Note on Twin Outrages

With Donald Trump, it's always more than one story

In an effort to get a full legal picture about the issues involved with Donald Trump’s months-long campaign of strikes against suspected drug boats, I reached out as many people as I could think of: lawyers I knew and didn’t know, veterans I knew and didn’t, plus a few others who had things to add but ended up not being quoted in the forthcoming piece “Insane Clown Pentagon.” These people were nearly unanimous in denouncing the Venezuela operation as a nadir of the Trump era: “Probably the dumbest shit he’s pulled,” is how one appalled source put it.

A number of these people are not exactly Democratic partisans but still argued that whatever Trump is trying to do in Venezuela colors well outside the lines, even by War on Terror standards. Several sources said the closest parallel they could think of is Barack Obama’s Libyan bombing campaign, in which Obama was ripped for blowing past ostensible War Powers guidelines in an action that probably should be more infamous than it is. We also looked at past drone bombings, incuding campaigns that seem at least as gruesome as the allegations of the current scandal, which is how Greg Collard ended up with the upcoming “Original Double Tap” story. Greg’s interview with an original investigator of “double tap” drone strikes, Mustafa Qadri, offers a brutal (and surprising) short-cut comparison between then and now.

Every story about Donald Trump is really two or three stories. Separating media hypocrisy from the Trump administration’s unaided faceplants requires constant attention, and where there are legal issues with one party in the last ten years, we usually also find them with the other. Please bear with us as we work on faster ways to deal with the “jerks in all direction” factor in American news. Thanks, and more to come soon.