacking, and concluded: “The use of lethal force in this attack appears gratuitous and the administration has not explained why law enforcement tools were inadequate to address the situation.”

On Thursday morning, Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin appeared on The Faulkner Focus and said the strike “raises questions about the legality and rules of engagement employed in this military strike.” She then read a lengthy statement from the White House that argued  the strike was legally permissible because it was “taken in defense of vital U.S. national security interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations” and said that it was “fully consistent with the laws of armed conflict.”  

But the right-wing media ecosystem didn’t wait to get that rather boilerplate statement to render its verdict. Instead, it treated Trump’s role as judge, jury, and executioner as a point of nationalistic pride — while imagining future actions and the spoils they might yield.