As defenseless Venezuelan fishermen are slaughtered by a military blindly obeying his illegal orders, President Trump — wearing a phony peace medallion — parades before the world urging it to “give peace a chance.” A combination of madness and make-believe, the clash of his war crimes horror and the spectacle of his sanctimonious talk of peace is so grotesque, so steeped in Orwellian doublethink that it causes both choked laughter and a brain-bursting shock of cognitive dissonance.

The US has killed 87 people in a series of 22 unauthorized air attacks on what it says are drug boats – vessels carrying illicit narcotics in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific. These summary executions, with accompanying celebratory videos of small crafts disintegrated into a fireball of debris, have been largely tolerated by Congress and the public.

Political outrage arose only recently thanks to a Washington Post investigation of the first such attack on September 2. US forces hit the targeted boat once, then hit it again — the second strike vaporizing two shipwrecked survivors clinging to the wreckage. According to the report, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a verbal command to “kill them all.”

Hegseth, who had watched the operation remotely, blamed Admiral Frank M. Bradley, the commanding officer in charge of the operation.

“I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. This is called the fog of war,” Hegseth said, demonstrating his ludicrous belief that “fog of war” relates to literal smoke or fog when it actually refers to confusion resulting from the chaos of field combat.

Evading the war crimes charge, Hegseth said,

“At the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, or whatever.”

Instead, Hegseth busied himself posting a mocked-up cover of a children’s book, depicting the cartoon character Franklin the Turtle blowing up a boat with a rocket launcher, under the imagined title, “Franklin Targets Narco-Terrorists.” To Hegseth, killing people is a joke.

Despite Hegseth’s indifference to human decency, killing civilian survivors of the boat attack is a clear-cut war crime. The Defense Department’s own Law of War manual forbids precisely this kind of action, spelling it out on page 448:

“Members of the armed forces and other persons who are wounded, sick or shipwrecked, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances.”

Despite Republican war-crime whitewashing, the murder of two defenseless survivors created a momentary political firestorm that overshadowed the outrageous illegality of the entire military offensive.

“Focusing on the shipwrecked is a distraction insofar as it suggests everything else preceding and after that strike was all legitimate,” said, Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and former Pentagon lawyer. “Even under a law of armed conflict, they were all civilians, and we are not actually in armed conflict. Either way, it was all murder.’

Warping reality, the Trump administration said that the boats in its gun-sights are ferrying drugs, from Venezuela to the US and that the traffickers are part of a “designated terrorist organization.” In effect, the US argued that the “war on drugs” is an actual war, in which Trump has the right to act as he would in any war.

There has been no declaration of war and a small unarmed fishing boat is not a warship.  At most this is a policing operation: drug dealing is not subject to the penalty of extrajudicial death by missile. In peacetime, targeting a civilian is murder; in an armed conflict, targeting a civilian is a war crime.

Last week Trump said, in effect, so what? He anointed himself judge, jury and executioner, insisting that he could continue to launch strikes against alleged drug traffickers without Congress first passing an official declaration of war.

“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country,” he said. “Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be, like, dead.”

In this, Trump aligned himself with the murderous anti-drug policy enacted by former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. During his 2016-2022 tenure, Duterte launched a nationwide “war on drugs” that resulted in thousands of extrajudicial killings, carried out by police and vigilantes with de facto state sanction. According to Human Rights Watch, Duterte’s “war on drugs” led to the deaths of over 12,000 Filipinos, mostly urban poor. 

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Duterte with US President Donald Trump in Pasay, Metro Manila, November 2017 (Public Domain)

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Patricia Evangelista’s horrific book Some People Need Killing documents Duterte’s extreme brutality.

“This is my order to the military,” said Duterte. “Find these drug pushers and kill them, period. I’d be happy to slaughter them. We need more funeral parlors because everyone will be dead.”

Trump has expressed admiration for Duterte’s drug war, praising it explicitly during a 2017 phone call:

“I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

Last week at a Cabinet meeting where he dozed off several times, Trump jolted awake to channel Duterte,

“Every boat that you see gets blown up, we save 25,000, on average, 25,000 lives. They’ve been sending enough of this horrible fentanyl and other things like cocaine and other things. But fentanyl right now is the leader of the pack to kill our entire nation.”

Numbers, even if they are made up, are important to Trump and Duterte. According to Evangelista,

“Duterte wildly exaggerated the number of drug traffickers and users saying there was over 4 million because numbers demonstrated the enormity of the problem: the army of mindless drug-dealing monsters whose extermination would require the entire might of the national government.”

Trump’s fabricated numbers are supposed to “justify” the massacre meted out against civilians in little wooden boats. They aren’t ferrying fentanyl as most comes into the United States across the Mexican border, smuggled by US citizens. Historically, the drug trafficked through the Caribbean is cocaine, and much of that is destined for North Africa and Europe. Finally, these boats are too small and ill-equipped to get to the United States. But facts don’t matter to the liar Trump.

In reality, Trump encourages drug-pushing. He pardoned a convicted narcotics kingpin — the former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández. A year into a 45-year sentence for drug-trafficking on an epic scale, Hernández — also jailed for money laundering and arms dealing — was found responsible for more than four hundred tons of cocaine reaching the United States. Shocked at the pardon, the Honduran Attorney General issued an international arrest warrant for the freed criminal Hernández.

Yet this did not cause a furor either on Capitol Hill or the media despite the fact that combating the flow of drugs into the US is Trump‘s principal rationale for launching the boat attacks that violate national and international law.

