Trump Relies on Distortions to Support His Pressure Campaign on Venezuela

In justifying his administration’s boat strikes and its mounting pressure campaign on Venezuela, President Trump has regularly relied on assertions that distort the circumstances, carry contradictions and twist language.

Mr. Trump says an “armed conflict” makes the killings of people on the vessels lawful, but law-of-war experts say standards for a war to exist are not met. The administration acts like a Venezuelan slang term for soldiers corrupted by drug money, “Cartel de los Soles,” is an actual cartel. It has recast drugs as a “weapon” and trafficking them as “terrorism.”

The core argument for using armed force? Overdoses caused by fentanyl coming from Mexico. The target of the strikes? Boats suspected of carrying cocaine from South America. A Venezuelan president’s alleged involvement in drug trafficking? Intolerable. A former president of Honduras convicted in a U.S. court for doing the exact same thing? Pardoned by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump has a long record of making false or misleading statements. But the sheer density of them in his administration’s boat attacks and Venezuela pressure campaign has been exceptional.

The pattern traces back to February, when, on Mr. Trump’s orders, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated eight Latin American drug cartels and criminal groups as “terrorist organizations,” including Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang. Since then, the Trump team has insisted on calling such groups and their suspected members “narco-terrorists.”

As a matter of plain English, terrorists are zealots who use violence to advance some ideological or religious cause. Drug cartels are unscrupulous businesses seeking profits by supplying an illicit product, despite a ban.

In March, Mr. Trump declared he could invoke a wartime deportation law against Venezuelans suspected of being in Tren de Aragua — and summarily deport them to a notorious prison in El Salvador — because, he said, Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, was directing that gang to carry out an “invasion.”

But United States intelligence agencies believe the opposite — that evidence shows the gang is not subject to Mr. Maduro’s control, is at odds with his government and lacks the organization to effectively obey orders.

And while federal courts said they did not have the ability to second-guess Mr. Trump’s assertion that the gang was an arm of Mr. Maduro’s government, they ruled that illegal immigration was simply not a wartime “invasion,” so the deportation law did not apply.

In July, the Treasury Department formally designated “Cartel de los Soles” as a terrorist organization and declared Mr. Maduro its leader. Last month, the State Department did the same. Based on that, the administration routinely calls Mr. Maduro a cartel leader.

But “Cartel de los Soles” does not refer to a real drug cartel. It is a slang term in Venezuela, dating back to the 1990s, for military officials who take bribes from drug traffickers and it is essentially a pejorative way of talking about the Venezuelan government as unusually corrupt.

Also in July, Mr. Trump sent an order to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom the administration refers to as “secretary of war.” The order instructed Mr. Hegseth to begin targeting drug smuggling boats tied to cartels in international waters with lethal force.

On Sept. 2, the military attacked the first such boat. It was carrying 11 people, who Mr. Trump said were members of Tren de Aragua. Mr. Trump also released a video showing one strike, suggesting a simple and clean operation.

Mr. Trump told Congress the attack was “self-defense.” But it turned out the vessel had been headed to a place associated with transshipment to Europe — and had turned back, apparently spooked by a military aircraft, before the attack began, raising the question of how it posed any imminent threat.

It also turned out it there had been multiple strikes on the vessel, not just the one shown in the video, and a follow-up one killed two initial survivors. The men had climbed aboard the capsized hull and waved as a surveillance plane circled overhead before an admiral ordered a second strike. Even in an armed conflict, it is a war crime to kill shipwrecked sailors who are out of the fight.

In briefings to Congress, the admiral justified the second strike by contending the men could have been communicating with narco-terrorists, but then conceded there were no other boats around and no sign they had radios, people familiar with the briefings said. He is also said to have argued that some of the suspected load of cocaine might have remained under the hull, in which case, what he called a “weapon” was still present.

In mid-September, Mr. Trump’s counterterrorism adviser tried another argument. He maintained that because the administration had labeled the cartels “foreign terrorist organizations,” or F.T.O.s, it was legal to use military force against them. But the law that enables such designations is about cutting off financing and support for such groups. It does not authorize military attacks on them.

As that came under challenge, officials shifted to using a different term for the cartels and gangs whose suspected members they said the military could lawfully kill: D.T.O.s, meaning “designated terrorist organizations.” That term is invented and does not come from law.

After a second boat attack, the administration told Congress that Mr. Trump had “determined” that the United States was in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that boat crews were “combatants” — not civilians, whom it would be murder or a war crime to target.

It is difficult to find anyone knowledgeable in armed conflict law outside the administration who agrees. People do not lose civilian status by committing crimes. Cocaine is an illegal recreational drug, not a gun or a bomb, and shipping it to American consumers who want to buy it may be a crime but it is not an armed attack.

Pressed for what can justify the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug smugglers, the Trump administration has cited a rise in overdose deaths over the past decade.

But that surge, which started to ebb after 2023, was largely caused by fentanyl, which is made in labs in Mexico using precursor chemicals from China. The United States is attacking boats from South America that are carrying cocaine — assuming the intelligence justifying the strikes is accurate.

The Trump administration has also said the United States can use armed force in the “collective self-defense” of countries like Colombia and Mexico, whose security forces sometimes have shootouts with cartel gunmen. But a nation has to request assistance before another may use force in its collective self-defense. Rather than ask the United States to blow up boats, the presidents of both countries have condemned the strikes.

A major justification for the administration’s vow to push Mr. Maduro from power is that in 2020, he was indicted on charges of conspiring to export cocaine to the United States. But three weeks ago, Mr. Trump pardoned a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been found guilty last year of conspiring to export cocaine to the United States on a vast scale.

On Dec. 15, Mr. Trump signed an executive order designating fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.” But that term has a legal meaning: a chemical, biological or radiological weapon, or explosive capable of killing many people in a mass casualty incident.

Last year, about 48,000 Americans who ingested illegal drugs died from overdoses in which fentanyl played a role. But those were individual deaths, not a mass casualty event.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump declared on social media that U.S. naval forces around Venezuela would enforce a “TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL VESSELS.” A blockade is an act of war, so the declaration drew dramatic headlines.

But the term also means something specific: blocking all vessels from entering or leaving an enemy nation’s ports. A threat to intercept a handful of tankers that were already penalized for their role in helping Iran sell its oil, leaving other vessels free to transit, is a law enforcement operation, not a “blockade.”

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