The Real Target of Trump’s War on Drug Boats

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1. Since September 2nd, the Trump Administration has attacked seven boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing at least 32 people, on the grounds that they were drug traffickers transporting contraband to the U.S. The President has justified the strikes as a matter of national self-defense, claiming, without evidence, that drugs from the region are responsible for 300,000 deaths in the U.S. last year. There were about 80,000 drug-overdose deaths in the U.S. last year. Fentanyl, which was responsible for the overwhelming majority of them, doesn’t come from Venezuela, and the Coast Guard has no record of seizing it in the Caribbean. “This is basically U.S. propaganda through force,” a former senior national-security official who served in the first Trump White House told Jonathan Blitzer. “This is not a counter-narcotics mission. It’s using a ten-ton truck to kill an ant.”

   Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff and the head of the White House Homeland Security Council, has a strong stake in the Administration’s increased military aggression, a source said, because Venezuela presented “an outlet for the belief that the President can just kill these guys” as part of an open-ended war on drugs and crime. “Stephen is a lot of the energy behind the bombings,” the source said.For

   Miller, the military strikes help expand the President’s power, while also reinforcing the narrative of Venezuelan immigrants as “alien enemies.” As a former Trump Administration official put it, “this just feels like the militarization of domestic policy. How do you stay in power? You create an ‘other.’ You say that we’re under attack. You create a casus belli. You blame the other for everything. This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities. You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.” Jonathan Blitzer reports on Trump’s recent vessel strikes in the Caribbean: [https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-real-target-of-trumps-war-on-drug-boats](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-real-target-of-trumps-war-on-drug-boats)

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