By Jason Renard Walker 

To call Donald Trump’s military missile strikes on boats in the Caribbean, extra judicial killings, is a misstatement. It suggests that there was an ongoing crisis that needed addressing and a judicial responded with unnecessary violence. This is not the case here. There was no crisis. These were state sanctioned serial killings by a tyrant that is using the military in peacetime to kill civilians, in an effort to instigate conflict with Venezuela and weed out its president Nicolás Maduro. The more appropriate term should be psychopathy. 

Since early September ten different boats have been obliterated at the direct orders of Trump, killing over forty people, who he claims were enroute to the U.S. with drugs and were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang he declared a terrorist group and unlawful combatants. Whether or not any, some, or all of these boats carried drugs is irrelevant to the amount of deadly force used to stop them. In such instances, intercepting boats that pose a threat to the U.S. is the role of the Coast Guard. There is no evidence to suggest the Coast Guard needed military assistance. 

Trump’s orders were insensible, unfounded and gave him another opportunity to kill and destroy the lives of Hispanics. Also, we must not be fooled by focus on Venezuela and Colombia as a sign that narco trafficking across the U.S./ Mexico border is in check. 

The irrationality of these horrific endeavors is that Trump suggests boats bringing drugs to the U.S. is a threat that will only be met with murder, land attacks being next. Yet neither he, nor the Department of Defense has produced, nor can they produce, any evidence to prove that: 

1) The boats were headed to the U.S. 

2) The occupants on the boats were drug traffickers and an imminent threat to the U.S. in particular, if they weren’t killed right then. 

3) Had the boats reached the U.S., the threat level would’ve increased beyond Coast Guard efforts. 

4) How this method of drug smuggling is a threat that can only be prevented by destroying the entire vessel, but Asia shipping fentanyl to Mexico and the U.S. the same way is not. 

5) If civilians that deal drugs in Venezuela and Colombia aren’t killed by the military, Americans are in danger. 

6) Using the criminal justice system to prosecute drug smugglers is ineffective. 

Quite the contrary, the Trump administration has indirectly produced evidence that no such threat exists. And the president of Colombia expressed on social media that a strike in September had killed an innocent Colombian fisherman in Colombian waters. 

First off, two of the survivors in a September strike were repatriated back to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution. This alone brings the first question: If these individuals are that much of a threat and need to be killed, why are survivors being sent back to the countries they came from? The second question is: What evidence can either of these countries use to convict them of drug smuggling when the evidence and boats have been destroyed? 

Here we have Trump, who acts more on impulse, emotions, and self interest, abusing the power of the military to kill innocent civilians, for his own personal reasons and in contradiction to the interests of the U.S. He’s made it clear that neither Congress nor any other judiciary will impact or sway his decision to kill as desired. He’s even prepared himself by deploying aircraft carriers and naval assets into the Caribbean in case Venezuela and Colombia choose to protect themselves once the U.S. military invades their mainlands and massacres innocent civilians with, or without, the approval of Congress. 

Using the military to kill ‘suspected’ drug smuggling civilians based on the personal lust of a lying psychopath has no judicial standing.

I think we should look at Trump as acting in his personal capacity and under the color of law. He’s shown that there will be no initial judicial step to check and balance any decision he makes for any reason, while the law is whatever he says it is. And acting personal is exactly what he’s doing, while overstepping the limits of his own presidential authority, not acting within it. 

What Trump has done is torn a page from ex president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte’s playbook, removed the knock and plea element and is testing its application as a license to kill, in the international arena and without verbally declaring war. 

After Rodrigo was elected as president of the Philippines in 2016 he instituted an anti-drug program that included an initiative called Oplan Tokhang (which translate to knock and plea). This policy focused on capturing low-level drug dealers and users. 

Under Oplan Tokhang, the police and local officials visited the homes of those suspected to be involved with drugs, with the demand that they cooperate with busting other dealers and users. Those that refused, or cooperated then returned to using drugs, were reportedly killed. Under this program Duterte had thousands of people slaughtered, without giving them a trial. 

The difference between Duterte’s extra judicial killings and Trump’s orgy of murder is twofold. Duterte used drug offenders as a scapegoat to justify creating a law to kill them if they didn’t help control the drug epidemic. On the other hand, Trump is framing fishermen and others as narco traffickers, using a procreated terrorist designation he gave Tren de Aragua to kill whoever he wants, while bypassing all efforts to address the reason he says warrants the killings. 

