Trump keeps moving the U.S. closer to being the fascist war machine he wants

Blowing up a boat on international waters and killing 11, extending federal troop presence in D.C. despite a new lawsuit, and an effort to rename the Defense Department.

Still from video Donald Trump released of the aftermath of his ordered murder of 11 people on international waters

In a series of developments this week, President Donald Trump has even further pushed the United States military into actions that appear to be illegal, in service of his fascist aims, or both.

Earlier this week, in one of the more alarming actions of this administration, Trump ordered the murder of 11 people that the Trump administration claims were drug traffickers on international waters.

“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again,” Secretary of State Rubio told reporters Wednesday, as the Washington Post reported.

The move followed a New York Times report in early August that Trump “secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.“

A month later, as Charlie Savage’s analysis in The New York Times on Thursday laid out, Trump took that even further, “telling the U.S. military to treat even suspected low-level drug smugglers as combatants.“

There are many problems with this. Among them, Savage explained:

[T]he trafficking of an illegal consumer product is not a capital offense, and Congress has not authorized armed conflict against cartels.

That raises the question of whether Mr. Trump has legitimate authority to tell the military to summarily kill people it suspects are smuggling drugs — and whether the administration allowed career military lawyers to weigh in.

Think what this means. The president is claiming the authority to:

1. Define drug cartels as terrorist groups.

2. Choose who is a member of those now-terrorist groups.

3. Declare that the military is allowed to use force against those groups.

4. Allow any member of those groups to be targeted.

5. Order the military to kill them.

Most important to all of that — and as horrifyingly seen this week — Donald Trump is claiming the authority to do all five of those steps secretly and with no review from the judicial branch.

As the legality and constitutionality of those questions is being considered, Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging that Trump’s use of military in D.C. is illegal and unconstitutional.

The lawsuit established the scope of the military actions in D.C., which echo my weekend report at Law Dork.

The lawsuit also justified its concerns that these actions could continue:

“These unprecedented, unlawful actions have subjected the District to serious and irreparable harm. The deployment of National Guard troops to police District streets without the District’s consent infringes on its sovereignty and right to self-governance,“ the lawsuit argued. “No American jurisdiction should be involuntarily subjected to military occupation.“

Hours later, the Trump administration proved Schwalb’s point, when Dan Driscoll, the friend and Yale Law School classmate of Vice President JD Vance who is now the secretary of the Army, announced that he was “extending [the D.C. National Guard] mobilization through 30 November 2025, to continue supporting the President's ongoing efforts to restore law and order in the District of Columbia.“

In addition to there never having been a crisis justifying this action, Donald Trump said the city is perfectly “safe” now and there is “no crime.” How is there still a need to “restore law and order”? Is this man calling Donald Trump a liar?

Dan Driscoll

Of course, this effort to extend the use of troops in D.C. beyond the end of the 30-day emergency period does not exist in a vacuum, even domestically. It comes even as Trump has claimed to be readying plans take similar federal actions in Chicago and Baltimore, and it comes in the aftermath of a federal judge finding that the Trump administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act with its use of troops in Los Angeles — a decision the Trump administration is appealing.

Finally, and this is just the icing on Trump’s fascism cake this week, Trump also is planning to announce Friday, as The Guardian reported, that he is going to authorize Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth to ask Congress to pass legislation changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.

This is a multi-step process, per the draft reviewed by The Guardian, but in his authoritarian way, he’s also not waiting:

In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.

So, they will being going to Congress, but also Trump and Hegseth will play make-believe in the meantime.

If Trump weren’t ordering the military to blow up random boats and sending armed soldiers to “patrol” city streets where their presence is an affront to American values, this “Department of War” effort might be laughable.

But, in that context — and, again, those are just steps that we know about from this week alone — it is an almost literal sign that Trump does not want the U.S. military to be under his command; he wants a fascist war machine.