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.
Right-wing media celebrate extrajudicial strike on Venezuelan boat, even if it’s “outside the realm of legality”
Over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday, prominent conservative commentators dismissed concerns that Trump may have exceeded his legal authority in ordering the airstrike.
- On Fox News’ The Five, co-host Harold Ford praised the strike, arguing that it “sends a message like none other can — that even if this is outside the realm of legality, and the courts will eventually tell us this, those on those boats know that they have a problem, that this president and our country now is going to protect and seal our borders against these kinds of things.” Ford added: “I love what the president — the things he’s doing here. We’ll see if it stands up to muster.” [Fox News, The Five, 9/3/25]
- During the same program, host Greg Gutfeld pointed to video of the strike on the boat, claiming, “I prefer that due process right there” to the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has argued Trump administration officials are violating his due process rights. [Fox News, The Five, 9/3/25; CNN, 8/25/25]
- Fox News host Jesse Watters claimed that Democrats didn’t criticize former Presidents Barack Obama or Joe Biden for airstrikes carried out during their administrations, but “Trump sinks a boat full of narcos with enough fentanyl to kill a small city and they want to bring him to the Hague.” He added: “That speedboat was full of killers heading to our coast. That’s an enemy attack Trump neutralized.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 9/3/25]
- Fox News host Laura Ingraham mocked international-law experts who questioned the legality of the strike, arguing that they “are actually defending the drug lords.” Ingraham asked her guest, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who is a former military lawyer — if Trump was “on solid legal ground here.” DeSantis responded: “One hundred percent.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 9/3/25]
- On X (formerly Twitter), MAGA legal influencer Mike Davis celebrated the lack of judicial oversight of the strike, writing: “And Trump didn’t get Jeb Boasberg’s permission.” Right-wing media have waged a campaign against Judge James Boasberg since he ordered the Trump administration to halt some deportation flights in March. [X/Twitter, 9/2/25; Media Matters, 3/18/25]
- MAGA media influencer Mike Cernovich wrote several posts defending the legality of the strike. He argued that “some decisions made by the Executive are non-justiciable political questions” and Trump’s classification of Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization “clearly falls under this,” adding: “By bombing the cartel boats, this is 10 times more true.” In a separate post, he wrote: “Under the Constitution, the President is immensely powerful. He can declare and wage war. Courts have stolen power for themselves. Judges are the ones violating the law.” He further argued that Trump’s airstrike “has strengthened his legal position.” [X/Twitter, 9/3/25, 9/3/25, 9/3/25]
Trump recently claimed, in the context of sending the U.S. military to invade and occupy Democrat-run cities, that he has “the right to do anything that I want to do.” When it comes to extrajudicial murder, his media acolytes clearly agree.
Conservative pundits envision expanded targeted killings and imperialist access to natural resources in Latin America
The deeper questions raised by the airstrike are moral ones, not least of all because it is unusual to have so many people on such a small boat, suggesting that some of the occupants could have been migrants. And it’s worth underlining that participation in the illicit drug trade is not a capital offense, secret intelligence is not a conviction in a court of law, and the summary execution of so-called drug dealers in other contexts has prompted international outrage.
As for whether Trump’s strike is an opening salvo or a one-off, right-wing media are clearly signaling they believe it is the former.
On The Five, Watters paraphrased Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (formerly of Fox News) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, saying, “There is more where that came from.” Watters opened the panel discussion with: “This is an escalation in the war on drugs — I could see this expanding.”
Co-host Dana Perino speculated, “I’d imagine that those Mexican cartels are wondering, wait, could this happen to us?” (The New York Times reported on August 8 that Trump had ordered the Pentagon to use military force against some illicit drug organizations in Latin America.)
Later in the same program, guest and Good Day New York host Rosanna Scotto said the bombing was “shocking,” to which Watters replied, “We’ll probably have to see more of it.” Scotto then speculated, “Mexico may be next.”
The next morning, Fox’s Rachel Campos-Duffy entertained an imperialist fantasy about how Trump’s growing military campaign could allow the United States to seize natural resources in Latin America.
Campos-Duffy said that Trump sent a message to “our hemisphere” that “there’s a new sheriff in town.”
“Make no mistake, the Southern Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere is resource-rich — all the lithium and all the critical minerals, there’s oil, there’s so much there and we’ve ceded so much of it to China.”
Campos-Duffy’s remarks are reminiscent of Trump's 2016 threat to “take the oil” in Iraq, and similar comments he made in 2019 about Syria.
Trump’s boat strike brings to mind another story from 2016, when civil libertarians expressed worry that then-President Barack Obama was handing incoming President Trump keys to a global assassination program. The responsibility for the 11 deaths falls squarely at the feet of the Trump administration, but one wonders how history might have been different if Obama had dismantled the war apparatus he inherited from George W. Bush — and held that administration legally accountable for its crimes — rather than institutionalizing it.
And although former President Joe Biden put limits on the targeted killing program relative to Trump's first term, the ACLU's Brett Max Kaufman said in 2023 that Biden's “rules further entrench unilateral assertions of presidential power.” Kaufman added that the “the policy’s weak civilian harm rules do not even apply to strikes conducted in ‘collective self-defense’ of U.S. partner forces,” language that largely mirrors the statement Trump's White House gave to Fox News on Thursday.
The war on terror and the war on drugs now seem to be one and the same, as some long feared and predicted. The Trump administration and its right-wing media supporters are cheering on an extrajudicial killing that by all accounts is a template for future strikes. No doubt conservative pundits will defend those as well, law or morality be damned.
