The Peril of a White House That Flaunts Its Indifference to the Law

[milestogo]

The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has wartime power to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs.

By Charlie Savage
Oct. 24, 2025

Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart. A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs.

The administration insists that the killings are lawful, invoking legal terms like “self-defense” and “armed conflict.” But it has offered no legal argument explaining how to bridge the conceptual gap between drug trafficking and aThe irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency associated crimes, as serious as they are, and the kind of armed attack to which those terms can legitimately apply.

It is becoming clearer than ever that the rule of law in the White House has depended chiefly on norms — on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding. This is especially true in an era when party loyalty has defanged the threat of impeachment by Congress, and after the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with official powers.

Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.


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[dugog55]

1. " Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched

or disputed legal interpretation". Explains exactly how flawed and outdated our Constitution actually is. I was fine up to the late 1800's. The US and the rest of the world were close to the same as when it was written. But once the industrial revolution started and progress was exponential, the Constitution became dated and too easy to circumvent. Just look at all the bullshit Trump has pulled in the last nine months. Things that were thought near impossible to do legally, he has shown they can be done with enough legal stretching. The Heritage Foundation has had four years to sharpen their attack and it has been a precision operation.

Fast moving battleships, bombers and fighter jets, ICBM missiles, and nuclear weapons were not even imaginable 250 years ago. Now, most countries have some or all of these weapons. Most of Western Europe's Democracies have constitution written in the 20th Century, some after WW2, they are modern compared to ours. The way Trump is ? around the law the last nine months, do you really think their will be mid-term elections? Do you really think that he will be exempt from running for a third term? Do you think in 12 months we will not be under a complete dictatorship? Good people in places of authority and government are leaving in droves to step away from the madness consuming the Federal Government. Once the orange turd has the full might of the military behind him along with his brown shirt ICE Agents, we are finished. It would take a peasant revolt with massive casualties to restore order, or devolve into a complete autocracy. I firmly believe these are the choices ahead of us.

[Fiendish Thingy]

2. Lawlessness does not equal omnipotence

Trump is not omnipotent, and the states and the people are not powerless

That is one absolute truth that must never be forgotten.

States run elections, and even this corrupt SCOTUS isn’t stupid enough to permanently relinquish their power and relevance by proclaiming that the number 2 actually equals 3, for if 2=3, then 3=4, and so on.

SCOTUS is loyal to their ideology, not to Trump the man.

This sickening defeatist doomerism does nothing to help us face and fight the actual atrocities occuring daily.

P.S. Nationwide martial law is a physical impossibility.

P.P.S. Just because you can imagine something, and type it on the internet does not make that thing possible, plausible or probable,