Conservative Commentators Cheer for Bloodshed in the Caribbean
Donald Trump’s administration for months now has been celebrating dubiously legal air strikes the military has been carrying out against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, many Americans look on in horror, and the charred remains of bodies are washing up on Caribbean beaches, with locals suspecting they may be the evidence of airstrikes on the boats. It now appears that one of the strikes may have been in violation of a cardinal rule of international conflict, after the military launched a second missile to kill off the survivors of a strike in early September. Conservatives have continued to celebrate.
Neither the families of the sunken dead nor the American public have received any concrete justification as to why these men — some of them fishermen with no discernible criminal history — were condemned to die. The Trump administration has employed the same reasoning they have used for the sweep of detainments, deportations, disappearances, and imprisonments the government has carried out over the past year: these are terrorists. But even as elected members of the Republican Party begin to cast doubt on the legality of the president’s maritime executions — and the blank-check power the administration has given itself under the guise of counterterrorism — influencers and commentators who only recently decried the Biden administration as lawless abusers of the justice system are demanding more bloodshed.
“I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer,” former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly told her podcast audience this week. “I would like Trump and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little.”
Current Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said on Tuesday that while it would “be great to kill a terrorist while he’s terrorizing,” what “are the odds of that?”
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“Of course, they’re going to say, ‘But what if they were a fisherman?’ You could say the same thing about terrorists. What if those terrorists were fishermen? True. Maybe they are terrorists. Maybe we made a mistake,” he added, but, “It’s just better for us to kill them in the ocean, make them shark feed, be done with it. Merry Christmas.”
Commentator Stephen Crowder wrote on social media that “if the Left is angry that a drug-running terrorist boat got blown out of the water, they’re not ‘pro-humanitarian.’ They’re just anti-America.”
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), a former Navy Seal, also defended the second strike. “I can’t recall any time in my history of doing counterterrorism operations where we strike a group, whether that’s a building or a boat or a vehicle, and then we were, like, ‘Oh, well, there’s survivors. We have to go. We can’t kill them.’ Of course we killed them,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
Vice President J.D. Vance, meanwhile, criticized “permanent Washington” for drawing a “red line” at “using the military to destroy narco terrorists in our own hemisphere.” In a Cabinet meeting earlier this week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed the administration had saved “hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you’ve blown up in the Caribbean.”
The Department of Defense Law of War manual instructs servicemembers to abide by the laws of the Geneva Convention in regards to “humane treatment protections for all persons taking no active part in hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause.”
“Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” the manual adds.
Some congressional Republicans are pushing for clarification from the Trump administration over what exactly happened in the September “double tap” strike. The Washington Post reported last week that Hegseth issued a verbal order to “kill everybody,” as one source with knowledge put it to the paper. Navy Admiral Frank Bradley, who allegedly carried out the order, briefed lawmakers behind closed doors this week about what happened. Hegseth and Bradley have both denied Hegseth gave the order.
“Admiral Bradley was very clear that he was given no such order, not to give no quarter or to kill them all. He was given an order that, of course, was written down in great detail, as our military always does,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), told reporters.
Other lawmakers remain unconvinced of the administration’s obfuscation around the strikes. “Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors — bad guys, bad guys — but attacking shipwrecked sailors,” Rep. Jim Himes, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee added.
Hegseth remains unfettered, and has doubled down on the bloodshed in response to the increased scrutiny. On Wednesday, after Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet wrote on X that “every new attack aimed at Pete Hegseth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean,” Hegseth seemingly rewarded him.
“Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat,” Hegseth responded.
The head of the most lethal fighting force on the planet is taking marching orders from his friends on social media. The laws of war have seemingly been suspended in order to create propaganda films and the impression that the administration is cracking down on terror. The president, of course, is all for it. “Every boat we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives,” Trump claimed in the Oval Office on Wednesday. “I think you’re going to find that this is war, that these people were killing our people by the millions.”