Under Duterte’s law, there was an extortionate opportunity for the victims to avoid being unlawfully executed. Under Trump’s law, there is no right to live, no need to collect evidence and no rule that compels him to prove who he killed and why. The victims are ironically and summarily blown up without being probed, interrogated, or questioned about who they were working for, who they were delivering the drugs to and who they are. Which in my perspective, doing so is common sense and fundamental to catching the highest in command in the U.S. and abroad. 

This in itself is proof enough that these boats being targeted aren’t being blown up in furtherance of confronting a drug trafficking operation that supposedly posed a proximate and acute threat to U.S. citizens some 2,000 miles away. They were just collateral damage, Trump’s means to achieve an end. 

One of the things he does well is take the most dangerous and abnormal events and make them feel like a normal part of U.S. politics. It’s evident in how the mainstream media and those questioning his illegal war crimes, aren’t doing so from the view that it is shamelessly immoral, but are merely questioning whether he had evidence that who he killed, were in fact drug traffickers. So they’ve completely tucked what’s going on into their back pocket and seems likely to accept his actions, if he can just prove his rationale for engaging combat with defenseless civilians. Which he won’t because he can’t. 

We have gone from a president who was elected, in large part, to lower inflation and the cost of groceries and control illegal border crossings – Trump’s link to fentanyl overdoses in the U.S. Nearly a year later inflation and the cost of groceries have gone up, his mass deportation plan is receiving push back and he’s let the military loose in U.S. cities and is now attempting a coup in Venezuela. 

But these aren’t random acts that Trump is experimenting with on a whim. Most were embedded during his dog whistle campaign speeches, that I illuminated in a past article: The New Lee Atwater, that I posted to my website http://www.jasonsprisonjournal.com 

Though some who read it suggest Trump’s policies were clear, not all of his policies were publicly announced.

There were the closed circuit banquets he held at his Mar-a-Lago resort for his billionaire friends and potential donors and the fundraiser dinner where high class individuals paid a set fee to be near Trump and feed him their recommendations. This is where a lot of his newly disclosed maneuvers were probably discussed and refined. 

One consistency Trump seems to keep in his arsenal is taking the moves of previous presidents and attempting to outdo their achievements and even their blunders. A good example, out of many, is his efforts to go after everyone involved in investigating, charging and critiquing him, with no signs of slowing down, which is what Richard Nixon pulled in his Watergate scandal. Trump’s second term is merely a Watergate. 

In the original Watergate ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon drew up an enemies list and took it to the IRS and pressed them to go after his enemies. When they pushed back he installed a special task force at the IRS to do the deed. In no way was it as bad as the break-in. But it was one of the core charges of abuse of power that would have led to his impeachment, had he not resigned. 

The difference between Trump’s quasi-Watergate and Nixon’s is that Trump is publicly announcing his desire to abuse power to the world, while Nixon did it quietly and had to be fleshed out by reporters. But the similarities are clear, Trump is just taking them to the next level and daring anyone to try and stop him. 

We can also look at his peacemaker nickname he has convinced conservative commentators to roll with. If we dip into his dog whistle tactics, a different view emerges. For those unfamiliar, a peacemaker is a firearm manufactured in 1872 by Colt and was used as a standard issued firearm in the military from 1873 until production ended in 1941. To go even further it’s also the name of a comic book character that not only enforces the law through murder, but thinks he is the law. 

Whether he is selling dog whistle politics like Atwater, committing public executions under a fake war on drugs like Duterte, or keeping the legacy of white supremacy at the forefront of American history like his fore fathers on Mt Rushmore: Trump will not stop. He can only be stopped. 

Jason Renard Walker 1532092 

Powledge Unit 

PO Box 660400 

Dallas, Tx 75266

Jason Renard Walker is a prison journalist who has published articles and essays in various print and online media outlets since 2016. His work can be viewed at: www.jasonsprisonjournal.com You can also purchase his paperback book ‘Reports From Within The Belly Of The Beast: Torture And Injustice Inside Texas Department Of Criminal Justice’ available on amazon.com