Trump’s arbitrary assassinations were enabled by Democrats

Among the Trump administration’s various daily assaults on democracy in America, it can be easy to overlook examples that ultimately become inflection points. A close look at what might seem like one-among-many, however, reveals further depths of the emerging dystopia.

Many have wondered what will happen when Trump finally joins Henry Kissinger in hell. Will the GOP repudiate Trump’s thuggery, or will J.D. Vance consolidate and institutionally entrench it?

The complicity of so many Democrats in so many of Trump’s actions suggest that the ultimate crux is not the behavior of Republicans, but instead whether voters are able to hold accountable, refashion, replace—or instead remain beholden—to the Democratic Party.

No issue better demonstrates the disturbing pattern of Democrats enabling Trump’s authoritarian aspirations than arbitrary state assassinations.

Assassinations made for social media

Last week, observers across the political spectrum condemned (while an equally bipartisan spectrum of voices outrageously supported) a military strike on a boat in the Caribbean that allegedly was being used by narcotraffickers to transport illegal drugs.

The legal sleights of hand enabling the strike included a recent reclassification of Venezuelan gangs as supposed narcoterrorists, as well as a decision (made within a month of Trump retaking the White House) to ease restrictions on military airstrikes.

But Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, explained why these contrived justifications hold little water:

Under international standards for law enforcement, lethal force can be used solely as a last resort to meet an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. That rule makes sense because law-enforcement officials should ordinarily seek to arrest and prosecute criminal suspects. That is the best way to ensure they have committed the offense in question. It also respects the fact that for most crimes, the penalty upon conviction is a prison sentence, not the death penalty—let alone summary killing without trial.

Trump has sought to evade those standards by in effect declaring war against Venezuelan drug cartels. Beginning with Richard Nixon in 1971, US presidents have repeatedly referred to a “war on drugs”, but that was a metaphoric war, a rhetorical claim that the effort was important, not a literal war. The distinction is important, because in genuine armed conflicts, opposing combatants can be summarily shot unless they are surrendering or in custody. There is ordinarily no duty to try to capture or arrest them.

There was nothing in the encounter in the Caribbean Sea that is indicative of a war.

Adam Isacson, Director for Defense Oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, explained that “There is zero evidence of self-defense….Looks like a massacre of civilians at sea. Even if they had drugs aboard, that's not a capital offense.”

Dan Froomkin, whose bylines have appeared in The Washington Post and The Intercept, described the strike as a “Horrifying story, and yet horrifyingly understated. This is a five-alarm fire. These are war crimes. This is murder. Trump should go to prison for this. Servicemembers should have refused their orders.”

Make no mistake: murdering people through military airstrikes, rather than proving their guilt in a criminal trial, is a gateway to every horror imaginable. This is precisely why the presumption of innocence matters so much. Without it, our government would (and seems to, indeed) simply kill people randomly.

But methinks the ranks of outraged opinion columnists doth protest too much. Or, more accurately, they’re raising their voices a decade late.

The complicity of supposed “liberals”

Presumptive guilt justifying arbitrary state assassination was a power normalized not under a Republican president, but under President Obama, who infamously pioneered arbitrary drone strikes in the War on Terror and even decided himself who would wind up on the CIA’s so-called “kill list.”

There are many reasons why so many of us have been screaming bloody murder for over a decade, while a generation of complacent self-described “liberals” (who couldn’t even understand their own supposed commitments) grew complicit, aggrandizing executive power and sleepwalking into today’s constitutional crisis.

Both Obama and Biden helped prepare the presidency for Trump’s autocracy, yet enjoyed unflagging support from the liberal establishment. Similarly, both administrations enjoyed broad support from organized labor despite their refusal to support labor’s most critical demands.

In each arena, acts of political theater were taken in lieu of actual solidarity or representation, allowing communities to be fleeced by wolves masquerading as fellow sheep.

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I wrote over a decade ago to expose the lawlessness of the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes, which effectively killed victims at random despite widely parroted claims that they were somehow targeted. As I explained in 2013:

While presenting the leaked memo authorizing al-Awlaki’s death as limited to that particular target, the [New York] Times acknowledges that at least two other US citizens—against whom drone strikes were supposedly not authorized—were killed without trial. Yet no one has been held accountable, the program has been only reinforced by [CIA Director John] Brennan’s confirmation, and the unaccountable use of targeted assassination continues in secret.

The question ignored by proponents of drone strikes is the same overlooked by those who defend torture: “How do we know our government has the right person?” The overwhelming proportion of detainees released from Guantanamo, or recurring revelations of surveillance targeting non-violent activists, reflect our government’s poor track record of assessing guilt.

No demonstration of this pattern offered a more jarring example than the assassination of a 16 year-old born in Denver based on his father’s (theoretically constitutionally protected) speech. Like a dystopian legal cherry on a rotten political cake, he was killed even after he & his family previously sought to vindicate his right to due process in court.

A once-secret legal memo leaked in 2013 followed a March 2012 speech by then Attorney General Eric Holder at Northwestern University Law Center, both aiming to justify what apologists described as a policy allowing “targeted killing” without any judicial—let alone due—process.

A few weeks after AG Holder spoke at Northwestern, I delivered a keynote address at a law symposium a few blocks away at Loyola University Chicago Law School. The article compiled from my remarks is freely available, but in the interest of making it machine readable, here is a relevant excerpt:

Just last week, the chief prosecutor of our country spoke down the street from here and defended the president's authority to disregard both [the Fifth and Sixth] amendments at will to essentially order the death of a U.S. citizen without any process. Now there’s a secret process that the Attorney General claimed would suffice to guard against any potential liberty interest that we might perceive as threatened here, but I want to invite you to think about a couple of things….from a legal realist perspective.

I will grant that the Attorney General articulated a series of limiting principles that govern whether killing a U.S. citizen is legal, such as the seniority of a target within a known terror network and the imminence of an attack that might ensue from the target’s activities. But what value are limiting principles if there is no forum in which to articulate or contest them? And if there is no transparency to the decision—if this is a process that happens entirely behind closed doors—how can we have any faith that the application of those limiting principles reflects any degree of legitimacy?

The short answer is: we can’t. The canard that we can simply construct a division of process that doesn’t involve judicial process, that we can cut out Article III of the constitution because it is inconvenient to the executive branch, is not only foolish and draconian, it is authoritarian.

That was over a decade ago, under an administration led by a former constitutional law professor (from another law school just across the same city in which Holder & I spoke a few weeks apart) who has served as the Democratic Party’s template for potential successors since then.

Few appreciate just how much damage President Obama did as a president to the Constitution he studied as an academic.

I could go on here about executive secrecy or the various crimes it enables, such as torture with impunity, or the disturbing patterns enabled over time by the ratchet effect, but I’ve already done that for years and will let my previous writing speak for itself.

Can you hear me now?

It brings me no joy to witness the complicity of the supposedly liberal opposition in the authoritarianism that so many Democrats rightfully decry today.

But it’s crucial to witness that complicity in order to enable accountability. Replacing the dominant party in elected offices offers voters no solution to bipartisan issues—and few goals are more compelling than the need to ensure the most basic modicum of due process as the Trump administration continues its blitzkrieg on America.

As we seek to craft an alternative future that might one day finally respect our rights, it’s important to recognize the underlying constitutional landscape often obscured by daily partisan debates—and to hold accountable Democrats and Republicans alike for the many authoritarian policy positions that they have long shared in common.

Paid subscribers can get access to some further thoughts reporting on the ground from the front line of the culture war. I found myself intrigued by an object of viral debate and put on my shoes to pound some pavement and investigate the story in person...