Harry Houdini has me wondering if we're at war, if it's too late, and how we get out of this
The boat strike murders continue, Trump wants more ICE violence, and the latest on his National Guard efforts. And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.
“But it was too late. The world was already at war.“
When the character of Harry Houdini says so at the end of Ragtime, he is speaking of the start of World War I. He is speaking of an act that took place by across the globe — the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a 19-year-old student.
At the exact moment Rodd Cyrus, the actor playing Houdini in Lincoln Center’s current production of the show, took his bow Saturday night, the U.S. government announced that the United States had carried out yet another murder strike against a boat in international waters.
In a post on X, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote, “Today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War [sic] carried out a lethal kinetic strike on another narco-trafficking vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) in the Caribbean.”
CNN reported on Sunday that, despite the claims from Hegseth and others, “The Trump administration has also not provided public evidence of the presence of narcotics on the boats struck, nor their affiliation with drug cartels.“
It was, per the Associated Press, “at least” the 15th such strike carried out by the Trump administration, on behalf of the U.S., over the past two months.
“The U.S. military has now killed at least 64 people in the strikes,“ the A.P. reported.
.At least 21 murders ago, The New York Times’s Charlie Savage wrote bluntly:
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 New York Times has reported on and published a copy of a letter Trump sent to Congress in connection with the first such strike on September 2. In the September 4 letter, Trump wrote, “In the face of the inability or unwillingness of some states in the region to address the continuing threat to United States persons and interests emanating from their territories, we have now reached a critical point where we must meet this threat to our citizens and our most vital national interests with United States military force in self-defense.“
CNN has reported on “a classified legal opinion“ produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that apparently “argues that the president is allowed to authorize deadly force against a broad range of cartels because they pose an imminent threat to Americans.“
Despite the Trump administration having claimed for the past two months of the need to use “military force” to strike boats and kill people, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the White House is now asserting that the strikes do not “rise to the level of ‘hostilities’ covered under the War Powers Resolution,“ per an administration official. Under the law, the Trump administration would need to stop with the strikes after 60 days — now — if they weren’t authorized by Congress.
So, two months into the United States’s boat-strike murders, there is no public legal explanation — let alone a sufficient one — to justify these killings and there is no end in sight.
There is, instead, only this sort of self-serving propaganda from Hegseth, the Fox News host-turned-Cabinet member:
As Trump, Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and others continue to pave the way for Trump’s fascist war machine — as I wrote in the wake of the first boat strike — the reality of their actions must be considered in light of history.
This time, it is not an act from a revolutionary across the globe. These acts, instead, are the acts of the American president, defense secretary, attorney general, and others.
Is the world already at war?
It is too late?
And, as Houdini — both Ragtime’s Houdini and the real one — would certainly appreciate, can we get out of this?
60 Minutes — and less than 100 words
From the transcript of Norah O’Donnell’s 60 Minutes interview with President Donald Trump:
NORAH O’DONNELL: Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No. I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the — by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama. We’ve been held —
NORAH O’DONNELL: You’re okay with those tactics?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, because you have to get the people out.
Here’s a clip of the above moment.
National Guard remains out in D.C. — and blocked in Oregon
This weekend, while I was in New York City, I actually noted at one point that it had been the longest I’d gone in weeks without seeing random, armed National Guard troops patrolling the streets around me.
It felt good.
Returning home on Sunday night, the clock nearly immediately got reset to zero.
It’s no longer just the sight of the Capitol that greets those people — visitors or residents — coming off the trains into the city. It is, almost inevitably these days, also the sight of aimless National Guard troops “patrolling” the Union Station grounds.
Sunday night was no different.
Across the country, however, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, issued a preliminary injunction on Sunday night that ultimately maintains the status quo in Oregon — meaning National Guard troops cannot be deployed in the state.
Immergut’s preliminary injunction, which echoes her earlier temporary restraining orders in the case, came following the conclusion of the three-day trial in the case.
In the preliminary injunction, she blocked the federalization and deployment of National Guard in Oregon — but stayed the injunction as to the federalization “until this Court issues its final opinion on the merits,“ which she stated will come by “by this Friday, November 7, 2025, no later than 5 p.m. PT.”
This status — deployment, but not federalization, blocked — has (generally) been the status since the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit initially issued its administrative stay in the case on October 8 (and as the Ninth Circuit reiterated was still so in an order issued October 30).
Immergut also made it pretty clear that she viewed DOJ as having forced the issuance of this preliminary injunction, which, again, changes nothing (for now) from what it had been on Saturday. Immergut noted that she had “asked the parties whether they would agree to maintain the status quo for a week from the conclusion of trial, during which the National Guard would remain federalized but not deployed, in order to allow this Court to perform these tasks and issue a final opinion on the merits.“ DOJ said no.
As such and while trying to craft and issue a final ruling on “this case of significant national importance,” Immergut also had to issue this preliminary injunction order because her TROs were limited in time.
Closing my tabs
For those who don’t what this is, it’s my effort to give a little thank you to paid subscribers. “Closing my tabs” is, literally, me looking through the stories and cases open — the tabs open — on my computer and sharing with you all some of those I was unable to cover during the week but that I nonetheless want to let you know that I have on my radar. Oftentimes, they are issues that will eventually find their way back into the newsletter as a case discussed moves forward or something new happens that provides me with a reason to cover the story more in depth.
This Sunday, these are the tabs I am closing:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Law Dork to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.