The Trump administration's lawlessness is front and center, on multiple fronts

The response to the shooting of two National Guard troops, reporting on the boat-strike murders, and the continued contempt inquiry keep Trump's lawlessness in the news.

On three different fronts, the Trump administration’s seemingly endless desire to act lawlessly — in ways that target others while seeking to avoid accountability for themselves — has become the story of this Thanksgiving weekend.

Despite the horrors and harm involved, all three stories show how important discussing lawlessness is to making accountability possible — now or in the future.

The responses from senior officials in the Trump administration — from President Donald Trump on down — to the Wednesday shooting of two National Guard troops sent from West Virginia to Washington, D.C. over the summer was immediately to assess collective guilt and assign collective punishment once an Afghan national was named as the suspect.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem echoed Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant speech in response to the shooting, quickly blaming the Biden administration. An hour later, action. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — under Noem’s jurisdiction — announced that “all” immigration requests involving Afghan nationals had been “stopped indefinitely.” This — as Trump’s speech made clear — was an angle to further restricting immigration from people the Trump administration wants to keep out of America.

This is the stuff of Stephen Miller’s dreams, and he spent Thanksgiving making that clear to anyone who would read to his hate — including lashing out at The Wall Street Journal editorial board for opposing the administration’s racist collective-guilt response.

The head of USCIS followed up on Thanksgiving, announcing that this would go further than the Wednesday statement — both to encompass people already in the U.S. and countries beyond Afghanistan.

After Sarah Beckstrom, one of the West Virginia National Guard troops who was shot, died from her injuries on Thanksgiving, the hate pouring out of the administration only became more aggressive, more lawless.

To end that day, Trump issued a triptych of late-night, racist, anti-immigrant diatribes — horrifyingly discussing unconstitutionally and illegally “denaturaliz[ing]” people who “undermine domestic tranquility“ and “deport[ing]” foreign nationals who are “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

On Friday morning, DHS made clear that all of this was, yes, very fascist, indeed.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, apparently feeling left out, piped in on Friday evening to announce that he, too, was on board with the collective punishment plan.

As the collective-punishment campaign was building, however, the Trump administration was forced to address a second front in its lawlessness.

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Around lunchtime on Friday, The Washington Post reported on the administration’s boat-strike murders. The report from Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima about the first boat strike, on September 2, is alarming. Once analysts became “more confident“ that 11 people aboard the boat they were tracking were drug smugglers, the Post reported, this is what happened:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

While purportedly attacking their reporting as “fake news,” Hegseth on Friday evening did not deny the key claim in the report about the second strike, stating, “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’ The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.“

That is not the end of it, not at all. The response to the Post’s report from Jack Goldsmith — the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel official during the George W. Bush administration who withdrew the administration’s earlier “torture memos” — was perhaps the most notable immediate response.

“[T]here can be no conceivable legal justification for what the Washington Post reported earlier today,” he wrote at Executive Functions. “In short, if the Post’s facts are correct, it appears that Special Operations Forces committed murder when the ‘two men were blown apart in the water,’ as the Post put it.”

Ryan Goodman from Just Security reported on Saturday that the Former JAGs Working Group — a group of former military lawyers — echoed Goldsmith, concluding a white paper response, “[S]ince orders to kill survivors of an attack at sea are ‘patently illegal,’ anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.“

By Saturday night, bipartisan leaders of both the Senate Armed Services Committee and House Armed Services Committee had issued strong statements.

The Senate leaders, Sens. Roger Wicker and Jack Reed, referencing “recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,“ stated that their committee had “directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

The House leaders, Reps. Mike Rogers and Adam Smith, similarly stated that their committee is “committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean,” adding that they “take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.”¹

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Finally, and as I reported Friday, Chief Judge James Boasberg’s contempt inquiry over the March 15 flights — with, as of this past week, its increased focus on Noem, in addition to the then-key Justice Department leadership — is also proceeding into its next phase next week:

This weekend, then, illustrates three points at which the administration’s lawlessness can become a part of the public discussion — when officials announce lawless actions, reporting that follows lawlessness, and when orders from federal courts are issued seeking to hold officials accountable for lawlessness.

1. Information about the congressional response was added after initial publication, at 10:05 p.m.