The Trump administration has declared war on drug cartels, labeling them “foreign terrorist organizations” and deploying military firepower, including F-35B jets, to the Caribbean in a massive escalation of force. That’s right, we’re not talking about a new, better-funded DEA program or more border patrols; President Trump is straight-up using the military’s most advanced stealth fighters, like the F-35Bs recently sent to Puerto Rico in September 2025, to fight what they’re now calling “narco-terrorists.” It honestly feels like the playbook from the post-9/11 War on Terror has been dusted off and applied directly to drug trafficking, and it may be because Trump can’t stop bombing civilian boats. The entire shift comes from the administration’s new view of these cartels. As FBI Director Kash Patel put it recently, we “must treat them like the al-Qaidas of the world because that’s how they’re operating.” Patel argues that law enforcement alone has completely failed to destroy these organizations, and to truly “eliminate the drug trade and eliminate the pouring into the country of narcotics,” the U.S. has to bring “authorities at the Department of War and the intelligence community to go after the threat like we did terrorists when we were manhunting them.” You can’t get much clearer than that: they’re moving this from a police problem to a military one, per NPR. Trump tries to justify murder with war The White House has been celebrating a series of lethal strikes, three and counting, against suspected drug boats out in the Caribbean Sea with no evidence. I honestly can’t believe how quickly they moved to lethal force. After the first one, President Trump posted a black-and-white video online that showed a fast boat literally bursting into flames. He claimed the strike killed 11 suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, though the administration hasn’t provided any evidence to back up those assertions. After the second strike, when reporters asked about evidence that the boat was actually a threat, he just brushed it off. “We have proof. All you have to do is look at the cargo, it’s spattered all over the ocean. Big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place,” he said, adding that the government also “recorded evidence” but didn’t elaborate further, and this video evidence couldn’t be confirmed. https://t.co/0GjcmCbi0IWife of Man Aboard Venezuelan Ship Bombed by Trump Says Husband Was a FisherThe Trump administration has offered no concrete evidence to support its claim that the boats destroyed by the US military were carrying drugs.Brett WilkinsSep 29, 2025 https://t.co/hQw0P3BwLJ— Nah (@CiaoQuirkTax) September 30, 2025 The administration is claiming the president acted under his Article 2 commander-in-chief powers and in self-defense. Here’s where the trouble starts, because a lot of experts and even some lawmakers are condemning these strikes as outright illegal, extrajudicial killings. Luca Trenta, a professor who studies U.S. foreign policy at Swansea University, called the administration’s military action a “massive escalation in the use of force.” He also raised a terrifying question for all of us: “It’s a really bad thing if the president of the United States can decide that a group of civilians that might pose some kind of remote threat can be killed without any form of due process because who is to say what group will be targeted next?” The post-9/11 authority that allowed strikes against al-Qaida simply doesn’t apply here, according to Trenta, due to “the nature of the target and the lack of a threat that the target was posing.” In fact, one individual briefed on the first attack even said that the boat had actually turned around and was heading back to shore when it was hit. How is that a direct threat to the U.S.? It makes you wonder.