Wannabe king Donald Trump has adopted a new tactic in his never-ending quest for a Nobel Peace Prize: conducting unjustified military strikes on boats, primarily in the Caribbean.
At least five attacks on boats that set sail from Venezuela and Colombia occurred in the run-up to the October 10 announcement that Trump had not been awarded the coveted Nobel Peace Prize. Another five attacks have taken place since then (as of October 23, 2025). The strikes have now expanded to include boats in the Pacific Ocean, killing at least 35 people.
After each attack, Trump and his allies have taken to social media and sympathetic media outlets to make baseless claims that the boats were loaded with drugs destined for the United States—without providing a shred of evidence that any of the vessels carried contraband. Senator Rand Paul reminded the public that even with its exhaustive intelligence capabilities, the Coast Guard sometimes gets it wrong: at least 25% of the ships it boards are found to contain no drugs.
The October 16 attack resulted in two deaths and left two survivors who were rescued at sea by the U.S. Navy and promptly returned to their countries of origin. In the absence evidence of criminal activity, the survivors were released.
There had been no evidence that the boats were actually carrying drugs until the Dominican Republic reported salvage operations recovering 377 kilograms of cocaine from the ocean. However, with the shortest route from Venezuela to the nearest point in the continental United States (Key West) being around 1,200 miles, it would be easy for the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard to intercept these boats en route and parade the suspects—and their alleged payloads—before the media. That is a strategy the Trump military has conspicuously refused to adopt.
The broader sanity of the Drug War deserves its own discussion, but whatever your stance on that issue, it should go without saying that—absent an urgent and bona fide threat—the U.S. military should not be executing people in the middle of the ocean without evidence to justify their actions.
All I can say is, it’s shocking what his allies in the supposedly co-equal branches of government are willing to allow—all so he can distract Americans from a certain set of files he’s desperate to keep from seeing the light of day.