It’s raising questions about how far President Trump intends to wield his presidential power over the U.S. military. Democrats question the legality of the strike.
Within a week of Donald Trump’s election, Sen. Lindsey Graham counseled the president-elect to quickly send a message to the drug cartels from the White House.
“Blow up something,” Graham told Trump.
The brazen military strike on a suspected drug-smuggling speedboat carrying 11 people from Venezuela this month is just what the South Carolina senator had in mind. But it has cleaved fresh divisions within the Republican Party over Trump’s campaign promise to keep the U.S. out of foreign entanglements and the reality of a commander in chief whose America First agenda is pursuing a tougher military stance.
And it’s raising stark questions about just how far Trump intends to wield his presidential power over the U.S. military without a robust check on the executive branch from Congress.
Already, Trump has dropped 30,000-pound bombs on Iran’s nuclear sites without any new authorizations from Capitol Hill. He deployed the military to Los Angeles over the objections of California’s Democratic governor and wants the National Guard in other cities, too. Trump’s allies pressured senators to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary despite objections to his past behavior and skepticism of “warrior culture” at the Pentagon. And last week Trump rebranded the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
“I don’t care whether it’s a Republican president or a Democrat president,” said Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, once a Trump rival for the White House. “We can’t just want to kill people without having some kind of process.”
“We’re just going to blow up ships? That just isn’t who we are,” Paul said.‘Killing cartel members’
The Trump administration, and the president himself, have said the lethal strike on the vessel from Venezuela was intended to make it clear that the U.S. would not tolerate drugs being shipped into this country. They said those killed on the boat in the Caribbean included members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which operates from Venezuela, though details have been scarce.