Image: Nicolas Maduro

The extrajudicial killings reflect Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s and Trump’s fixation on deposing Venezuela’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro, possibly to plunder the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Wrapped up in the case for Maduro’s ouster are all of Trump’s most dangerous proclivities, including his xenophobic bigotry and his disregard for war crimes.

Rubio has long been committed to regime change in Venezuela, in part because he believes it would lead to regime change in Cuba and Nicaragua as well. Pushing the false claim that a Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua is a terrorist threat, Rubio falsely asserts that the Maduro government directs it to invade the US through an incursion of migrants. He repackages the illicit war against Maduro as a battle against against “narcoterrorism,” with Maduro as a drug cartel leader — a possible fake rationale for an air strike targeting Maduro.

Trump has unilaterally declared Venezuelan airspace “closed in its entirety,” ordered the largest military buildup in the region since the Cuban missile crisis, and warned that land-based strikes could begin “very soon.” Yesterday, the US seized a Venezuelan oil tanker without justification. Though historically US aggression in Latin America has been appalling, the Trump administration is somehow managing to plumb new depths. Trump and Rubio are openly manufacturing a war in a manner so blatant as to recall the Iraq buildup.

The increased possibility of a catastrophic invasion derive from intersecting normalizations. The abrupt and unexplained departure of combatant commander Adm. Alvin Holsey during a military mobilization like this would have occasioned sustained coverage and congressional investigation in another era. Now it feels already forgotten. After a failed vote to stop the boat strikes, congressional democrats (and Rand Paul) are left lamenting stonewalled requests for information instead of moving to block funding for the buildup. 

While engaging in war crimes abroad, threatening regime change in Venezuela, and carrying out an anti-immigration war at home, the self-anointed “President of Peace” was giving himself accolades for ending another war.

“We just settled another war today, you saw that with Rwanda and the Congo,” he said excitedly. “We just settled it today. That was a big one.”

Aside from his belief that he, and he alone, gets to decide what qualifies as an emergency worthy of sending in the troops, it’s quite a trick for Trump to both claim credit for ending wars that are not actually over while initiating new ones that have no legal justification,

Last Thursday, Trump appeared at the newly renamed “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace” to preside over a signing ceremony with the Presidents of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Earlier in the year, Trump and his maniacal henchman Elon Musk took a chainsaw to the Institute for Peace and closed it — a congressionally chartered, independent think tank dedicated to fostering peace around the world. Musk fired institute staff, staging an armed takeover with the help of the DC Police, which was later ruled a “gross usurpation of power” by a federal judge.

Repurposing the shuttered Institute for propaganda, State Department workers — at he behest of industrial strength sycophant Rubio — had recently hauled giant “Donald J. Trump” silver letters to the hollowed-out building, and slapped them on its facade.

At the ceremony, Trump praised himself for “succeeding where so many others have failed” in brokering a deal between Rwanda and the DRC. At the end of the ceremony, a journalist suggested — consistent with reports from the region — that fighting in eastern Congo had escalated in the run-up to the summit and that peace was not really possible until troops actually withdrew. Not to worry, the President insisted: “It’s going to be a great miracle.”

The mind-bending peace charade ignored the awkward fact that a President famous for deriding African nations as “shithole countries” was hosting an array of leaders from the continent — not only from Rwanda, the DRC, and Kenya but also from Angola, Burundi, and elsewhere — just days after unleashing a bigoted rant branding all immigrants from Somalia as “garbage” and declaring they were not wanted in the United States.

For months, motivated by his humiliatingly infantile desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump has absurdly presented himself as the very incarnation of a global peacemaker, touting an ever-changing list of international conflicts that he claims to have settled, such as the Gaza-Israel ceasefire.

Since the ceasefire was announced October 10, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians in Gaza. As UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s wrote:

“Ceasefire according to Israel equals you cease, I fire. Calling it ‘peace’ is both an insult and a distraction. Israel must face justice, sanctions, divestment, boycott until occupation, apartheid and genocide are over and every crime is accounted for.” Further, Amnesty International claims that Israel is still committing genocide in Gaza and that the use of the term ceasefire “risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal.”

Trump-as-global-peacemaker propaganda continued last Friday. As billions of fans around the world tuned in to watch the World Cup draw at the Trump-commandeered Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, they were forced to endure an unrelated, cringe-inducing, Trump promotional event. The head of FIFA — soccer’s governing body — Gianni Infantino awarded Trump the recently concocted “FIFA Peace Prize.”

This prize is not only a farce, but an appeasement trophy, a meaningless certificate, and a gaudy medal. After showing Trump the gruesome trophy that appropriately depicts the hands of the undead rising from the grave to crush the globe, Infantino reached out to help Trump put on the medal, but a pathetically enthusiastic Trump ignored him and eagerly medaled himself. The Village People performed “YMCA” and Trump did his stupid “dance” as the event degenerated into a Trump rally.

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Dan Dinello, Professor Emeritus at Columbia College Chicago — is the author of Children of Men, a critical analysis of Alfonso Cuarón’s visionary dystopian science fiction film masterpiece. His other books include Finding Fela: My Strange Journey to Meet the AfroBeat King – a memoir of his 1983 trip to Lagos, Nigeria, to film African musical legend Fela Kuti, and Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. Dan runs the Website shockproductions.com and has also contributed chapters to books about Avatar, Westworld, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Ridley Scott, and Star Trek among others. He is an Informed Comment regular.

Featured image: Pirate of the Caribbean,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v 3, 2025.

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